The relationship between insight and advertising

The competitive landscape for video service providers is increasingly complex.

Previously many were dominant in their market and appeared to have an unassailable position, but now they are under increasing pressure from all kinds of new services.

Having real knowledge of how their service is being used, by who, where, on what device has always been crucial to profitability. Considerations including knowing what’s popular, whether the interface is efficient, and what content generates the most and least revenue are crucial to the success or failure of a service.

It is clear that insight needs to be: simple to access, aggregating data points from multiple sources efficiently; consistent to provide common measurement across all services; and accessible for a clear overview of business performance.

Dashboards are a great starting point, but visualisation is only part of the solution. Service providers need to be able to act on data quickly and efficiently. Insight will be the key tool in customer acquisition, conversion and retention, and in identifying new business models and opportunities.

One key area in which insight can develop new revenue is addressable advertising, and the ability to deliver advertising across all devices and platforms is now table stakes for many service providers.

Reaping the benefits
Service providers will need to support addressable advertising both for their own services and for their content and channel partners. If they get it right, the service provider will reap the benefits, namely:

1. Generating new revenue from new advertising inventory: OTT services such as VoD, catch-up, etc, create new new advertising inventory, generating additional revenue and advertising-supported business models.
2. Increased revenue through addressability: Addressable or targeted advertising generates higher revenue, both for the service provider and their content partners.
3. Improved user satisfaction: Viewers like addressability as it gives them a more relevant experience.

The service provider needs to evolve both their technology and processes to take advantage of this opportunity. The three ‘must haves’ are:

1. Consistent measurement: To effectively trade audience and not just single ad spots, audiences and their actions need to be measured consistently across all devices in order to create a common trading currency.
2. Operational efficiency: The key to delivering exponential revenue is to not add exponential cost. Managing multiple campaigns is a challenge, and with the added complexity of multiple devices and platforms all management needs to happen from a single team, with a common set of tools.
3. Technical agility: As the nature of the market changes advertising tools will need to work with new insight and services. They will have to support changing business models and evolving ecosystems of partners and vendors. Technical openness is going to be a major factor for success.

Turning insight into action provides a real opportunity to create a better experience for audiences, content providers and advertisers, while increasing revenue. The technical ability exists and now is the time to implement the lates tools and business models to take advantage of this new world.

• Adam Davies is product manager at Synamedia