AMAGI – Top 3 FAST monetization strategies to drive revenue
Nissim Dokey, Director of Product Management at Amagi’s Monetize Business Unit
The holiday season is almost here – and with its arrival comes a surge in TV viewership. It’s when brands look to reach consumers in the most effective and innovative ways possible. The possibilities of realizing better ROIs increase as content owners can enhance their reach and revenue with a higher inflow of ads. Streaming, the most popular TV viewing option during the holidays, offers advertisers and content owners a unified sweet spot to meet the bottom lines faster and deliver an exceptional experience to viewers.
FAST (Free Ad-supported Streaming TV), enabling lean-back viewing, offers unique ad experience advantages over AVOD (Advertising Video on Demand), which is lean-forward. Whether it is easy content discovery or offering more ad opportunities, FAST provides better monetization avenues for content owners.
Here’s how content owners can elevate their monetization strategy on FAST.
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Showing the right ad to the right audience in the right format
Gone are the days when the blanket approach to showing the same ad to a large audience worked. With 92% of US households reachable through CTV advertising, delivering personalized ads at the right time to the right person while meeting your bottom line seems logical. Here’s how to achieve it.
a. Hyper-personalization and contextual advertising
The first step to delivering personalized ads is to identify the target audience and group them into meaningful cohorts based on demographics, age, behaviors, location, interests and more. With personalization involving carefully delivering relevant ads without seeming to intrude on the viewer’s privacy, the addressability of CTV provides a great opportunity.
Contextual advertising helps deliver contextually relevant ads to an audience already engrossed in the content. This enhances the engagement rate as the ads are now relatable. 86% of viewers also do holiday shopping while watching TV when relevant ads are served, which reinforces the importance of contextual advertising. Content and context metadata play a pivotal role in delivering this experience.
b. Showing the right instream linear ads
The next step after building your target audience is delivering the ads without latency. These ads can be placed before (pre-roll), during (mid-roll), or after (post-roll) the streaming content and can be of varying lengths. With IAB’s guidelines in place, packaging the ad pod (a group of ads strategically placed in an ad break) so viewers stay engaged is critical. A few factors to consider – ad duration (6/15/30 seconds), ad load of 5–8 minutes per hour and ad positioning.
During the holiday season, 95% of consumers watch holiday-themed content, and 97% watch with family and friends. This co-viewing experience offers increased opportunities for engaging with multiple viewers simultaneously, and hence, nailing it becomes crucial.
- Pod building refers to grouping multiple ads into one ad break to maximize monetization.
- Content localization customizes ads according to regional preferences, such as displaying ads for the nearest bakeshops to place orders for Christmas.
- Per-user playlist (PUP) creates personalized ad experiences at scale. PUP allows users to view customized ad playlists based on their viewing habits and metrics, such as demographics, location, interests and more.
c. Incrementally reaching your audience through in-content ads
Advertising redundancy is often bothersome for viewers – repeatedly encountering the same advertisement across various platforms and devices can result in ad fatigue. As a content owner, in-content ads offer you an incremental opportunity to best reach your audience non-intrusively — without increasing the pod length or disrupting the overall viewing experience. Graphics overlays, L-bands, picture-in-picture, dynamic brand insertion and interactive ads are popular in-content ad formats.
2. Pumping up your ad-sourcing strategy
With a target audience and ad delivery solution in place, how do you ensure the right advertisers approach you and that your inventory generates optimal ROI? Programmatic advertising enables the automatic buying and selling of ads.
Making programmatic a part of your strategy
Amagi ADS PLUS, Amagi’s advertising marketplace, connects premium CTV content owners with global programmatic and direct buyers and enables the filling of most of the ad inventory.
With ADS PLUS, you can:
1. Reach buyers at scale: Get in touch with leading advertisers leveraging Amagi’s integrations and relationships. Get access to a huge breadth of demand including:
- Open marketplace buyers
- Amagi’s custom private marketplace packages
- Programmatic guaranteed connections
- Audience extension spending from Amagi content partners
2. Maximize the value of every minute: Advanced contextual targeting and new ad formats help drive performance and enhance CPMs.
3. Realize profitability on your terms: Get transparent reporting and hands-on operations support to maximize opportunity for your business.
3 Optimizing your yield effectively
Ad yield optimization involves tracking and analyzing advertising efforts and calibrating them to ensure optimal ROI. FAST channels can face challenges in generating higher render rates (the % of ad impressions served out of the total number of ads received from ad servers) and win rates (number of bids sent vs. won) for advertisers.
Why?
- Viewers tend to drop off during longer ad breaks, leading to no conversion of ads for the entire pod, resulting in lower render rates.
- FAST channels leveraging several programmatic partners may call them all at once for every pod, resulting in low win rates for many partners or low render rates if more ads are sent than the pod time available.
A solid monetization strategy decides whether you meet the expectations of your viewers and advertisers. With multiple moving parts, partnering with the right technology provider helps deliver a last-mile, flawless experience to those viewers and advertisers and expected ROIs to your organization.
Nissim Dokey is the Director of Product Management at Amagi’s Monetize Business Unit. He oversees product strategy and execution across Amagi’s flagship THUNDERSTORM suite of products. Nissim brings over 10 years of B2B/SaaS product management experience with 5+ years in CTV/Video ads.
