4. CTV, Engagement, & Skippy The Bush Kangaroo

Since its popularisation in the family home, Television has been somewhat of a household idol.

Today we look at the evolution of TV to its current connected state, discussing the importance and impact of CTV in the advertising landscape and how it affects our attention and engagement.

Sarah Lewis is on the Digital Distillery Stage this time as she discusses a recent study on tracking users' attention, and what that can tell us about how we engage with this new TV more differently from its traditional and modern counterparts.

We also look at this study's results, the different CTV advertising options available, and which are most effective. The answer may surprise you, it did me!

This episode is brought to you as always by The Digital Distillery.

If you would like to get in touch with us you can head to our website or email podcast@the-digital-distillery.com

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Written, Produced & Engineered by Phil McDowell
Executive Producer: Nadia Koski
Project Leads: Dennis Kirschner

Transcript

Since its prominence, in our homes, the television set has been a monument in the family living room. Sitting together in a rainy day or a quiet evening in, we watch together, laugh together and cry together when a fight for the remote gets out of hand and you end up digging out popcorn from between the cushions for months to come.

As humans, storytelling has always been part of our culture and we are simply built to pay attention and take in the themes and morals of a story when it’s told. We covered a bit about storytelling in video in our last episode so if that sounds interesting to you I recommend you go check it out if you haven’t already.

And in keeping with that theme, I would like to kick off this episode with a story of my own.

If you’ll indulge me…..or if not just skip forward about 3 minutes.

In my youth, when I was backpacking through the foothills of my Tibidabo….. no wait, not that one.

During my various travels through Eastern Europe when I was younger, I found myself on a day trip to a small historic village in the Czech Republic called Cesky Krumlov.

So this village is about 130 k’s south of Prague in the Bohemian forest foothills and was first mentioned in the 1250s

Built on a steady slope and split down the middle by a gently winding river with houses and shops backed all the way up to the waters edge. 

While doing the tourist thing and lazily rafting through the village from top to bottom with some very large, very nice local beers in tow, I saw something strange on one of the buildings on the water-front that caught my eye

A huge,  colourful, but slightly wonkily painted Kangaroo pointing enthusiastically and with the look of insanity in its eyes only a poorly painting can have, at the words ‘the skippy inn’ in huge block letters on the side of this building.

Now for those of you not familiar with the peak of Australian Television in the 1960’s, 

‘Skippy the Bush Kangaroo’ was a very tame and shallow black and white afternoon tv series featuring a small ‘roo-whisperer-esq’ boy and a puppet-string visible Kangaroo solving crimes somewhere in the bush and scrub of regional Australia.

Now the show was no entertainment marvel by any stretch of the imagination and as far as I know enjoyed no great success or airtime outside of the greater United Kingdom and a brief flirtation with smiling Irish eyes.

So what the hell was Skippy doing on the side of a small Czech B&B in a little village near Pilzen? I had to find out.

As our raft got to the bottom of the village, and with not much time left before the bus was heading back to Prague, I told my mates to wait at the bus for me and don’t let it leave, (they didn’t, and it did)  and sprinted up the hill in search of the titular bush kangaroo. 

As I arrived out of breath in the car park underneath the towering marsupial, I caught the owner coming out and asked her if she could tell me where the name of the Inn came from.

As it turns out, when the now inn owner was a child, this building was her family home. Her father was a radio repairman and had managed to come across a broken TV set which he worked on in the garage of an evening, to try and fix. Eventually, he managed to get it working and proudly hooked it up in the living room. It was the only television in this or any of the neighbouring villages and it very quickly became an idol of technology and entertainment for all of the children in the village.

Every Wednesday at 5 o’clock the living room heaved with children of all ages in rapt attention before the tiny cathode screen airing the only non-propaganda show that the iron curtain deemed disparate enough from the local world to not instill ‘dangerous’ ideas into the minds of the watchers. 

You guessed it. Skippy the bush Kangaroo. And this experience of everyone crowding around the screen to gaze briefly into strange and alien worlds, outside of their scope of reality, had such an impact that it inspired her to name her business after it.

Since then, the humble television set has held a position of prominence in family living rooms across the globe. It’s held firm through black and white, to colour, cathode ray to flat screen, the weekly television guide to on demand streaming entire seasons of your favorite show while locked away in COVID isolation….. yeah, sigh, that was me after dmexco. As a side note I thoroughly enjoyed heartbreak high on Netflix, but who knows, my corona-addled brain was a bit fluffy at the time.

Anyway. The evolution of television has brought us to the currently most used and fastest growing opportunity for advertisers, Connected TV.

