Month: June 2021

The reason for the gap may not be a simple matter of people preferring to watch movies and shows without commercial interruptions. That’s a likely contributing factor, but another consideration is that “there are a lot more [subscription-based] platforms than [ad-supported] platforms,” said Todd Supplee, partner at PwC.

With the exception of Hulu, the preeminent streaming services have been subscription-based and sans ads. Netflix and Amazon Prime Video have historically dominated the market, and more recently Disney’s Disney+ and WarnerMedia’s HBO Max have risen the ranks without relying on advertisers for revenue. 

However, the past year — and this year in particular — has seen an increasing influx of major ad-supported streamers. Last July, NBCUniversal’s Peacock rolled out nationally in the U.S. Then in January, Discovery debuted Discovery+. And in June alone, both HBO Max and ViacomCBS’s Paramount+ will have added ad-supported tiers to their respective services. 

The ad-supported streaming landscape “is significantly different than it was 18 months ago. It’s been like a hockey stick,” said one agency executive.

The introduction of more ad-supported streamers has coincided with an increase in the overall number of streaming services that people use. In 2020, the typical person used, on average, nearly eight streaming services — including free services — compared to six in 2019, according to PwC.

While people are using more streaming services, the market among major ad-supported streamers is still settling. For example, the audience overlap among the major ad-supported streamers is relatively minimal, said a second agency executive. Moreover, each of the aforementioned major ad-supported services, as well as Hulu, provide ad-free tiers, and their primary ad-supported tiers still require people to pay a monthly fee. That can make it hard to gauge how their ad-supported viewership may change month to month.

Nonetheless, the growing number of streaming services offering high-quality shows and movies and charging for access may lead more people to opt for the cheaper ad-supported tiers to access a wide array of programming without breaking the bank.

In PwC’s survey, 63% of respondents said they would be willing to sit through more ads if it meant lower subscription prices. “There are people that have budget constraints,” Supplee said. 

What’s unclear, though, is how many more ads people would be willing to sit through. Ad-supported streamers have used their low ad loads as a selling point, at least to advertisers. Compared to traditional TV, which typically features 16 minutes’ worth of ads per hour of programming, NBCUniversal’s Peacock has capped its ad load at five minutes of ads per hour, where Discovery+ and HBO Max have maxed out at four minutes. The lower ad loads are intended to make the services more attractive to audiences accustomed to seeing zero ads on Netflix or to being able to zip through ads through their traditional TV DVRs. And that idea has made them more attractive to advertisers. 

“I do like the limited ad loads and decreasing interruptions. It’s making a more consumer-friendly ad experience,” said a third agency executive.

In ‘Use Analytics and Insights to Accelerate Your Customer Experience Strategy,’ a new study commissioned from Forrester Consulting on Mapp’s behalf, the results show a mixed picture of the industry as it engages with challenges and opportunities in an effort to improve the customer experience. 

The goal is to bring about faster growth and higher revenue. However, despite the clear benefits, companies face major hurdles when it comes to updating their customer experience strategy. Specifically, they cite the difficulty of linking business outcomes to real customer needs, insufficient technology platforms and a lack of vision and alignment among leaders, teams and employees. Finding adequate time and resources to implement a better customer experience is an ongoing challenge.

Lack of insights is the brand’s biggest challenge

Marketing decision-makers know how crucial customer analytics are in developing a CX strategy. Our research shows 88% agree that it is important to understand changing consumer needs to improve customer experience. However, many are not acting on this knowledge. Only a little more than half of the decision-makers are planning to implement customer analytics in 2021. 

Our research also uncovered that more than half of the marketers polled are unable to identify customers on their website, even though this is the first vital step in gaining insights to improve the customer experience.

For 54% of respondents, the lack of customer insights is by far the biggest challenge when it comes to enabling better brand experiences. Following Google’s announcement that they will no longer support third-party cookies, first-party data will play an even more important role moving forward. Companies need to focus even more heavily on accurate data collection and identifying the right insights.

Marketers are struggling to unlock the value of data

Finding a way to unlock value from an abundance of data is a major concern among marketers in our survey. Enlisting the help of a dedicated data team can help, although finding such a team can prove difficult. More than half of the marketers surveyed consider a lack of skilled talent as their primary challenge in delivering a better customer experience.

