Broadcasting the 2012 Olympic Games - CSI Magazine

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Advertising Who needs ad insertion? Cable companies are looking to targeted advertising for multi-screen monetisation, with tablets being the sweet spot, discovers Philip Hunter Targeting and personalisation are going to be critical for success in the multi-screen era where content is increasingly both time and place shifted. So far the emphasis for multi-screen, and to an extent catch-up TV as well, has been on combating churn and holding up ARPU, and therefore halting revenue decline rather than opening new sources of it. But as the volume of viewing on alternative screens grows, so will opportunities for new revenues that operators cannot afford to miss. Targeting will be crucial for all the new revenue opportunities, both for upselling content and delivering adverts that are much more relevant for the viewer. Both require the same infrastructure even if the business rules are slightly different, capable of selecting adverts or promotions according both to the context of the surrounding content and the identity of the viewer. This applies equally whether the operator is promoting its own services, or inserting an advert for a third party. There are several challenges to overcome on the way. These are not principally technical since most of the underlying standards and mechanisms are now more or less complete, but relate to the business model and the rate of growth in viewing on alternative platforms. “This is not so much a technological hurdle as a business hurdle,” agrees Jeff Brooks, VP of business development at Arris, whose Skyvision Ad Manager platform is being enhanced to support advanced advertising. “The main hurdle exists in aggregating the fragmented nature of this type of delivery, so that those purchasing the advertisements experience the same measure of simplicity, reach, and monetisation as today’s linear insertions”. But 2012 could be the year multi-screen advertising comes of age as operators approach the required critical mass of viewers. “An operator needs to have a sufficient volume of viewers for a multi-screen service before it gets interesting from an advertising perspective,” says Gidi Gilboa, senior product marketing manager for advertising solutions at NDS (which was incidentally recently acquired by Cisco primarily for its content security and multi-screen software capabilities, including its dynamic addressable advertising platform). “We’ve now started to see this happen in some deployments. In this respect, advertising will become more important in multi-screen environments going forward as eyeballs shift to this new type of viewing.” Operators need to be prepared for this even if they are not inserting adverts yet, in order to avoid losing out on revenue when the time comes, and ensure they do not fall behind competitors in the emerging market for targeted ads. This means having the platform in place, with critical mechanisms being measurement of ad engagement, insertion, addressability, and campaign management. Measurement will be needed whether the aim is to present specific ads for single screen viewing with one-to-one targeting, or just to replicate the ads of the main broadcast stream, exploiting multiple screens as alternative points of access. Either way, measurement is needed to provide the evidence of engagement that will bring in revenues. Insertion and addressability need to support different levels of targeting down to households and devices as well as the less fine grained demographic groups used at present. This goes hand in hand with campaign management to exploit addressability, with the aim of exploiting the unique advantages of each platform. “Operators leveraging these technologies will be best placed to seize the benefits of advertising on multiple screens,” argues Gilboa. But this raises an important question that will determine success in multi-screen monetisation, which is finding the right formula for targeting across the different screen types and sizes. “The larger the screen, then the longer viewers spend consuming video, so we tend to talk about “snacking” on mobile, “browsing” on tablets, and “watching” on TV,” notes Boris Felts, vice president of product marketing at video encoding specialist Envivio. “On the other hand, the smaller the screen the more interaction you see.” The tablet may prove to be the sweet spot for targeted advertising therefore, with enough viewing to present brands and advertisers with an enticing target audience, but also with ample scope for targeting and interactivity. “The tablet sits at an interesting crossover point between 24 May-June 2012 www.csimagazine.com
Advertising Consumer willingness to share personal information Q. Please indicate how much you agree or disagree with the following statements Among Total Consumers Summary of Agree Strongly/Somewhat I would be willing to provide more personal information online if that meant I could receive advertising more targeted to my needs and interests I am comfortable with having my web browsing activity tracked so that I could receive advertising more targeted to my needs and interests Source: Deloitte Media Democracy Survey, 2010 US % “video consumption” and “interaction” and therefore it should be the prime candidate for one-to-one targeted ads,” says Felts. “It’s also important to remember that most applications on tablets use a log-in or other form of user authentication, so from this perspective there are no real issues in audience targeting. The operator will know who has logged on to a particular app and be able to target accordingly,” he adds. One-to-one vs traditional targeting Technically then one-to-one advert targeting to smart phones, tablets and PCs is, or soon will be, possible for most operators, but this comes back to the business model, and the question of whether it is desirable or likely to bring in extra revenues for the operator. In the immediate future one-to-one targeting is unlikely, according to Aseem Bakshi, general manager of advertising at SeaChange, whose Adrenalin platform brings together the back office