CTV for short, refers to any Television that is connected to the internet and can access streaming services such as Netflix and Disney plus for example and is the preferred entertainment platform across Europe with 80% of users now preferring it over linear or traditional TV.

Now this is a big change in a short time, partially because it was going that way anyway but also because everyone was stuck at home in 2020 watching telly in an unprecedented way compressing several years of marketing evolution and innovation into a few short months.

And it's super advertiser friendly with far more attention paid to CTV ads than its linear ancestor.

Back in Vienna, the next speaker on the floor was none other than Global Director of CTV at ShowHeroes Sarah Lewis.

And she was talking specifically about the benefits of CTV for advertisers but before we get into that, let's look at what actually the main differences are been CTV and the more traditional linear TV for both users and advertisers.. 

The main and obvious difference for users is that with traditional TV you have no real control over the content. You check the TV guide, switch it on, and you get what you get over a small handful of channels. This is opposed to the now commonplace CTV practice of selecting anything you care to watch at any time.

Advertisers as well have less control using traditional tv. Really all you can do is choose which channel you would like to advertise on which gives you a broad idea of demographics, the time your ad gets viewed, and during which program.

Actually, this reminds me, there were some rudimentary ways of measuring demographics more directly. When I was 9 or so years old someone came and installed what I now know was a device for measuring demographics and engagement but at the time was a weird little box that lived on the TV for a month or so. 

We were asked to always manually enter the age of each of the viewers whenever the TV was turned on and regularly hit an ‘I’m still here button’. It was a nice try but you can see the limitations.

My little brother and I thought it was really funny and made a point to religiously input viewer data every single time we watched tv.

And that month in a small town in regional Australia there were apparently an astounding number of 99-year-old grandmothers watching cartoons with alarming frequency.

But I digress…

So with linear tv, it’s not really possible to measure the engagement level of the viewer as there’s just no possibility for any feedback or interaction that can be usefully analyzed. You just pay your money and send your ad out there, hoping to gauge its success on the following sales.

This is muddy. If you’re running simultaneous campaigns or have some other external factor influencing your sales at the same time your tv campaign is running, then it can skew the results, making the data for planning future campaigns pretty unreliable.

Now CTV targeting itself is leaps and bounds ahead of traditional in its targeting ability, but of course it’s not perfect. CTV is more often than not a shared experiences. Both in terms of multiple people watching something at the same time, or more relevant, multiple people with completely different tastes living under one roof and sharing the TV time.

And that's where Semantic CTV targeting comes into play. This is a kind of targeting that takes keywords associated with a user or group of users and actually attributes likely real-world meaning to those keywords and adjusts targeting accordingly.

You have a greater chance of not just engaging your audience but also tracking how well you engaged them and with which specific parts of your ad, more about this later.

And finally, you just have way better data with which to plan and adjust your future campaigns, giving you the best chance for success.

So we know that CTV is better at engagement, and due to its potential for contextual targeting, ie showing ads that are relevant to what you’re watching, garners more willingness from viewers to actually watch ads…. But how exactly can we even measure this?

Traditionally, studies in Europe surrounding TV and the behaviors of its viewers have mainly relied on questionnaires and surveys.

The nature of questionnaires and surveys means that responders, without necessarily meaning to, will always be thinking consciously about their answers and introducing some biases through either, misremembering or not being aware of something, to not wanting to be judged by the answers that they give.

The study that Sarah is talking about was done in collaboration with the independent market research company COG who have been studying how people watch video content for around ten years.

But how on earth do you track unconscious thought or someone’s attention without asking them about it after the fact?

So I for one had no idea this was a thing, but what they did was get the watchers to put on these smart glasses which would track the movement and focus of the eyes, allowing the researchers to see exactly where their gaze was and how long it remained on a certain place on the screen. 

This is then coupled with dermal response tracking, something a bit like a lie detector test in the movies, in order to collect data from around 30 participants, watching a variety of different video-based platforms.

So as Sarah says here CTV is a VERY engaging platform based on the measurements taken of where people’s attention is being held.

However as I said, it's not just the attention that they looked at but also the electro-dermal response which measures the actual brain state of the user. 

And when watching CTV 51% of viewers are in that optimal state. And this is significant compared to linear tv which came in at 34% and Social type platforms like Instagram youtube and TikTok were significantly lower.

It was only after collecting all this information that the good old quantitative questionnaires and surveys were sent out, aiming to find out the why. What drove the participants to download a particular CTV app, why did they choose one over another.

