Tag: Appified TV

Roku Offers Advertisers Demographic Guarantees Based On Nielsen Digital Ad Ratings

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
On Monday, Roku announced it will start offering advertisers audience guarantees for that are based on Nielsen Digital Ad Ratings in an attempt to close the gap between OTT and traditional TV ad measurement.

This makes Roku the first major OTT streaming platform to offer such guarantees for certain audience demographics, such as “adults 18 to 49”, allowing advertisers to buy and plan ad campaigns using the same kind of currency they have grown used to in traditional TV advertising. Previously, Roku ads are sold based on impressions. The streaming set-box maker signed a partnership deal with Nielsen to measure demographics on the Roku platform about two years ago.

What Brands Need To Do
With viewers increasingly choosing on-demand viewing over linear TV, advertisers have been curious about the viewing data that SVOD services are collecting. But since many of those services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime Video are not ad-supported, it is difficult for brands to reach the streaming audience. In addition, Roku says about 40% of its users are cord-cutters, meaning that are not reachable via traditional TV ads either.

Therefore, Roku’s ad offering is valuable for brands as it provides a way to reach those streaming viewers. And now with the new Nielsen ratings-based metrics, advertisers may have an easier time planning and evaluating their ad campaigns on Roku. As advertising on linear TV and digital channels continue to converge, brand marketers will need to reconsider their media mix and perhaps consider leveraging Roku’s ad products to reach cord-cutters and cord-nevers.

Source: Multichannel News

Header image courtesy of Roku

Google Enters OTT Streaming Market With YouTube TV

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
On Tuesday, Google unveiled its long-rumored over-the-top TV streaming service, officially taking on the likes of Dish’s Sling TV and Sony’s PlayStation Vue to conquer the shifting TV market.

The service, dubbed YouTube TV, is essentially a “skinny bundle” that covers live TV programming from all four major U.S. broadcasting networks —  ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC — and their affiliated cable channels such as ESPN and Bravo. The inclusion of Missing from the lineup are channels owned by cable pay TV networks such as Viacom and Time Warner.

YouTube Live will cost $35 per month for up to six accounts, and it also comes with an unlimited cloud DVR feature as well as a content recommendation system powered by Google’s AI engine. In addition, subscribers will also have access to YouTube’s original content. Google says it will roll out the service in the U.S. in the coming months.

What Brands Need To Do
This announcement marks another high-profile entry of a tech giant into the OTT streaming market, as the battle for retaining TV subscribers and, more importantly, selling TV packages to cord-cutters and cord-nevers, continues to heat up. It also shows the remarkable journey that YouTube has been on since its founding in 2005 as a website where people upload their home videos. Now, viewers worldwide are watching more than 1 billion hours of video content on YouTube every day, growing at a pace that easily eclipses U.S. television viewership.

As for brands, this means another channel to reach the audience that has abandoned linear TV viewing in favor of time-shifted viewing, as YouTube TV will carry all the live TV ads. Taking the vast user data and the sophisticated ad operations that Google owns into account, it seems likely that the search giant will be offering some ad tech integrations with the streaming service and allow brands to target audience in a more granular, personalized manner.

 

Source: ReCode

Header image courtesy of YouTube TV

Facebook To Target Streaming Viewers By Linking User Profiles With IP Addresses

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Last month, Facebook announced a partnership with A+E and streaming startup Tubi TV to bring Facebook ads to OTT streaming devices like Roku and Apple TV. Now a Bloomberg report reveals that the social network has been testing personalized ad targeting in this new program by linking Facebook profiles tied to the IP addresses of the streaming set-top boxes. Facebook customizes commercials based on the user data and certain A&E shows they are watching, and it is testing ads for nonprofits or its own products along with a handful of name brands, according to a company spokesman.

What Brands Should Do
The update better illustrates Facebook’s ambition in expanding its ad product and reach into the living room and onto the streaming devices. As we noted when this OTT partnership was announced, Facebook’s venture into streaming ads should provide brand advertisers with better targeting capabilities to reach OTT viewers and cord-cutters by bringing the same audience data that powers the rest of its ad network to the set-top boxes. And that looks like exactly what they have been doing. With more and more viewers choosing on-demand streaming over linear TV, brands wishing to reach consumers at scale should start exploring the advertising opportunities on the ad-supported streaming services.

To read more on how brands can deal with TV’s shift toward streaming platforms, please check out the Appified TV section in our Outlook 2016.

 

Source: Bloomberg