MISTV – Are we going back to linear? If so, what’s the impact on advertising? What role does AI have?
Stan Moote, CTO, IABM
Beyond news and sports, many viewers have seemingly replaced standard linear broadcast with on-demand. This is particularly true with the generation that grew up with MP3 players and making their own playlist, rather than simply listening to a whole album. Now we appear to be moving back into a type of customized linear viewing habit. Whether you’re sitting at home (or anywhere for that matter) people are back to just watching programs which we called “couch potatoes”. They are series binge watching, continuously locked into niche channels, or just sitting there watching clips flying by endlessly. When you look at the Nielsen Research, YouTube has captured 11% of the main TV screen in the home.
I call this “on-demand linear”. We are even seeing these niche FAST channels delivered over-the-air now and I wanted to dig deeper into this with respect to advertising as linear is still the “cash-cow” for the broadcast business due to advertising.
I had the fantastic opportunity to ask these questions to Jiří Gabriel, COO of MISTV, who supplies complex solutions for advertising sales, rights, content and broadcast management worldwide.
Jiří – I agree with you that “on-demand linear” is really stepping into the light now. But also I would not judge too quickly as for instance couple of years ago, I heard a lot of talk about terrestrial broadcasting being almost dead or going to be definitely dead soon as well as talk that everything will be moved to on-demand platforms and to social media only. The situation is constantly developing, reflecting the changes in society as well as in the technology.
My personal opinion is that classic linear broadcasting will survive, and it will be here for many more years, and it will be the same with streaming services, as each of these platforms still a have strong base among the consumers, but new possibilities to place the content and Ads will be appearing, like social media and other platforms. You have to be open minded and prepared for opportunities the future can bring. Lucky for us, we have been following this idea for many years, so for instance in our latest solution we do not care whether you are planning the content, booking commercials or measuring the impressions on terrestrial channels, on-demands, web pages or even social medias. The whole of society has changed and our industry has changed with it. And it is still changing and everybody is trying to exploit all of the new possibilities to maximize their potential.
We are living fast lives, maybe too fast and with it, we got used to be constantly consuming a huge amount of information over short period of time. I must say I don’t like seeing people constantly watching their smart phones or other devices focusing on the online world instead of the real one. Moreover as a big portion of this content is usually in a form of short, random videos without any deep thoughts inside or message to the audience. I do not like it as it is having a huge impact on the young generation as well as it is strongly affecting our industry, literally threatening the beauty of it. But it is happening and we all need to adapt to it.
A good example is in the way that the movies are being shot now. If you would present a 15-year-old movie to the current young generation, they would be immediately bored, as the development of the movie story and plot as well as the presentation of the information in it would be extremely slow for them. Nowadays everything is happening extremely fast: you need to have immediate action with overcomplex plots, catches, surprises and huge amount of information compressed into just a few scenes to keep the audience’s attention.
This change has had a similar impact on the way commercials are being created now as well. The audience is no longer used to receiving simple stuff. They need to have it compressed to extreme intensity to get the needed effect.
As everything is interconnected, this effect on people is significant especially on the source and way of consuming the content. As you already said 11% of the main TV time at home is now spent on YouTube. This is a significant number, but it also means that the linear and on-demand platforms are still there as well. The content will be more spread across the platforms, but I believe we are not in the moment where we can say that there is only one “main” platform now.
For linear broadcasting to remain as you said a “cash-cow”, the main goal is still the same: how to effectively deliver the commercials. The general answer is simple: ads focused depending on the exact consumer. The audience data are still the main key to achieve that, but how to get to the required information about every exact consumer while they are watching linear broadcasting?
With the AVOD, the easy answer is to use the information out of the profile of the subscriber and then focus the commercials directly based on subscriber preferences. With YouTube or web based content, it is pretty much the same, but with linear? That is a different story, because how will you get to the information about who is watching the show at a particular time in order to adjust the commercial block content accordingly?
Stan – So to help combat this, your system uses AI to help broadcasters select commercials to line up with the linear program content and advertising campaign. How does this work?
Jiří – This is not easy to describe but generally the system can suggest to the user what to do or even manage the whole process automatically, but to do this properly, the main thing is to have as much information as possible as a starting point.
So the more information you input on the campaign management side, the better. Then there are three sets of basic parameters: booking rules, booking conditions and booking constraints, permitting and restricting the algorithm responsible for the booking itself. Together with general coefficients, definitions and other settings (positions, priorities, affinity, etc) the system uses AI to “predict” the type of the audience based on the “type” of the content to manage the booking and continuously watches the ad inventory in order to improve the booking based on the latest user or system inputs. Also beyond the manual metadata, we use AI to review the clips and populate more metadata. This helps us align the ads with the program content and viewers’ preferences.
Stan – what’s your opinion on using GenAI for making TV commercials?
Jiří – I think all of the big players are digging into it as they are always looking for ways to improve their business and make it more effective and make more money, and they usually have the budget to play with. The smaller ones, despite the fact the usage of the GenAI can save a lot of human work, thus literally saving a lot of money, I believe they will be sticking with the classic approach longer, but eventually they will follow.
In the end, like with any GenAI usage, it can be a good tool, but only when used properly by well trained and experienced staff. Definitely we will hear a lot about it in the near future.
