3 Takeaways from the 2019 VideoNuze Ad Summit
Last week’s 9th Annual VideoNuze Video Advertising Summit in New York City was an illuminating event full of insights about the present and future of OTT video, video advertising, and mobile viewership. With speakers from top companies including Hulu, CBS Interactive, WarnerMedia, eMarketer, and Roku—and Penthera’s CRO Dan Hurwitz—the event provided a great look at the current video advertising landscape, its challenges, and how media companies will need to evolve to make it in the fast-paced video industry. Here are just a few of our takeaways.
The industry needs to focus more strongly on mobile.
Mobile video viewership is exploding, but media companies are still focused on bigger screens.
Connected TVs make for interesting discussion and are a great example of OTT’s overtaking of territory that was historically cable’s. But the reality is that OTT’s biggest competitor for eyeballs isn’t classic television, but mobile devices. Mobile use, especially video viewership, is soaring. Video traffic in mobile networks is forecast to grow by around 35 percent annually through 2024 to account for 74 percent of all mobile data traffic.
One Ad Summit panel called Mobile Video: Understanding the On-the-Go Viewer discussed how mobile video comes with a unique set of challenges and opportunities. 2019 is set to be the first year that the average US adult will spend more time engaging with their mobile devices than watching TV, according to a recent report from eMarketer. With mobile video, user experience is key, and in an increasingly mobile-focused world, OTT companies have to prioritize getting it right.
OTT needs to embrace more creative revenue models.
The over-the-top video industry is often broken into AVODs vs SVODs, but the media companies who want to survive in the hyper-competitive OTT space will need to embrace the best elements of both.
On a panel called How Premium Video Providers are Successfully Transitioning to the OTT Era, Robert Aitken of Deloitte predicted upcoming consolidation in the OTT video space and said that to win, media companies will need to expand multiple revenue sources, including both advertising and subscription support. On another panel, Ellation’s Henry Embleton pointed out that the relationship between AVOD and SVOD is a huge opportunity: “AVOD is a funnel to help users fall in love with our platform and transform into a paying subscriber.”
AVOD is unstoppable.
Data continues to show that digital video advertising is on a path of world domination, seeing immense growth every year. The Ad Summit’s opening speaker, eMarketer analyst Lauren Fisher, noted that today “Over half of today’s ad dollars are going to video.” And while Netflix is often cited as the face of OTT’s future, the reality is that ad-supported video is incredibly popular. And that number continues to grow.
Plus, viewers enjoy ad-supported content: IAB’s Eric John cited a recent study that showed 80% of streaming video viewers watch ad-supported content.
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