Advertising upheavals are afoot ahead of the inaugural Spring upfronts, as technology companies and brands scramble to capitalize on an industry rapidly recovering from the anguishes of the past year. Billions of dollars are on the line at the second virtual upfronts presentations, scheduled for May, and the likes of NBCUniversal and Roku – two of the greatest advocates for driving disruptive new ad formats – are already out in force.
However, any initial excitement quickly dissipated after we brushed away the superficial wording to reveal nothing but the usual ambiguities.
First up, Roku revealed its new advertising brand studio this week, a place for producing new creative ad formats and TV programming which has ambitions of trashing the traditional 30-second TV ad spot.
The agenda includes interactive video ads, advertiser-commissioned short-form programs, and other branded content on The Roku Channel. A perpetual thorn in the side of Faultline when reporting on the advertising market, particularly from companies preaching and promising interactive ad formats, is that these announcements rarely detail precisely how these so-called interactive ads will behave interactively.
The only bone Roku can throw us is an example of a project the fledgling brand studio achieved earlier this month, developing a College Basketball Game Guide on the Roku platform that invited streamers to “beat the buzzer” across TV and mobile devices via an augmented reality lens. Roku has given us little choice but to conclude we should expect more of the same.
Naturally, Roku promises to unveil additional details on its proposed advertising projects at its IAB NewFronts presentation in early May, ahead of the upfronts in mid-May.
Similarly, NBCU has announced a new partnership with Twitter to allow brands to build interactive ad experiences on the social network, by bringing all NBCU accounts into a single unified back-end. But again, nowhere does not state HOW these will be made interactive. Empty promises aplenty is a seriously frustrating facet of the ad industry.
Does a Twitter poll count as interactive? Probably. But does it push the boundaries of ad formats? Absolutely not. AR is a great place to start with innovating in and around ad formats, but the likes of NBCU and Roku really need to the give the industry a bit more substance beyond just flinging around the word “interactive” as a generalization.
In fact, it was only July 2020 when NBCU revealed that 11 new advertising formats were being created for marketers – taking its total to 30 different ways of delivering ads. We have no way of telling how many of these 11 experimental ad formats made the cut, but we have expanded on these further down, in the absence of any confirmation from NBCU, and on the off chance they appear during the upfronts.
NBCU’s Twitter announcement was just one of many unveilings at the company’s One21 event this week, a glitzy online affair where vague new features include “dynamic channels” and “passive personalization” to expand traditional linear viewing experiences. Aggregating content down to the individual viewer level is not exactly a groundbreaking revelation from the NBCU One team, yet demand is apparently being driven by superfans seeking additional curated content. NBCU streaming boss Matt Strauss gave the example of creating a short-form video showing the best pranks from The Office (the US version of the UK hit show). Seriously? Has he never heard of YouTube? How many user-generated variations of ‘The Office Best Pranks’ do you reckon can be found online? (we checked – the results are endless).
Arguably an update set to make a more immediate splash is the reveal that NBCU’s Peacock streaming service will begin offering programmatic advertising later this year, but that announcement took something of backseat.
Among the ad formats teased by NBCU last year was one coined “1:1 Talent Surprise” designed to show live video chats between two brand representatives or celebrities during ad breaks. “Set on Set” and “Brand Experience” are two new features where brands can promote ads directly on the sets of shows, developed in collaboration with NBCU writers and producers, which sounds like it could be intrusive to the content and defeats the point of having dedicated ad slots.
These experimental formats build on Peacock’s Prime Pods, which are 60-second ad slots running during the opening or closing ad breaks, designed to minimize in-show interruptions. Elsewhere, QR codes are being shown as “shoppable ads”, a feature already commonplace in poster ads, while another feature brings up a full-screen ad when a show is paused. Mood and genre-based ads are also being explored.
NBCU has also been exploring binge ads, where binge viewers are rewarded with fewer ads than casual viewers, so brands can sponsor an ad-free episode. Hulu has done something pretty similar.
With 2021 set to be a defining year for advertising, here’s hoping someone comes out and nails at least one disruptive new ad format – because even giants like NBCU and Roku are making underwhelming progress.