What came out of this and other studies like it was that we simply view CTV ad’s with much more attention than those on other platforms and much more than we even realise. Most of the time the CTV app is the first visited when sitting down to watch the telly and when that's the case, is very likely to remain on.

And that's why CTV is quickly becoming the most interesting and most heavily invested in option for advertisers looking to engage with their audiences.

But what do the studies show the audiences actually want? 

Well they want the convenience sure, but something else is changing that is impacting the space right now. And that something has been coined as subscription fatigue.

When streaming TV on demand and its associated subscription model started to become popular there were only a couple of providers. For me it was only netflix for a while, and that was great. Then “Better call Saul” came out on the australian service Stan so i grabbed that as well. Prime had american gods which I had just finished reading, awesome book by the way, and so i thought i would just subscribe for a while to watch that. Final season of game of thrones, foxtel, the mandalorian, disney plus. House of the dragon on sky…or wow as it is here in germany for some reason…..and so it goes on. You can see the issue.

Users very quickly got used to the control they had over what and when they wanted to watch, but the rise in popularity of course saw a rise in competition and with it, inevitable exclusivity rights and the need to have a ridiculous number of subscriptions if you want to watch everything that interests you.

And so the self-imposed weight of the subscription model is starting to tip things.

According to Strategus.com 51% of TV viewers said they didn’t want to spend more that $20 a month which is about the cost of 1 subscription, 2 at a stretch with some sort of discount. 

And so we, as an industry, started looking into other ways to create a more palatable value exchange than that of the subscription model. One of these is the video monetization model known as AVOD of Advertising Video On Demand.

So basically you don’t pay for the service with money, but rather with your time and attention watching various ads that crop up during, before or after the show.

And from the data, there are clear indications that exchanging commercials for content in this way is pretty agreeable to most people with 57% saying they would be open to lowering their subscription cost on a paid platform in exchange for watching an ad every other episode and another 40% saying they would prefer ads tailored specifically to their interests and 67% preferring to see ads actually related to the content they are watching.

Ok, so let's step back a little and define some of the terms that you might come across in the industry.  You ready?

As we have already discussed there is CTV which is related to the actual devices we use to connect to streaming services.

Then there is Over-the-top or OTT which is the same idea but specifically refers to the services themselves.

And CTV itself can also be broken down into a myriad of acronymic headings.

There’s AVOD which we have already talked about but there is also BVOD - broadcast video on demand. This is a subset of AVOD in that it is ad supported but the difference is that it comes from traditional broadcasters like NBCuniversal for example.

FAST stands for free ad-supported television and this refers to streaming services that are free to the consumer but also ad supported. They are often integrated into hardware like Samsung TVPlus for example.

And then we have SVOD - subscription video on demand and these are the ones we are likely most used to at the moment. These are simply services that require a monthly subscription like Netflix, Disney plus or Amazon prime.

Consumers and advertisers alike are cutting the linear TV cord at a record rate and across Europe's 5 biggest markets, Germany, UK, France, Spain and Italy, 4 out of 5 households can be reached by CTV which is a 30 percent year on year increase.

It provides marketers with targeting, engagement and measurement capabilities that were only a dream in the days of linear TV. It allows brands to more effectively plan and spend their ad budgets with a much higher probability of running more successful campaigns and driving better results for their bottom lines.

Additionally, it allows advertisers to better control their ad frequencies across channels with more precision and relevance.

With ad spend on CTV currently at estimated to be at 18.9 Billion and, as anticipated by insider intelligence, to increase to 38.83 Billion by 2026, it is certainly here to stay and if you want to take advantage of it, there’s no time to lose.

Thank you to Sarah Lewis as one of the keynote speakers at The Digital Distillery in Vienna. It’s gone quickly I know and we have but one final speaker from the event for our next full episode who by the way was my personal favorite from the event as he turned everything on its head to talk about the hidden importance of analog in media advertising.

We are also working on more special episodes covering the topics of Video for Social Media as well as talking all about The Digital Marketers act and why its so important.

On top of ALL THIS i am really excited to announce that we are launching a brand new show on the digital distillery network in few short weeks. I will be joined by sustainable development expert Araceli Almada to talk all about the the Digital Media’s impact on the environment and what we can do about it called ‘Green About Media’. 

Stay tuned at the digital distillery.com or keep an eye out on your pod-catcher of choice.

This episode was produced hosted and engineered by me Phil McDowell with Nadia Koski as executive producer, the project is led by Dennis Kirschner and Stefanie Leonardi. 

You can get in touch with us by emailing the-digital-distillery.com or by using the contact form on the website. 

Links to the articles used are in the show notes and we’ll catch you next time in The Digital Distillery Podcast.