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“Targeted advertising is a
red herring,”
- Adam Davies, Cisco.
will see some common metrics emerge but
with a lot of these OTT services I’m worried
fragmentation will continue to slow us down.
Even with cable that’s been around for years
we’re often surprised how little feedback loop
there is; it is often said they know what
people are watching and when – but 90 per
cent of the STBs are legacy and don’t have
real time data coming back. It is often not a
technology issue, it’s an implementation
issue,” comments Rosenstein.
“The status quo issue is in play,” says
Miller-Jones. “The linear TV advertising
model is well known and accepted and
regulated. To change that to the Internet
model is a huge change.”
“The industry has been wedded to the
spot ad and part of the problem is technology
and competition drove multi-screen ahead
without advertising being factored in, and the
model was set then. We have to recreate the
kind of interactive audit trail you’ve got for
web advertising for OTT TV,” says Trow.
“I think it’s right that to some extent the
technology has got ahead of the business
model,” agrees Kirby.
“We’ve got to go toward the business – i.e.
come up with metrics that ad buyers
recognise and can work with. Also we
shouldn’t overlook the concern in the creative
community – if you’ve got to start slicing and
dicing ads to meet 400 different
demographics, how do you do that,
where are the tools? You’ve got to be
able to re-purpose that content but in a
cost-effective way,” says Davies.
“I think we have a lot of metrics that
are easily captured and well understood
in OTT there just isn’t the read-across to
what’s been used and understood in
broadcast, but we have the data. Often
the question is ‘does the ad inventory
exist’ both for different demographics and
for international markets,” notes MillerJones.
“We have to make the creatives in the
ad industry and technologists work together
and that’s interesting because they are two
different types of people,” asserts ConnanLostanlen.
“I’m sure many an agency would be saying
‘hang-on, while we’re talking about Internetdelivered TV, what about ad blocking?’,” says
Trow. “People have become used to
freely-available content and then you’re
trying to introduce advertising, and
some platforms are competing to block
advertising content - it’s another
constraint.”
Another challenge for OTT is user
choice – each service via its own app is
hard to navigate, but even within each
service there’s often an overwhelming
amount of content.
“There is no silver bullet as far as
the UI goes,” admits Rosenstein.
“Every market and culture is different.
The current big trend is to some extent
following what Netflix has done where
it’s all about carousels and personalising
them, providing context to each carousel –
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