Hulu promises personalization ‘unlike anything you’ve ever seen before’ for both viewers and advertisers with Live TV launch
Ahead of the much anticipated launch of its Live TV service, Hulu will launch unprecedented levels of personalization for viewers, and it’s a level of service it hopes to extend to advertisers eager to tap into its audience, according to its vice president of sales Jim Keller.
Hulu Live TV will launch later this year with a host of service updates
Speaking on stage this week at Beet Retreat, Keller said the OTT service would leverage its Video Genome purchase (a company it acquired in late 2016) to “reimagine” its video recommendation service.
Content suggestions will be based on account-level information such as zip code data, etc, and can be further honed based on which household member is viewing the service at that time, previous viewing habits, as well as additional information that Hulu incorporates into its decisioning engine.
The new recommendation capabilities will be made available to both Hulu Live subscribers as well as those paying for its more traditional video-on-demand services, with viewers being presented with a mix of both live and historic services upon log-in.
“Right now, the television discoverability experience has always been done the same way, it’s the EPG. But what we’re going to do when you open up the Hulu experience...first of all what we’re going to do is first of ask who’s watching, and then personalize that personal experience based of your past viewing preferences,” he told attendees.
He later went on to tell attendees that Hulu would extend this level of bespoke tailoring to advertisers wishing to place ads on the service, adding that consumer adoption of such services was far in advance of advertisers’ willingness to invest in such platforms. “Each and every user on Hulu will have a different experience, and we want to take that personalized viewing experience and then make it happen for marketers in the way then can buy,” Keller added.
Also participating on the same pane was Seth Walters, a senior partner at WPP-owned Modi Media, who explained some of the thought processes among advertisers.
“We’re still very early on, from the agency perspective they still want to know that exactly is running on OTT, so there’s a lot of uncertainty especially when it comes to publishers like Hulu, or other networks out there,” he said.
“We still have to be designed to measure outcomes and be accountable, we have to reimagine a new environment at large that provides a lot of opportunity to enable their creative data.”