The New Fronts present the perfect opportunity for the next generation of video advertising inventory, AVoD, to flex its muscles. Keen to burst the hype bubble, Faultline has noted on a near-weekly basis that the growing streaming format still lacks top-tier content, while digital video ad capabilities are nowhere near the heights of granular targeting that many would have you believe.
At least on our first qualm, the New Fronts demonstrated how the content landscape is very slowly conceding to the AVoD platforms, with showings from Tubi, Crackle Plus, The Roku Channel and Amazon’s IMDb TV all boasting fresh original content. As for advertising capabilities from the New Fronts, most companies have been promising to unify and streamline access to their various inventory arms, as well as some more eye-catching interactive ad formats.
Pinpoint targeting across audiences still seems far out of reach, though.
Clearly in no mood to step out of the limelight on its first appearance at the New Fronts, Amazon announced that its own traditional AVoD outlet, IMDb TV, will also be featuring new original content, as well as the deployment of standalone mobile apps this summer. Even though the giant is a less-dominating presence in ad-supported OTT, Amazon’s ad business is booming, with the company’s Other segment up 77% year on year to $6.9 billion, the majority of which is thought to be ad sales.
Amazon was keen to lay on the benefits of AVoD with a trowel. “Three quarters of our audience is completely unexposed to linear TV campaigns,” said Mark Eamer, VP of IMDb TV, which has seen viewership climb 138% YoY, with nearly three quarters of viewers in the 18 to 49 age bracket – a distinct contrast from the aging linear audience in the US.
Impressively, under the broader definition of ad-supported content, Amazon’s total footprint – spanning IMDb TV, Twitch, plus network and broadcast apps on its Fire TV portal – now boasts 120 million monthly active users. This marks a six-fold growth from the 20 million viewers recorded in the same footprint at the start of 2020.
Interactive ads for online retail were also a keystone of Amazon’s presentation, with one segment showing how advertised products could be added to a viewer’s basket by simply asking an Alexa speaker. While plausible, this is not really new.
With all these wriggling ad-supported arms, Amazon was keen to emphasize how unified its Amazon Platform has become, a sentiment strengthened by the fact that Twitch inventory had been integrated into the platform last fall. Another guarantee is that its DSP customers will only have to pay for the impressions that reach the intended audience.
Meanwhile, NBCUniversal unveiled a new ad format for Peacock during its NewFronts presentation. Named Spotlight, it emulates linear advertising schedules, allowing advertisers to choose specific timeslots on the ad-supported tier of Peacock. Any user on the platform during the primetime period of 6pm to 12am will see the ‘spotlighted’ ad creative in their first ad break.
Peacock has also found innovative new ways to slot ads into the UX. Pause Ads allows static picture ads to come up when a user pauses playback, while Binge Ads rewards users’ binge watching with an ad-free episode. How does this benefit advertisers? A brief sponsored message appears before the reward, ironically telling the viewer that the lack of ads is courtesy of a certain brand.
Also significant was the arrival of contextual intelligence on NBCU’s digital outlets (One Digital Video and Peacock), which allows marketers to align creative with NBCU programming according to the IAB’s category taxonomy, with the assistance of machine learning. It always amazes us when features that we would assume have been offered for yonks are brought to market for the first time.
Peacock now has over 42 million sign ups, although its revenues of $10 million show that a huge chunk of these subscribers are coasting on free trials and distribution deals. The presentation marked the end of the platform’s first annual slate of advertisers, and the first time that inventory has been made available to new buyers.
In total, NBCU boasted that its various access points gave advertisers access to nearly 200 million viewers, while the company’s EVP of Advertising Strategy, Jenny Burke, argued that digital and linear viewership would be neck and neck within the next two years.
NBCU’s offerings are not completely insular, as its One View Platform is now offering linear-style dynamic ad insertion (DAI) across a range of vMVPDs including AT&T TV Now, Fubo TV, Hulu Live, Sling and YouTube TV. This DAI still sounds relatively blunt, with the main talking point being that certain product segments could be pitched according to regional seasonality.
YouTube also showed off some new interactive CTV and mobile ad features at its own NewFronts presentation, said to be “the first of many”. These include allowing viewers to send ad-related links directly to their phones or other connected second-screens, as well as related browsable images that click through to shopping websites.
The AVoD market leader reminded attendees that 120 million people in the US streamed YouTube or YouTube TV on a TV screen in December 2020 – up 100 million from March 2020 – with Comscore suggesting that this accounts for 40% of all ad-supported streaming in the country. YouTube Shorts, an attempt to rival TikTok, also now receives 6.5 billion daily views.
Fox’s Tubi has announced that it will be rolling out more than 140 hours of original content from Autumn onwards. The service has enjoyed a 54% year on year rise in annual total viewing time – over 800 million hours. Fox acquired Tubi for $440 million just over a year ago, with network execs claiming at the time that it could become a billion-dollar business.
Equally, Roku took the New Fronts as an opportunity to rebrand the short form content it purchased from Quibi as Roku Originals. A browse of Roku’s Q1 report suggests that the bargain price tag – under $100 million – that many expected for the content acquisition was bang on, with an increase of $96.7 million in content assets said to be “primarily driven by content acquired from Quibi and This Old House.”
Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment (CSSE), a company which owns a host of mid-tier AVoD platforms, came to the Upfronts announcing that it had doubled its content offerings in the past year. This is primarily thanks to the recent acquisition of Sonar Entertainment’s film and television assets, including 700 movies and 1800 TV episodes, all of which are set to expand the library of CSSE’s flagship AVoD, Crackle Plus.
CSSE appears to have unified all its inventory under the CSSE AVoD Network, although the details were so scant that we cannot be sure.
Meanwhile, Fubo TV has announced an advertising creative studio, offering advertisers the chance to create customized short and long-form content integrations featuring talent from the Fubo Sports Network. This seems a direct challenge to Roku’s own ad creative studio that was launched in March in anticipation of the New Fronts, allowing advertisers and brands to create experiences outside of the 30-second ad format, including show sponsors for its original series.
As is tradition, the New Fronts were also plagued by some Nielsen drama. According to the Media Ratings Council, Nielsen has now conceded that it has underreported total TV usage by adults aged 18 to 49 by between 2% and 6%, with total TV audiences under reported by between 1% and 5%.
This confession marks a humbling change in tone from the traditionally arrogant measurement monolith. Major US networks have been flapping about since April trying to explain why primetime viewership was down up to 16% year on year on some channels, but Nielsen was not willing to be the scapegoat. It kept the face of “full confidence in the fidelity of its ratings estimates” – only conceding that Covid had led to some panel households being dropped.
If feeling generous, one could have assumed at the time that Nielsen had the scalable panel capabilities to pull measurement off without a fraction of its households, but this is clearly now not the case. Either that, or the number of households that were switched off due to a lack of in-home maintenance visits is far larger than Nielsen is letting up.