Month: September 2021

The long tail of IGTV

The key hits:

• IGTV accounted for 10% of in-feed posts in the first half of 2021, according to a Conviva analysis of 25,000-plus accounts.
• Despite the small fraction, IGTV’s share of posts has increased fivefold since 2019.
• The long-form video product may not be a breakout star, but it’s become a hub for long-tail video viewership.

Instagram head Adam Mosseri may no longer consider Instagram to be “a photo-sharing app.” But neither is it a long-form video app, as IGTV’s popularity attests. However, the Facebook-owned platforms’ long-form video product is establishing itself as a role player within Instagram’s broader video platform.

More than three years after its debut, IGTV accounted for 10% of in-feed posts in the first half of 2021, according to Conviva. The video measurement and analytics firm examined the feed posts — not including Instagram’s TikTok-rivaling short-form video product Reels — across more than 25,000 accounts, including 1,300 accounts that belonged to marketers, media and entertainment companies and sports organizations.

While there are a small fraction of feed posts compared to regular videos, photos and carousel posts, IGTV videos have actually gained a hold since 2019 when they represented 2% of the accounts’ feed posts. At the same time, the share of photo posts on Instagram has dipped. While photos still represented a majority of the in-feed posts published by the examined accounts, photos’ share of overall posts slipped from 56% in 2019 to 52% in 2021.

“IGTV is really important for the balance of the platform,” said Nick Cicero, vp of strategy at Conviva. Since adding the ability for people to upload videos to its app in 2013, Instagram has grown its video product portfolio with the additions of Stories and Live Stories in 2016, IGTV in 2018 and Reels in 2020. 

Nonetheless, IGTV has yet to emerge as the YouTube rival it appeared to have the potential to become when Instagram introduced the long-form video product in June 2018. There are reasons for that. Here’s a brief history of why:

Adoption of IGTV among media and entertainment companies and creators was slow early on since Instagram did not provide an ad revenue-sharing program a la YouTube that would incentivize them to produce original IGTV videos. So instead many cropped their YouTube videos vertically to repurpose them for IGTV. 

Additionally, IGTV videos were initially largely sequestered to their own section with Instagram’s main app as well as an IGTV-specific app. In early 2020 when Instagram began running IGTV preview clips in people’s main feeds, viewership rose, but the revenue-sharing void remained.

Fast-forward to summer 2020. Instagram announced it would start testing a revenue-sharing program for IGTV videos, but the company initially limited the test to individual video creators, not media companies, and then rolled out Reels in August, which has stolen whatever spotlight had been cast on IGTV among video makers.

Conviva’s report provides another potential reason why IGTV has played more of a bit part than protagonist on Instagram’s broader video platform. IGTV videos do not perform as well when it comes to metrics that marketers have come to believe matter most: likes and comments. For each of the four account categories, IGTV videos received the lowest engagement rates compared to regular videos, photos or carousel posts. 

While views and watch time may matter more to Instagram’s algorithm when deciding which posts to put in people’s feeds, “Facebook and Instagram have conditioned clients to prioritize likes and comments and shares,” said an agency executive.

Meanwhile, Reels view counts have come to eclipse IGTV viewership, pushing video publishers to prioritize the short-form video product.

But again, IGTV remains a part of the mix. It doesn’t hurt that it’s easy for video publishers to repurpose their YouTube videos for IGTV. “We’re not doing anything that’s exclusive to IGTV from an original content standpoint,” said one media executive. Instead, their company takes their YouTube videos, creates “another version of the thumbnail for Instagram and syndicate it out. Sometimes they hit; sometimes they don’t. But it’s something we have in the mix significantly,” the executive said.

Helping matters, IGTV videos have a longer shelf life than other video formats on Instagram. IGTV videos receive the majority of their views within the first day of being uploaded. On average, an IGTV video gets 63% of its views on day one, 8% on day two and 29% from day three on. By comparison, regular feed videos receive 72% of their views on the first day, and carousel posts containing video receive 85% of their views on day one.

“The ability for IGTV to generate more long-tail viewership is one of the advantages over the feed. The feed is very impermanent,” Cicero said.

What we’ve heard

“The challenge remains that [publishers’ platform video ad inventory is] not viewed as valuable as GRP-based buying that you can get on YouTube or TV. And because the platforms can sell it for cheaper. From a direct sales perspective, there’s not much of a marketplace for those reasons.”

— Publishing executive

TV advertising’s single-currency era is ending

The TV advertising industry is sorting out the future of measurement. Nielsen’s role as the one currency to rule them all is under threat; however, no single company is likely set to usurp the role, as TV network owners like ViacomCBS add support for alternatives.

