How New Content Delivery Methods Are Enabling Personalised Advertising

With linear television broadcasts, advertising is pre-programmed—the same advertisement is delivered to the entire audience at the same time. The viewer has no choice but to consume it—or in the case of irrelevant advertisements, wait them out. Meanwhile, the advertisers have no control over how their advertisement would reach and target the different segments of the audience.  Advertising contracts are often signed weeks or even months in advance, and hence the advertisements are set in stone once they leave the production house—the creative cannot be customised in real time or on the fly because of the linear, pre-rendered delivery format.

However, the rigid and old advertisement delivery format is changing with the emergence of over-the-top (OTT) and video-on-demand (VoD) delivery. Delivery of content via the internet or digital and programmable TVs is allowing advertisers to overlay advertising at will, collect data on viewers and generate personalised advertising content, to be delivered at the right time to the right audience. The linearity and rigidity of traditional broadcast has been disrupted by the non-linearity and layered advertising of digital and internet-based delivery mechanisms.

Now advertisement delivery can be done real time, and the creative can be personalised for every conceivable demographic segment, right down to the names of consumers in certain cases. And these advertisements can be seen in high-definition or 4K quality on any device available to the consumer [1].

Personalisation for Better Monetisation
The new advertisement delivery model allows for the audience to not only enjoy personalised content, tailored to their specific tastes, but also allow for advertisers to push personalised advertisements based on demographic segments [2]. This results in a better viewing experience for the viewers, who are served advertisements based on their preference for the types of content they like to engage in and their historical viewing habits.

Social media platforms like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter have the ability to insert advertising clips into videos consumed by users while they browse or watch content on their platforms. The technology tools provided by SES now allow for any video delivery service to do the same, opening up an entirely new world of monetisation for advertisers, content providers and platform owners based on non-linear and OTT content delivery. Analytics tools are able to optimise advertisement offerings and help derive maximum value from them, while providing the advertiser with increased access to viewer preferences and behaviours. At the same time, micro-targeted demographics can now be connected directly to advertisers with server-side dynamic ad insertion technology, which also adapts advertisements to viewer devices [3].

For example, with server-side stitching technology, a viewer watching a national weather channel can be targeted based on their postal code to ensure that only advertisements and content most relevant to them are provided during commercial breaks [4].

Advanced Metrics
Not only can advertising content be personalised, and when viewed on the web, the response can be tracked to report several detailed viewing metrics back to the platform owner—resulting in further refinement in targeting and personalisation. The video completion rate (VCR), which is the percentage of viewers who have watched an advertisement to the end, has become an increasingly important metric in gauging the effectiveness of video content; similarly, performance of video content by time of day, days of the week, by device, demographics, and other parameters can also be tracked, giving valuable insights to the advertiser [5].
 
With modern video editing and web publishing software, hyperlinks can be inserted as layers on video advertisements. These can redirect consumers to any advertiser’s landing pages with calls to action that may result in an immediate purchase of a product—a far cry from the long purchase cycles triggered by traditional broadcast TV advertisements.  Data which are collected from consumers’ interaction with the advertisement at every touchpoint, will also provide deep insights in behavioural and purchasing patterns.

At the end of 2018, advertising technology publisher ExchangeWire invited thought leaders to share their ideas on how TV will evolve for advertisers in 2019. One prediction that repeatedly came to the fore was the greater proliferation of targeted, personalised and data-driven advertising enabled by non-linear content delivery [6]. It has empowered brands, shifted the focus from the infrastructure to the viewer, driven personalisation and led to superior storytelling and creativity.

With the demand for non-linear VoD services increasing, the advertising delivery model has to become more granular, more intelligent and better defined in ensuring that the right content is delivered to the right target audience and unleash growth and revenue opportunities for advertisers, channel owners and broadcasters.

To find out more about how you can deliver personalised advertisements to your audience, contact us today.

[1] MX1 and Nowtilus Team Up for Targeted Advertising

[2] Firing Up Asia’s Video Advertising Industry with VoD Everywhere

[3] Driving Personalised Ad Experiences

[4] Best Practices for OTT Dynamic Ad Insertion

[5] OTT & CTV Advertising

[6] Experts Predict How TV Will Evolve for Advertisers in 2019