Global advertising industry advised to adapt TV commercials for streaming or lose millions
Advertising creatives must produce TVCs specifically for the burgeoning content streaming audiences around the world to deliver maximum return on investment, according to the CTO of one of the world’s leading OTT companies.
Luke Durham (left), CTO of Switch Media and a panellist on the OTT TV Infrastructure Roundtable at TVOT San Francisco this Thursday, warns that to achieve this it will require all stakeholders, from platform and content owners to advertisers and their agencies, to collaborate.
Says Durham: “To be blunt, conventional TVCs aren’t high quality or smart enough to engage streaming audiences in an increasingly demanding and competitive content and entertainment market.
“It’s clear there needs to be a greater understanding and co-operation between industry sectors to ensure uniformities and efficiencies are improved on both the creative/production side and the technical delivery side.
“There has been too much focus on keeping costs low to support the bottom line rather than producing the right type of creative for the appropriate channel and audience to grow the top line.
“But standard 30 second ads, produced for broadcast television, do not cut it. In fact, the use of TVCs online is one of the key drivers behind the growth of ad-blocking technologies.”
Switch Media has delivered millions of hours of OTT content over the past decade for Australian clients including the nation’s largest pay-tv network, Foxtel and top free-to-air TV networks SBS, Seven, Network Ten and Freeview.
Durham said from Switch Media’s experience, content and ads need to be tailored specifically for digital devices.
Says Durham: “There are two sides to the problems that we all need to solve. Firstly, the advertising creatives and producers must consistently produce clever, engaging, original ads with shorter time frames.
“Studies have shown that 6 to 7 seconds is the optimal length of video for the average user attention span, with 10 seconds being the maximum to not only maintain viewer attention but to engage them.
Durham says the second major problem is the speed and accuracy of the back-end technology responding to millions of constant content searches literally every second of the day: “The ongoing challenge for agencies and OTT companies is managing the rapidly escalating volume of content that’s becoming available – literally tens of thousands of programs being accessed by millions of end users simultaneously from multiple sources.
“The accuracy of metadata provided by the content owners and ad agencies is imperative for each OTT transmission source to identify the content being sought by the viewer – and delivering them, simultaneously, to millions of devices across the country.
Luke Durham is CTO of Switch Media an Australian company that is a world leader in delivering online video content for various organisations including free-to-air and PayTV networks, government organisations and education. Multi-screen streamed events include London Olympics, Sochi Winter Olympics, the Glasgow Commonwealth Games, Australian Open and Formula 1 series.
2 Comments
Right on Luke!
Simply trying to pound away the max13 minutes an hour typical of Free to air outputs on Aussie TV across OTT outputs cannot succeed for the advertisers or the viewers.
A similar situation exists for closed captions, OTT needs real content specific captioning, but neither the normal turn-around time for editing existing or new closed captions now nor the cost of doing it the ‘linear’ way can be accepted, the content’s captions have to be part of the ‘re-use’ process for content editing for OTT use or re-use. There are clever tools available now that make this possible, even in the Cloud, or perhaps more especially in the Cloud…..Greg
Fluff piece. Tell us something we don’t already know. Any engineer worth his sale will know garbage in equals garbage out.
There are plenty of encoders today that already produce accurately rendered subs and CCs today. Maybe it’s about time these people at Switch Media build something that actually works and isn’t a disappointing kludged together shitty solution that barely works.
True native media services in AWS, GCP and Azure are already available. Many Media and Broadcast clients are already experimenting and implementing solutions that are scalable and future proofed.
Companies like Switch Media and this VCMS ‘cloud’ products will surely become irrelevent. Times they are a changing.