“There isn’t a need for a single currency. There is a need for a common denomination,” said John Halley, COO of advertising revenue at ViacomCBS. “If a buyer chooses a currency, that currency needs to work across all publisher endpoints so that they can understand delivery on a relative basis. That doesn’t mean multiple currencies can’t be supported.”

For its part, ViacomCBS now supports three currencies that advertisers can choose to guarantee their deals against — Nielsen, Comscore and now VideoAmp.

A major reason why ViacomCBS — and others like NBCUniversal — are adding support for Nielsen alternatives is streaming. “As the business moves to streaming, Nielsen no longer has the data advantage,” Halley said.

Nielsen’s panel gave it an edge in the linear era, but in the budding streaming epoch, companies are able to use technology like ad servers and automated content recognition systems to track who is watching what on a TV screen. Of course, that will complicate the measurement landscape pretty quickly, as measurement firms may use different methods to arrive at their reach and frequency calculations. But the pandemic’s impact on the TV advertising business, and resulting emphasis on flexibility, may have established the true new currency to be choice.

“Ultimately that future will involve multiple currency options based on advertiser agency preference. It’s up to us as sellers of media to accommodate those options,” Halley said.

Numbers to know

>1 billion: How many people use TikTok each month.

<20 million: How many subscribers Apple told labor union IATSE Apple TV+ had, as of July 2021.

$10: How much YouTube will drop the monthly subscription price of YouTube TV if it doesn’t reach a new distribution agreement with NBCUniversal.

$100 million: How much money Fox will spend on international unscripted programming through a new fund.

>£500 million (>$676.9 million): How much money Netflix is paying to acquire Roald Dahl’s literary estate.

8: Number of streaming services initially available as Amazon launches its Prime Video Channels program in India.

What we’ve covered

Misfits Gaming partners with The E.W. Scripps Company in a bid to bring esports content to Floridian TV viewers:

• The TV provider has invested $10 million in the esports organization.
• The deal marks the largest to date between a traditional TV company and major esports organization.

Read more about Misfit Gaming here.

How Salesforce is gathering its own customer data through its new streaming video play:

• Salesforce will combine data gathered from Salesforce+ viewers with its broader customer data set.
• Salesforce+ carries original series featuring interviews with executives like IBM CMO Carla Piñeyro Sublett.

Read more about Salesforce here.

How Copa90 is repositioning itself around the creator economy:

• The soccer media company has a network of 3,000 creators that were responsible for 95% of its content over the last 18 months.
• Copa90 expect to reach $24.6 million in revenue and $2.7 million in profit this year.

Read more about Copa90 here.

What we’re reading

Why entertainment workers are preparing to go on strike:
Members of entertainment labor union the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Workers plan to vote later this week on whether to go on strike, which could derail the TV and streaming video industry’s programming pipeline. The Los Angeles Times has published a primer detailing why the union’s 150,000 members are on the verge of a walkout — better pay and benefits, better hours — and the likelihood of a strike.

Google looks to add TikTok, Instagram videos to search:
TikTok and Instagram may start showing up in Google’s search results if the search giant is able to strike deals with YouTube’s rivals, according to The Information. Doing a deal would seem to carry pros and cons for TikTok and Instagram. On the plus side, it may lead to greater exposure for the platforms’ videos. On the other hand, it may mitigate people’s urge to use the videos and enable Google to feature similar YouTube videos alongside the rival platforms’ programming. For Google, the deals could help to address the criticism that YouTube videos’ appearance in Google’s search results signifies its monopoly.

ViacomCBS’s Paramount+-Showtime bundle symbolizes its streaming predicament:
ViacomCBS has started selling combined subscriptions to its Paramount+ and Showtime streaming services. But the limited-time-only bundle actually doesn’t go far enough in trying to win long-term streaming subscribers for the cable TV conglomerate, according to Vulture. This echoes a common criticism of ViacomCBS: The company has yet to show a willingness to make sacrifices in order to build up its streaming business and has instead relied on half-measures, like trying to produce some original programming for its own properties while still selling original programming to rival streamers.

HBO Max adds podcasting to streaming service:
WarnerMedia’s HBO Max has debuted a podcast on the streaming service, according to Bloomberg. The audio-only series’ debut is a test, and it is the latest example of streamers getting into the podcasting business after Netflix opened up a podcast operation earlier this summer and Amazon has also been building up its podcasting library. What remains to be seen is how exactly these companies see podcasts fitting in: as promotional vehicles, IP incubators, some combination of the two or something else altogether?

