5 minute read
Opinion - Generation Media
Why don’t we talk about TV anymore?
Although Linear TV budgets may have been reduced in favour of other Digital platforms, Jonathan reminds readers of TV’s strengths and how it remains one of toy trade marketers’ greatest assets.
We all know the rhetoric: TV in the UK, and increasingly across Europe, is dead. We’ve used this very column to share the statistics highlighting its decline, and in 2022 in the UK, we reached the tipping point where a greater percentage of toy marketing budgets were invested in Digital channels than TV.
The conversations we have as an industry have changed as a result. We are no longer judging campaigns purely by the volume of TVRs/GRPS we put on a plan (although we do hear from time to time of retailers still placing perhaps undue precedence on this part of the puzzle). This is a step in the right direction that the industry needed to take. It’s important not to overlook that whilst marketing investment has made a significant shift away from traditional Linear TV advertising, we are still talking about TV in one of its many guises incredibly regularly.
Advertisers have migrated away from Linear TV advertising as the supply of impacts has reduced, with children and parent audiences focusing their attention on other, Digital, platforms. Whilst this has been happening, audiences have been showing an increasing preference for consuming Digital media on the largest screen possible, bringing them back to the TV set.
Subscription Video On Demand (SVOD) services such as Netflix and Disney+ long surpassed Linear TV as the primary video channel for children, with Giraffe Insights reporting that SVOD accounted for 38% of total video occasions in October 2022 (Kids and the Screen, Wave 11). It will come as no surprise that over 80% of the viewing of these platforms takes place on a TV screen, meaning that if a viable commercial solution is ever presented to toy advertisers (i.e. cost effective reach at scale), SVOD would be well placed to command a large percentage of advertising budgets. But current pricing structures, targeting restrictions and the slow uptake of ad funded subscriptions means that this might not be a reality for the toy market until 2024, and more likely 2025.
What of ad funded platforms? What have these got to do with TV? YouTube is now the No.1 platform when it comes to toy advertising spend, offering advertisers the reach that Linear TV has lost, at a price that is more affordable, given the inflationary pressure on Linear TV. The success of YouTube in recent years has been, at least in part, driven by its movement to becoming the largest Connected TV (CTV) partner in the world. In fact, assessing natural delivery of impressions by device, over 50% of campaigns on YouTube are now delivered on a TV screen. YouTube not only has the capacity to run a full campaign budget on TV alone, in the UK at least, it has an inventory of children’s content that easily surpasses that of all the commercial children’s channels on Linear TV combined.
Within the ad supported world, we also need to be aware of CTV/VOD partners. At present, there are 13 recognisable child-targeted channels in the UK (compared to 12 Linear TV channels), with the group set to be bolstered by ITVX Kids as the CITV channel is removed from linear feeds in September 2023. At this point, we are projecting that of the combined Linear/ CTV/VOD market, CTV/VOD channels will account for over 20% of total impressions. This will only grow as content providers opt for lower cost Digital distribution; as with YouTube, the vast majority of impressions is delivered via the TV set.
So, what does this preference for the big screen (at least by household standards), mean for advertisers? Primarily, that as much as things have changed over the past decade, they have somehow stayed the same when it comes to consuming video content. The channel line up may have changed from the dominance of Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network to YouTube et al, but the device that has the highest impact when it comes to reaching, and ultimately influencing children’s audiences, remains TV. Campaign plans and buys need to be optimized accordingly.
Secondly, in the modern age of big data, the TV set remains an ally when it comes to identifying key consumer trends to tap into. Even against a backdrop of COPPA and GDPR-K compliancy, we can use it to gain more impactful insights than ever before to connect entire media plans. Using Automated Content Recognition (ACR) technology, Samba TV can identify viewership and non-viewership based on set criteria, allowing advertisers to either retarget or extend the reach of campaigns. For example, the ACR tech can identify which households have been exposed to an ad, then this data can be used to target Digital devices in the household with a follow up message on other devices. Alternatively, it can identify households that have not been exposed to the ad, before targeting them on platforms and devices in those households, increasingly using CTV channels, to extend campaign reach.
In the age of media fragmentation, when Linear TV no longer commands the lion’s share of budget, don’t forget to talk about the importance of TV and how as a device it is still one of the greatest assets in the marketer’s playbook.
