Streaming platforms are seeking to expand their audiences – and advertising sales — by building up their live sports programming, as seen with Amazon’s deal to show the National Football League’s “Thursday Night Football.” As more live sports migrate to connected devices, marketers must consider how their access to consumers is changing.
“What we’ve seen in the past year is fragmentation of audiences,” Matthew Jamison, AVP of digital and demand partnerships at DIRECTV Advertising, said in this interview with Beet.TV contributor Rob Williams.
“Some viewers are very comfortable navigating streaming services and cable networks to find their game,” Jamison said. “Others are overwhelmed and just want to be able to turn on their TV and easily flip through the channels they want…For marketers, it means they need to work harder to reach these avid sports fans.”
Amazon helped to expand the audience for “Thursday Night Football” with its reach into households that have hooked up their televisions to the internet. Its live viewership has shown that streaming can carry much more than libraries of on-demand movies and scripted series.
In its research, DIRECTV Advertising has found that 70% of sports viewers like to watch live daily programming. To help these viewers find games, it introduced a “Sports Mode” that showcases what’s available to watch. With 20 million Americans using sports-betting apps, advertisers can reach a highly engaged audience in live games, Jamison said.
Television advertising is becoming more automated as programmatic technology expands beyond digital display, internet search and social media. That gives marketers a way to work with adtech companies to buy ad inventories in live sports as DIRECTV Advertising offers.
“We want to partner with companies like Unruly who really understand the various outlets to which marketers can actually buy content,” Jamison said. “It’s crucial for us to be advocates in educating the end buyer of how to reach those audiences and what’s happening with the sports landscape.”
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