At the same time, however, only a quarter attribute their success in recent years to talent improvement. While hiring and developing qualified staff is significant, using the right tools for insight-driven marketing offers the greatest economic success. In our survey, 65% said they expect that new technology will lead to improved customer insights. Fundamentally, there needs to be a blend of strategy and technology to extract value from raw data.

Can technology change the game?

Investment in mar-tech stacks is well underway as companies seek to improve their customer understanding. The marketers we surveyed consider customer analytics, customer data management and marketing automation to be the top investments they made the past two years. 

Additionally, half have already achieved greater performance using customer insights. Companies that have implemented machine learning or artificial intelligence software also report improved ability to update their strategy, greater understanding of customer intent and better customer insights.

Machine learning and AI tools enable marketers to manage the customer journey in a data-driven way, where everything revolves around obtaining a holistic view of each individual contact across all channels. Through unified customer profiles, information such as transactions, socio-demographic profiles and interactions can be used for targeted personalization.

Customer insights are driving performance

Improved performance hinges on the ability to truly know customers. Marketers are striving to break away from decisions based on gut feeling and traditional campaign thinking. Marketing teams have a responsibility to understand who their customers are and instill a culture that leverages customer insights and represents customer interests. That’s the only way to meet expectations for the customer experience and deliver real value. 

Our study shows that improving the customer experience leads to significantly faster growth and more revenue — the move should, therefore, be a top priority for every marketer.

A healthier response is relief coupled with excitement over the coming opportunity. Third-party cookies grew beyond their initial intended use and were used in unintended ways. Now, as the industry swaps an old hack for new solutions, this creates a chance to explore new and exciting opportunities in the advertising field. However, many of those opportunities will take time, while the need to pivot from cookies will be immediate. 

For instance, brands have begun exploring first-party user data in their advertising campaigns. Utilizing existing CRM systems and CDP platforms ensures that brands can deliver targeted marketing and sales collateral to their existing customer base. 

Other brands are taking a wait-and-see approach before properly assessing how they can best manage their transition to a cookieless future. While there is a time and investment component that needs to be considered for this transition, there is also a risk to these brands, as they will be playing catch-up if the market moves quickly.

For brands to successfully launch effective targeting campaigns in a post-cookies world, they need to consider two factors: context and interest. Rather than generating an instant user profile, brands can build a deeper understanding of users by using technologies such as AI and machine learning to analyze clicks and engagements on a publisher network. 

Harnessing this data will allow marketers to avoid rudely promoting a product or service and instead ensure that marketers can implement more effective communication strategies by presenting consumers with quality recommendations and content aligned with a reader’s tastes. 

As third-party cookies dwindle, publishers and platforms with massive data sets — collated by using tech such as AI — can provide marketers with data pools that they can use to supplement their first-party data efforts. 

Of course, if there’s one objection to anticipate, it’s regarding direct response advertising. Companies that have excelled at retargeting shoppers on the web have long relied on cookies. That’s true, but increasingly consumers are revealing, through their words and actions, just how much they dislike being followed around the web by invasive retargeting messages. 

If marketers have learned anything from the death of the cookie alongside increased attention on consumer privacy and opt-out choices, it’s that listening to consumers should be every brand’s priority — and it hasn’t always been. At the moment, nearly every marketer is vying to have more of a direct relationship with customers. Those relationships will be harder to nurture in a post-cookies world without tapping into first-party data that can provide signals to what consumers find truly valuable. 

It’s time to dispel the belief that the end of cookies means the end of personalized recommendations. Brands approaching an uncertain future without cookies can take the following steps to be prepared:

• Work with publishers to utilize their first-party targeting data and understand the audiences the brand can target in a noninvasive way. 

• Consider the environment in which the brand is featured. Audiences are tired of disruption — an environment that is relevant to their experience helps create engagement.

• Create value for the audience by presenting them with content that is of interest to them. Do not assume a one-size-fits-all approach will work when it comes to content. 

For brands that follow these three steps, their marketing teams will hardly miss cookies at all.