Australia's TV network sales bosses have all revealed a greater push for broadcast video on demand (BVOD) spend in 2019, as they urge brands to consider the channel as a separate spend from traditional linear broadcast.
At a panel event joint-hosted by the Australian Association of National Advertisers (AANA) and ThinkTV, sales bosses from across the TV industry came together to discuss how BVOD will play a greater role in TV's offering.
Seven's chief revenue officer Kurt Burnette said addressability and BVOD needed to evolve from being thought of as "a part of TV", adding it should be considered a channel in its own right.
"For the channel planners, think about BVOD and addressability as not just television but as something separate, like your TV, digital and radio budgets," Burnette said.
"This opens up a larger amount of advertising opportunities for clients that could not historically afford a linear broadcast opportunity, but now can because of this new proposition. It also goes the other way, for those that have historically spent heavily on linear, it acts as an extension of your strategy."
Rich opportunity
Burnette said it gave advertisers an ability to drill down into target audiences while still having mass reach.
An example he gave was the upcoming federal election. As part of Seven's addressable offering, parties will be able to reach voters at a federal and state level but also drill down and target them by their local electorate.
Prosser agreed, arguing that "TV is in a renaissance" and BVOD was a key factor in creating that, tapping into "all the legacy strengths" linear broadcast had to offer, such as mass reach and deep libraries of content.
"As networks we are now doubling down with digital attributes such as targeting, which lets us paint a full 'entertainment' picture," Prosser said.
"It's extremely important to us and is measured by a gold standard, which is key for us and should be for marketers as it gets extremely frustrating when you see the amount of 'marking your own scorecard' that goes on with digital players."
Nine group content strategy director Lizzie Young said the opportunity for brands is "so rich" because these platforms provided a real means of being embedded in consistent and engaging content.
She said shows like The Block, My Kitchen Rules and MasterChef were key to BVOD strategies, not simply because they are ratings winners but because they also provide an opportunity for short-form, brand integrated content that can be housed right next to the episodes themselves.
"We know that this is the content that gets the audience, we see it day in and day out. Where the values get even greater is through BVOD platforms," she said.
"That's because if you are embedded in a piece of content, which the first time it runs may be seen by one million people, then as the VOD keeps going you can get stronger incremental reach by being part of short-form, integrated content that the consumer is already interested in."
Can TV unite for the ultimate roadblock ad?
MCN CEO Mark Frain said the changing TV consumer had obviously impacted Foxtel, however, it had also forced the brand to create new on-demand product that had its own unique place in the market, more specifically, its new sports streaming platform Kayo.
He said the business has ensured it has intense market testing, including learnings from Optus' recent FIFA World Cup blunder. Despite this, he said as an industry, TV should be working on enhancing the linear broadcast and not be distracted by BVOD.
"There is no doubt that BVOD is growing exponentially, however, the volume of spend for the next two or three years is going to be spent on linear broadcast and we have to do better job of making that a better viewing experience," Frain said.
"That's about playing around with and testing new ad loads, individually and proactively. For example, if Seven, Nine, Ten and Foxtel were to come together and roadblock a 60-second ad across all stations and deliver the biggest TV audience for the industry, that would be an enourmous achievement."
He said Foxtel was certainly beginning to change the way it looked at adload, dropping times down to two minutes per hour on certain channels.
During the event Frain, who was called the 'Christmas Grinch,' slammed the upfront model, labelling the event "outdated", adding it no longer fits into the modern marketing strategy. Check out the story here.
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