Fractal screens: SVOD’s surge, generational viewership, the chaos of measurement – and how to solve it
Stitching together audiences across screens – buying them and measureing effectiveness – is about to get much more complex as ad-funded streamers pile into Australia, erecting another set of walled gardens that outdated approaches will struggle to penetrate. Kinesso’s Charlie Allatt and Beatgrid’s Daniel Tjondronegoro unpack what’s about to hit – and an oven-ready solution for effective measurement across TV, BVOD and new SVODs that some marketers are already tapping.
Brands face a fractal landscape of watching: varied, complex, and hard to measure. The coming surge of SVOD platforms like Prime Video and Paramount+ heralds a new era of intricacy in digital video; enriching the opportunity, while defying the capability to measure it. Traditional approaches are confounded by generational watching behaviours, cross-media consumption, and the siloed nature of buying and measurement solutions - circumscribing the impossible shape of screens in 2024.
“In 2024, the screens landscape is becoming more complex for brands – as SVOD ad availability grows, audience fragmentation increases, and challenges around accurate cross-channel measurement persist. This calls on advertisers to develop more sophisticated screen strategies, in order to navigate the evolving space and unlock opportunities as they develop."
Time is money
Where are people spending their time and how much of it can a brand incise? Back when attention-based measurement was a twinkle in the eye of researchers, there was still an implicit understanding that advertising, or at least brand dollars, grossly tracks the time and impact of media channels. The impact of a format like a display banner was well understood to pale to that of a linear TV ad. That nearly the entire country spent hours there every month, led to linear’s deserved and unsurprising dominance on media plans for the better part of the last century.
It’s equally unsurprising, as people’s watching habits have moved online, that we’ve seen a correction into digital, especially video and connected TV environments that best parallel the linear experience. Recent studies from Beatgrid underscore the enduring relevance of linear TV among older audiences (45 years and above), while also emphasising the pivotal role of YouTube, alongside other CTV and subscription-based apps, in engaging Gen Zs and Millennials. This highlights the increasing significance of video-on-demand services and their impact on audience behaviour, as they seamlessly transition between platforms (screens) for content consumption.
“With the surge of new SVOD channels and walled gardens, measuring campaign effectiveness becomes a challenge for brand marketers and agencies. Traditional methods lack vital person-level data, relying on modelled Big Data sets from various channels. This flawed approach fails to offer an accurate overview of a campaign's incremental value. Australian brands turn to single-source measurement solutions like Beatgrid's, providing unified cross-media insights on incremental reach, incremental brand lift (including attention metrics), and retail footfall without relying on cookies or IP addresses.”
2024: the ‘year’ of SVOD
In Australia, current ad availability exists in just four of the ‘Big 9’ streaming services – Netflix, Binge, Kayo (+ESPN), and Optus Sport. Between them, there are roughly 3.5m subscriptions-worth of eyeballs – a figure that tends to balloon in reach terms, given co-viewing factors on the big screen.
Today, that figure represents about a fifth of the total scale inherent in those nine services, given the different ad-model penetration held down by Netflix at roughly 10 per cent of its massive subscriber base. That’s about to change as Amazon Prime and Paramount+ have hotly anticipated launches coming within the next few months, bolstering that potential scale to over 40 per cent of gross ‘subscribers’ – largely off the back of Amazon’s anticipated 4-5m watchers. With Disney+ likely to launch in the late stages of the year or early 2025, we would see SVOD availability for ad models rise to well over 50 per cent, even as Netflix continues its slow road to dominance as attrition on its higher tier plans leads more people to the ad-funded model.
This paradigm shift will bring over 8 million viewers with SVOD-heavy content diets into the spotlight for brands, spurring significant investment in digital video.
Yet, challenges loom for buyers as industry giants like Netflix and Amazon have both chosen to silo their availability within specific buying platforms (Microsoft Invest, and Amazon DSP, respectively) segregating them entirely from, for example, YouTube’s audience, which must be bought through Google’s DV360 or Google Ads. This fragmentation, alongside the complexities of preferred platforms for BVOD purchases and the distinct realm of linear TV, underscores the upheaval buyers will face in the impending digital consolidation era.
Clarity to the chaos
Advertisers are grappling with the task of achieving thorough measurement of digital reach and frequency. Although historically, a centralised approach within a single demand-side platform (DSP) offered insights into aggregate reach and frequency across digital channels, it fell short of bridging the divide between linear TV and digital video platforms, thus hindering the accurate assessment of the incremental reach and brand lift of incorporating specific channels into the media mix.
However, in the new era of subscription video silos, this strategy is inadequate. Advertisers now grapple with a daunting dilemma as each platform operates within its own isolated buying ecosystem. Navigating this complex landscape of at least three distinct buying platforms, alongside isolated linear TV measurement, presents a significant obstacle to obtaining holistic insights - despite endeavours to unify measurement via centralised buys in platforms such as DV360 or Amazon DSP.
Furthermore, the inability to measure at a person level exacerbates these privacy and transparency challenges. As a result, advertisers find themselves confronted with the arduous choice of either relinquishing reach on certain platforms or forsaking sensible measurement practices altogether. This fragmentation not only obstructs advertisers' pursuit of clarity regarding the impact of their media expenditures but also presents formidable obstacles for the industry in adeptly navigating the escalating complexity of media plans.
“An advertiser wanting to tap into Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, YouTube and BVOD will be faced with a choice between (at minimum) three different buying platforms, plus theirlLinear TV measurement in isolation on top.”
In 2024, Australian marketers are struggling to accurately measure the impact of new SVOD channels on their media strategies beyond traditional data sets. The growing dependence on competing measurement currencies that rely on Big Data, and modelled and fusion data poses challenges for advertisers to truly understand if they have effectively reached their target audiences and measured the genuine impact of their campaigns. As consumers seamlessly transition between platforms in search of optimal content, the persistence of siloed channel measurement and outdated methodologies exacerbates the problem, leading to fragmented insights that impede comprehensive cross-media campaign evaluation.
Pioneering Australian brands are already starting to adopt more innovative unified single-source person-level measurement solutions to measure deduplicated incremental reach and brand lift at a person level. Using such new approaches have allowed them to overcome the challenge of screen fragmentation and effectively measure across TV, BVOD and new SVODs – by-passing walled garden measurement challenges. The question for advertisers remains: "How much of your media budget are you willing to leave unmeasured and unobserved, as the fractured nature of supply access mounts, and measurement solutions are largely incapable of keeping pace?".
In the fractal world of screens – how will you fare?
