Today, we are no longer required to sit constantly in front of your TV to catch a brand new series. We no longer need to wait for your favourite movie to play on TV, but can watch it whenever and wherever we want. A few decades ago, this would have sounded impossible. But, the wand of technology has made this a reality. Today, everything available on the tip of our fingers. And, in todayโs fast-paced life, it has become more of a necessity. Well, itโs time to say goodbye to the traditional forms of entertainment, and say hello to over-the-top (OTT) platforms. They bring you the best of entertainment, on-the-go!
The Rise of OTTs
The past few years have seen tremendous popularity of OTT services. I am sure you have of major international players like Netflix, & Amazon Prime Video, and domestic players Hotstar, and SonyLIV. The faster data speeds, increasing internet penetration, and a broader shift toward on-the-go entertainment have played a major role in this transition. Regional language content is also an important factor. Thanks to the OTT platforms, one can watch Telugu, Marathi, Punjabi, and almost every regional language content in any part of the world, without any extra subscriptions! A one-time subscription fee gets you access to all the content. Whatโs more? If you donโt want to pay, thereโs even โFreemiumโ content, where you access the content, but are also shown ads. Well, thatโs the trade-off.
The Audiences Here Have Their Priorities
As thereโs something for everyone, OTT (over-the-top) platforms are gaining popularity among netizens. eMarketer predicts that this year about 765 million people across the globe will be using over-the-top (OTT) video subscription at least once per month. Thatโs a huge audience! And, they are spending a considerable amount of time there. A per recent data, 96% of the videos on Hotstar are watched for an average of 20 mins! Naturally, advertisers cannot miss this opportunity to reach their customers! Thus, OTTs have are gradually becoming a favourite avenue for advertisers. However, advertisers need to be cautious. The audiences here have their priorities quite sorted. They are here for entertainment and do not appreciate being intruded by irrelevant ads popping-up in between of their favourite shows. Intruding their space can harm both – the advertisers & OTT platforms.
Programmatic Advertising Can Help
Programmatic advertising is the answer to this delicate situation. It is a smart way to advertise. Programmatic is fueled by advanced technologies like Big Data, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML). This allows advertisers to show highly relevant and targeted ads. Programmatic advertising offers a variety of targeting options like demographic targeting, psychographic targeting, behavioural targeting, geo-targeting, and so on. Employing the right combination of these options enables advertisers to reach the right consumers at the right time, and get better results and increased ROI. Thus, it enables OTT platforms to monetize their huge audiences, without disturbing their viewing experience.
Programmatic Can Make Life Easier For OTTs
Also, programmatic makes monetization easy for OTT players. Programmatic advertising offers is a plug and play environment, wherein the platforms can simply add the relevant plugins, and start the monetizing programmatically. Moreover, programmatic brings in the benefits of automation, which further simplifies the sales process. In programmatic, the media sales are often done on an ad exchange in real-time, through an automated auction.
Further, with the increasing user base of OTT players, large volumes of first-party high-quality data are available with them. The success of an ad campaign depends on the quality and quantity of data. This enables the OTT players to leverage their data to run their campaigns and yield amazing results.
Programmatic advertising also provides the OTT players with granular reports on the campaigns. These reports offer the platforms interesting and deep insights about their audience i.e. their content preferences, likes and dislikes. This data can be utilized by the OTT players to craft a powerful content strategy, which would increase the platformsโ viewership and popularity.
Furthermore, since the ads will be served in a brand-safe environment and will offer brands an extended audience-reach, it is quite likely that there will be a great demand for OTT platform from digital video advertisers all across the world. Programmatic advertising will help the OTT players leverage this demand.
Programmatic advertising has already seen popularity among advertisers. More than 80% of the display ads in the US are served programmatically. OTT (over-the-top) platforms, on the other hand, are gradually gaining popularity and attracting large audiences. Thus, the time is ripe for the OTT platforms to start leveraging the array of benefits that programmatic monetization techniques have to offer them
