The digital ad market in Australia has grown from $35 million in 1999 to $9.4 billion today* but the need to reach key audiences at scale in premium content environments, across multiple screens remains consistent.

Now, consumers are connected to more devices than ever before, so brands and media have adjusted and developed models for engagement that reach key audiences not only with the right message at the right time, but on the right device and in the right context.

Traditional silos between TV and digital are rapidly breaking down, especially as advertisers shift towards and audience-first approach and screen planning becomes the norm within agencies. Navigating the path of cross-screen consumption and contextual relevancy is complex and many point to converged offerings – or the ability to reach and engage consumers across channels, formats and screens in a consistent manner – as the solution for the future.

How do we get there?

Engaging consumers consistently will be reliant on the unification and automation of planning, activation, measurement, and attribution of audience driven premium video advertising.

Planning

Traditional TV buys and manual RFP submissions and responses are no longer satisfactory. The process of reviewing proposals, selecting relevant inventory and creating separate forecasting models will need to evolve, and in this case, TV can learn a lot from digital.

TV buyers usually plan campaigns up to a year in advance, while digital buyers plan their campaigns days, weeks, and sometimes even hours in advance. Using a converged platform, two very different approaches can be bridged to provide buyers with a one-stop-shop to consistently design and understand the composition of target segmentation, as well as the ability to forecast factors such as spend, reach and measurement consistently across formats.

The emergence of companies like addressable TV business Finecast Australia, which provides buying solutions across premium TV content using an audience, versus program, perspective, has helped facilitate this. Similarly, it has opened up the world of addressable TV advertising, or the ability to target individual households based on consumers insights, often thought of as the holy grail of targeting for marketers.

Activation

To bring a converged platform to life and enable sufficient scale, workflow automation is needed. An end to end workflow from planning, negotiation to reporting and verification, needs to account for these manual processes. A converged platform must take these principles and apply them uniformly across linear and digital workflows, ranging from upfront guaranteed to negotiated access to programmatic supply.

Media owners are beginning to adopt this model. Nine Entertainment Co’s automated trading platform 9Galaxy for example allows buyers to trade TV and video across Nine properties in one platform.

Measurement

Right now, measurement is possibly the most volatile factor in advertising. This is particularly true in digital – because it is most often bought and sold in real time, it is highly variable and tends to fluctuate. When it comes to TV, inventory is usually bought in a “guaranteed” fashion, meaning there are fixed prices and spots bought upfront. Still, discrepancies remain as measurement systems, targeting methods and reporting vary across formats and approaches. A converged platform means unification and deduplication of insights, results, and optimisation across all media formats.   

The launch of OzTAM’s VOZ in Australia partly addresses this need by providing common measurement standards for linear TV and BVOD. However, there is still work to be done when it comes to creating standardised measurement systems across all traded digital media types.

Attribution

Marketers are looking to demonstrate outcomes and validate return on ad spend. Increasingly, advanced data and technology solutions are applying large volumes of first-party data, in a secure, privacy compliant way, to understand audiences, build segmentation, and measure performance.

Where TV buyers have historically relied on traditional demographics, a converged platform must be able to define unique audiences and associate ad exposure to real world outcomes or KPIs.  As technology progresses, an advanced platform can use these learnings to inform and optimise future campaign design.

In order to make the idea of convergence a reality, collaboration is needed across the entire industry. By working together, we can leverage one another’s strengths to provide trusted and streamlined advertising technology platforms that unite compelling data with premium content, empowering

marketers and agencies to deliver intelligent and customised campaigns across all screens and publishers.

 Source: * 2019 IAB Australia Online Advertising Expenditure Report