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Yield Analytics is the key to premium video forecasting

By Samuel Tan, Senior director, market development for JAPAC

Xandr

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July 14, 2020 | 5 min read

As TV and digital advertising continue marching towards convergence, buyers want to reach their audiences across various endpoints of premium content where that long-form premium content is being consumed – not just on TV and not only on digital devices.

Xandr look at the effectiveness of yield analytics and suggest ways of packaging to suit buyers' needs.

Xandr look at the effectiveness of yield analytics and suggest ways of packaging to suit buyers' needs.

Conversations between buyers and sellers will converge side by side. A primary question from buyers in the near future will likely be: “What does your forecasting tell you about the audiences I can reach efficiently across screens – including TV?”

Especially in the current Covid-19 landscape, as people stay home, media and on-demand video are being consumed at increased volumes across multiple platforms. For brands to be able to reach audiences effectively, a major key will be quality inventory management and forecasting, which have long been critical to both TV and digital selling.

Changing TV viewing habits

Research from GlobalWebIndex found that APAC spends the least amount of time watching linear TV but recorded one of the highest amounts of time spent watching online TV. In South East Asia alone, there has been a steady trend of decline in time spent on linear TV across the last couple of years; while time spent consuming TV content on streaming services has been rapidly increasing.

Most TV buying is currently done manually and in an up-front, spot-based manner, and there’s a contractual liability with advertisers to get it right. Programmers know that they can overbook, just a little, so they can get the most value for the inventory. But there’s limited supply and, unlike on the internet, once the TV program has run, the inventory is gone.

Current TV buying methods haven’t adapted to the more limited reach created by declining linear viewership, leading to heavy TV watchers being disproportionally bombarded with repeat ads.

In the same GlobalWebIndex study, just 17% of the markets surveyed reported more time spent on traditional than digital media. If a brand doesn’t have the insight or tools to begin dynamically allocating their ads beyond TV viewers and into the CTV and digital video space, it’s possible that 20% of a brand’s audience could be watching 80% of their ads.

Harnessing the power of yield analytics

In the world of display, there’s no real demand constraint or supply constraint, so the value of yield analytics lies in the details that optimise revenue on an impression-by-impression basis.

Enabling publishers to get granular in the time of the day, week or month that their inventory is available, based on real-time, advanced audience-layered forecasts rather than linear delivery, brings precision to pacing while maximising publisher yield.

To deliver optimal pacing, it helps to have a direct integration between forecasting and delivery systems in the ad server. It will deliver more guaranteed impressions during high-traffic periods, capture more RTB demand during lower-traffic times, and deliver higher overall revenue. That’s why publishers are investing in solutions like Xandr’s Yield Analytics, which integrates with ad servers and delivers this type of pacing.

Fragmentation of consumer habits and the decline of linear TV viewership (and the convergence they herald) are contributing to a premium video and TV ecosystem where converged forecasting is going to need to start looking a lot more like digital forecasting. Sophisticated AVOD platforms are already taking an impression-based, audience-layered approach, inserting ads dynamically to individual viewers who are watching premium long-form content on demand.

As our industry approaches a future state where premium TV-like supply is more readily available across different formats like Mediacorp’s portfolio of channels and YouTube, and the number of on-demand services like Netflix, Viu and iflix continues to rise, there is a growing importance to be able to forecast across audiences accurately, and assign allocations within, and between, inventory pools expands.

Ultimately, when it comes to yield analytics of the future, the planning silos between digital, CTV and TV inventory will matter far less than how they can best work together for brands, as marketers’ digital strategy encompasses them all in one place.

What will set publishers and programmers up to capitalise on this convergence is forecasting and pacing technology capable of giving a comprehensive view of all inventory, and a platform that can package all types of inventory together – the way that buyers want it – in the not-so-distant future.

Samuel Tan, senior director, market development for JAPAC at Xandr.

Open Mic Advertising

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Xandr, a part of Microsoft Advertising, powers a global marketplace for premium advertising. Our data-enabled technology platform, encompassing Xandr Invest, Xandr...

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