Driven by a combination of marketer uptake and viewer expectations, the use of interactive television ads is surging at Hulu. So much so that “I feel like there’s a bit of an inflection point for interactive ads in TV,” says SVP of Advertising & Sales Peter Naylor.
“We’ve been working with people like BrightLine for a long, long time, Innovid, true[X] and others,” Naylor says in this interview with Beet.TV at the Advanced Advertising Summit. “It think we’re at an inflection point because my volume of orders for all of last year I’ve already booked year to date. That’s two hundred, three hundred percent growth. Very smart growth.”
A few weeks ago, Hulu served video trailers for the Warner Bros and MGM movie “Tomb Raider” that were interactive ads to the extent that viewers could order tickets to a nearby theatre from Fandango. As Variety reports, part of the strategy was to lessen the time between people seeing a movie trailer and actually going to a theatre.
“So I think as people, viewers in particular, continue to expect that they can interact with TV ads, you’ll see marketers take advantage of the opportunity,” says Naylor. “It’s a real opportunity to go beyond a conventional fifteen or thirty and I don’t see why it shouldn’t continue to go up and to the right.”
Such interactive spots are priced at a premium “because the results are superior in terms of brand awareness and purchase intent and even just at the most basic level, time spent with the ad. These ads just get more attention and I think expectations are going to just continue to increase for the viewer.”
Interactive ads typically begin with a conventional spot and some kind of call to action. “Maybe it’s an overlay or some kind of creative element to alert the viewer that they can interact. Once they interact it can be a video library, it could be a photo library, or a transactional unit. There’s a whole hoist of opportunities once you get people to engage.”
It’s a “modest call to action that lets people know pick up your remote, pick up your phone you can play around with this and learn more.”
Naylor likens growing consumer engagement with interactive ads to the advent of touch screens and peoples’ evolved expectations to encounter touch screens just about everywhere.
“I think sooner or later people just expect, of course I should be able to transact with a set. It’s IP TV. It’s a connected environment.”
This video was produced at the Advanced Advertising Summit in New York. Please find more videos on this page from the Beet.TV series presented by 4C.
