LONDON– In the television industry, the 2010s were marked by a ratings rebellion and a pivot towards impressions. In an interview with Ashley J. Swartz, CEO and founder of Furious Corp. on behalf of Beet.TV, Calum Smeaton, CEO and founder of TVSquared, says there’s still a long way to go as far as performance measurements are concerned.
“There’s an argument between performance and brand,” says Smeaton. “Both are important, but I think for a long time it’s been all about brand and I think TV struggled against digital threats from Facebook and Google by not having proof of performance.”
The more buy-in there is from brands, the more it will help to shift trends towards performance. Smeaton also notices a wave of advertisers moving to OTT in order to get better response rates and know who they’re targeting among other advantages.
“We’re already seeing some of our brands go from a test-and-learn strategy in 2019 to moving from 10 to 15 percent of the budget to 30, 40, 50 percent of their budgets moving toward OTT [for next year], so big changes are coming within the next 12 months,” says Smeaton.
As a new decade approaches, Smeaton hopes that the importance on big data will shift towards little data. It’s this smaller data that can be more efficient to advertisers, especially as OTT continues to evolve at a faster pace.
“It’s the insight that matters,” says Smeaton. “When can we get insights in a timely fashion, not three months after the fact, after we’ve analyzed all this big data. I need it now, I need to be able to act on it, and I need it in real time.”
This video was produced in London at the Future of TV Ads Global forum in December 2019. This series is sponsored by Finecast, the global addressable TV company that is part of WPP. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
