The impact of the last couple of years has started to become real. With prices for petrol, energy, and food (to name a few) all reaching uncomfortable levels, it’s forcing the average person into survival mode and to think about what matters most to them. This means rethinking how they are spending their hard-earned money.
From trading gym memberships for home workouts and health food subscription boxes for store bought veg, the next one on the list looks like it will be trading content subscription for advertised free content.
Recently, household subscription staples such as Netflix and Disney+ have been feeling the crunch, with a rush of cancellations. Even Sky TV, which of course is not ad free, has seen cancellation rates rise as consumers look to remove the luxuries in their lives.
However, old habits are hard to break, and consumers are now, more than ever, willing to accept ads as a necessary part of their lives in order to keep watching, or listening, to the content they love. Just like the open internet, there is mutual value between all parties; advertisers reach their audience, publishers generate income from advertisers to fund content production, consumers receive quality content. Everyone wins.
From an advertiser’s perspective more consumers entering the ad funded ecosystems means more available inventory and more opportunity to reach their target market. With almost 70% of UK households subscribing to video on-demand services (which doesn’t account for the number of households sharing accounts with other households) your audience is highly likely to be active across these channels, and therefore, the question becomes how best to communicate with them, within these relatively new touch points.
The current targeting and creative options available to advertisers in the platforms that already offer an ad-based service is admittedly quite basic (excluding YouTube, which sits on its own), however, these are expected to rapidly advance as the likes of Netflix start investing in their own marketing and product teams. They already have a huge advantage by holding rich first-party data from logged in users and if they can also leverage their advanced algorithms used for recommending consumer content into programmatic advertising, they will shake up TV market and make this space impossible to ignore.
Before the inevitable rush of advertisers, which will force the price of inventory up, we recommend 3 things to get started in this space:
- Get in touch with suppliers to identify the scope of the opportunity
- Think about how these channels can complement the rest of your media mix
- Plan to test a range of different formats and messaging to figure out what resonates best with your audience
