Music video distributor Vevo may not favor comparisons with the traditional giant of televised music video broadcasts, MTV – but there is one screen where many will find the parallel impossible not to draw.
Having historically found two-thirds of its users from mobile, now – thanks to a strategy called “Vevo Everywhere” – it is finding 20% of its audience is from connected TVs, thanks to carriage on platforms like Roku, Apple TV, Amazon Fire and Echo Show, Pluto TV and Samsung TV Plus.
Vevo and MTV, on-demand and linear, may be different kettles of fish – but now Vevo is targeting the same kinds of main-line TV advertisers who are staples of traditional TV.
To seal the deal, Vevo will need to measure its audience and prove the success of its inventory.
“(It’s) very challenging … to measure CTV audiences,” says Adam Butler, Vevo’s director of brand insight and measurement, in this video interview with Beet.TV. “If you look at lists of market(ers’) concerns when it comes to media quality, ad measurement is often very near the top.”
Measurement
Butler says Vevo recently tapped TVision, a measurement provider that offers detailed viewer metrics, to get a better handle on its audience, by using a panel-based solution. Here is what they found:
From snacking to sessions: “People are viewing our content in sessions. More than 70% of our views on CTV are sessions – people are watching 2+ videos; they’re sitting down enjoying it in a long-form type way, much like music television was way back when.”
Group viewing: “We’re also seeing that over 60% of the viewing sessions are co-viewed… there’s more than one person viewing the content during the session.”
Attribution
Butler doesn’t just want to measure viewing – he also wants to prove to advertisers that connected TV can work. But that is a work in progress.
“When it comes to CTV and proving attribution, it’s an emerging space,” he says.
“We’re talking to various companies that are out there, trying to find what the right solution is for Vevo and for our clients.
Scale
If Vevo can get the numbers right, its own growing audience scale means it could be sitting on a very large opportunity. Butler says Vevo’s audience stats look like this:
- 26 billion video views per month
- 800 million to 1 billion people reached per month
- 120 million users reached per month.
- Around 450,000 official music videos.
In other words, Vevo’s audience is turning up the volume – and the metrics will catch up soon.
“The way I see, consumer adoption always outpaces measurement,” Butler says. “The genie is out of the bottle.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s leadership series Vevo Everywhere: Evolving Content Distribution. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
