Tag Archives: tv

SnapChat’s Viewability Advantage Over Facebook

What’s one of today’s prime digital advertising concerns? Viewability.

In case you’re out of the loop: Viewability is more or less a measurement of whether or not a video ad is actually viewed by an audience. (Seems odd, right? A marketer can buy and pay for an ad that was never “viewed.”) A number of factors contribute to the dwindling of this number from fast-scrolling users to bots and videos played “under the fold” or hidden in banners or buggy units.

That is why it should be very concerning that Facebook was recently accused of a less than 30% viewability rate by agencies using third-party measurement firms. Viewability is never going to be perfect and that’s OK — viewability is really just a proxy for “how much is my ad dominating that consumer’s attention” and that’s why agencies are measuring it. Some products and platforms will always perform better in this way… we love TV because that’s a big-ass screen with sight, sound and motion and I get all of it for a 30-second spot.

SnapChat’s ad product, by comparison, is extremely viewable. This is one reason that Snap has a huge advantage (esp. in terms of shifting TV ad spend), even though Facebook and Instagram have potentially slowed their growth. Snap’s ad product takes up the whole screen. It can’t be minimized, ignored or “tuned out.” Further, its users are completely engaged in the content — they’re burning the screen, skipping anything they deem unworthy of their attention. They’re leaning forward, right into your ad. Earn their consideration and you get a never-before-seen level of “dominating the consumer’s attention” for 10 seconds. It’s probably BETTER than TV.

Here’s SnapChat continuing to master product design and UI — it’s all about the user first… and just so happens to whet the advertisers’ demand for viewability.

YouTube TV — UGC and Vlogging Next to Premium Television

Bloomberg has an awesome breakdown of YouTube’s really cool announcement today. They’re launching their own “skinny bundle” of network and cable traditional TV access which will fuse with a high-tech cloud DVR and their own recommendations for YouTube videos.

A conversation will commence online about the viability of these low-priced “skinny bundles” and I tend to think they’re not a great model and won’t last. I don’t think Google thinks they’ll last either — I think their intention is to blur the lines between content on YT and TV. Because that’s the battle they’ve been fighting for years… Google is dominating digital ad spend but barely chipping away at television ad spend.

If they can change media buyer perceptions — prove that their content is just as premium as TV — then maybe they can get some of that dough. I don’t think it’s nearly that easy. Literally, this is the example, cited in the Bloomberg piece:

A query for cooking shows, for example, might turn up recommendations for Hell’s Kitchen, the TV staple from Fox, alongside Epic Meal Time, a web-only show produced by Studio71 GmbH.

Now THERE’S a stretch: Competition reality fans seamlessly transitioning into a handheld brofest about binge-eating. Is surfacing vloggers next to This Is Us going to accelerate cord cutting? Or shift ad spend from TV to digital? There’s no way.

This is a really cool service and it’s extremely thoughtfully designed. I’m thrilled to use it. But the idea that just putting these two types of content next to each other will somehow “merge” them in the eyes of audiences and advertisers is flawed. Until YouTube makes content like Empire, it’s not going to command revenue or ratings like Empire.

YouTube Bets It Can Convince Cordcutters to Pay for TV via Bloomberg