components needed to deliver targeted advertising insertion for linear, catch up, VoD and multi-screen services. This is because SeaChange believes local ad replacement is the most promising application for multiple screens in the short term, complementing traditional regional advertising on linear channels. “Local ads delivered to multiple devices constitute a financial opportunity for many operators and OTT distributors,” says Bakshi. “Although there are solid reasons for re-transmitting linear TV to multi-screen devices, there is greater potential for replacing local ads in linear streams in the same manner that they are inserted by the content distributors on a regional basis for traditional TV.” This of course does not require one-to-one targeting, but does exploit the geographical location features available with IP delivery over the Internet or mobile networks. NDS has been musing over the same question. “Our NDS Dynamic can do one-to-one targeting today, especially on personal devices that are Canada % Germany % France % Japan % 26 23 14 23 26 4 21 21 24 22 27 5 UK % registered, activated and authorised through our system,” notes Gilboa. “The question is more about the ad sales models on these platforms and whether these will be “internet like” models with the one-to-one targeting approach, or closer to TV that tends to be more regional, or based on targeting wider demographic audiences. There is no doubt multi-screen will open new opportunities in this respect and that we’ll see some one-to-one approaches where it makes sense from a business perspective.” Some of the leading cable operators are well placed in that they have already deployed some targeting with ad replacement within VoD and catch-up services, such as SeaChange’s customers Virgin Media in the UK and Rogers Cable in Canada. “Both operators are using their growing VoD tier for ad or promo insertions pre-roll, postroll and mid-roll,” says Bakshi. Regulatory questions are still widely to be addresses worldwide, particularly related to addressable one-on-one advertising, with common consensus that this will take time. Sky’s AdSmart technology technology, which is set to roll out in 2013, will only see occasional ad spots devoted to addressable ads and without a healthy premium at first. According to Nick Adams, head of digital development at MindShare UK, perhaps some 8% of TV advertising revenue will come from some form of targeting by 2016. He believes that addressable ads will likely to appeal initially to direct marketing organisations rather than mass market brands. Not a question of standards The standards though to facilitate advert targeting and insertion around catch up and multi-screen are now fairly mature, with the two main contenders being the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers (SCTE) 130, and the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) Video Ad Serving Template (VAST). These are sometimes regarded as being alternatives, and it is true cable operators in particular will have to support both, but there are some important differences. Both are based on XMP protocols for encoding, but SCTE 130 was designed for addressable advertising across all platforms focusing mostly on VoD and linear ad insertion, while VAST is pitched squarely at online advertising. VAST therefore includes guidance for handling the leading video players including Microsoft Silverlight and Adobe Flash. A crucial difference is that VAST does not decide when to show the ads, which is up to the player in the online world. SCTE 130 on the other hand decides when to play ads whether with VoD or linear content, although of course for VoD the user determines when the content as a whole is viewed. A key point, as Envivio’s Felts notes, is that SCTE 130 is widely used for the back end infrastructure within linear services, but when the adverts are transferred to an online platform, streaming and web standards are also involved. Operators therefore need to understand both. “Transposing the traditional linear ad architecture requires a good understanding of SCTE130, but also of all the adaptive bit rate technologies, as well as all the web-based advertising models,” says Felts. But above it requires understanding of how users will respond to and interact with ads on the different platforms, which will determine how they are constructed and presented. The C3 window The ability to insert mid-roll ads is constrained by the so called C3 catch-up window. This is the three day period after the scheduled showing during which an operator is contractually obliged to show the original ad sold with the programme. The idea is that because most catch-up viewing occurs within this three day window, it is treated as part of the overall package. It enables the operator to monetise the main catch up viewing in effect by counting it as part of the total viewing figure, but it does mean that scope for ad replacement around catch up is confined to pre- and post-roll, until the C3 window has expired. Advertising deals need to evolve to take account of the fact that some catch up viewing occurs on alternative screens such as tablets, presenting greater opportunities for targeting and interactivity. www.csimagazine.com May-June 2012 25
Page 1: London 2012 Ad insertion HbbTV IP&T
Page 5 and 6: News First 3D over DTT to launch in
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Page 9 and 10: Smart TVs need USP - survey Your wa
Page 12: Analyst corner Not old news yet Wit
Page 15 and 16: HbbTV Broadcasters committed to Hbb
Page 18 and 19: Olympics special London 2012 Going
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Page 22 and 23: Executive interview Supporting mult
Page 26 and 27: Business intelligence Turning data
Page 28: Show review IP times are a changing
Page 32 and 33: Connected TV Almost everything on t
Page 34 and 35: Guest column A question of spectrum
Page 36 and 37: Energy efficiency Figure 2: Home ne
Page 38 and 39: Business Directory To advertise con
Page 40: Real World Security Solutions for Y

Broadcasting the 2012 Olympic Games - CSI Magazine

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