Amazon continues to withhold streaming, video data from advertisers:
Amazon is notoriously walled off when it comes to the information it has on people, and that description applies to its handling of data from ad-supported streamer IMDb TV and video platform Twitch, according to Advertising Age. Specifically, Amazon doesn’t allow advertisers to access IP addresses for people exposed to their ads running on IMDb TV and Twitch. Considering the popularity of the IP address as an identifier, that’s a significant obstacle for advertisers looking to track ad exposures, but it’s also yet another sign of the IP address being taken off the table as an identifier.

Not because it’s new per se.

From the emergence of social media to the unbundling of the publisher model, there’s not much this industry can kick up that the Spanish media exec — Condé Nast’s managing director in Europe — hasn’t already faced in some shape or form. Rather, it’s the amount of contortion needed to wriggle through this latest set of pandemic-induced challenges that are unprecedented. 

The balancing act has put a new spotlight on the U.S. — which has already had its fair share of challenges in recent years — and is now serving as a sort of playbook for Gamero del Castillo, who has been working with Condé Nast’s global chief revenue officer Pam Drucker Mann to revamp the publisher’s commercial organization across Europe ever since she took on the job in January.

“This has represented a huge advantage because in many ways our U.S. market has already gone through the process of digital acceleration that we are implementing now in Europe,” said Gamero del Castillo.

Subs revenue alongside ad revenue. Centralization versus fiefdoms. Vision or sensibility. Gamero del Castillo is at the coalface of all of these tough choices and more at Condé Nast. It’s been this way ever since she took on the job after overseeing the publisher’s titles in Spain. And If the pressure is getting to her after eight months — a period where high profile editors have left and layoffs have been announced amid a sweeping restructure — then it doesn’t show. She’s candid about the challenges ahead but confident they can be overcome.

“I’ve always thought that the big opportunities come from the unexpected moments because it forces you to reflect on plans,” explained Gamero del Castillo. “It’s a key moment for the company because we’re joining our five European markets into one, which takes time and has to get the global to local dichotomy right.”

In many ways, Gamero del Castillo is everything you’d expect from a Condé Nast exec. In other ways, she’s the complete opposite; she’s passionate about her work but could just as easily fill the time talking about jazz — specifically pianist ​​Keith Jarrett and his seminal performance at the Köln Concert in Cologne, Germany. She’s been a trailblazer at the publisher, and yet is more comfortable talking about her teams than herself. She doesn’t look for excuses when talking about what has gone wrong at the publisher. Her achievements in Spain are a testament to that. When she got promoted to the job during the summer of 2019, unique users across all the publisher’s digital platforms were just over 20 million, per the company. When she got promoted around 18 months later, that number was north of 30 million. 

“It’s been interesting being part of something big, so big that you cannot control, and learning to trust,” said Gamero del Castillo. Trust is the prerequisite for any network to succeed and for the first time in Condé Nast’s history, it is working as a network.

That is to say, the old Condé Nast approach of different brands running with near-autonomy is a relic. Gamero del Castillo’s role — the first of its kind — is a tacit admission of this. In fact, steering the business away from these fiefdoms has been a major focus from the moment she started. The publisher’s pivot to centralization — albeit one laced with local leanings — is in full swing.

Local editorial teams for specific brands that once ran independently of one another have been brought under one editorial director. See GQ’s first-ever global edition of GQ for September. Some 17 the brand’s international editions joined forces to collaborate on, and simultaneously publish, a cover featuring The Weeknd. Each edition also co-produced and co-published a portfolio called “Voices of the Future,” which showcased 21 emerging musicians, each of whom was nominated, photographed, and profiled by one of the editions. As much as Condé Nast’s top brass have embraced the collaborative model, they’re wary of veering too close to homogeneity. Not when they hope to break even again next year after years of layoffs and losses. Indeed, Gamero del Castillo appreciates the cultural cache those brands have both locally and globally, but the combined brand-category model lets her teams sell to advertisers backed with broader company data and consumer knowledge.

That a prestigious publisher like Condé Nast is unraveling these problems is nothing new. The pandemic undeniably hastened the end of the scale era of digital media, as monolithic ad-dependent publishers were battered. But its outlook for the future has sharpened over the last 18 months as CEO Roger Lynch’s pursuit of direct reader revenue streams gathered pace.

Over the next four years, the former Sling TV and Pandora exec expects money to come into the business via three funnels: a third of it will come from print and digital advertising: another third will be generated by a video business that spans licensing and advertising: the final third will come directly from readers through the likes of e-commerce and subscriptions. 

But as well-trodden as the route to those revenues is, it’s going to be difficult (and expensive) for Condé Nast to reach them all. To boost those odds, Lynch already plans to increase the company’s investment in content by 25% over the next four years. A notable chunk of this spending will be on new video products and series as well as events and hires. Essentially, video is now the growth driver for Condé Nast. Revenue for the Condé Nast Entertainment video business, which launched in 2011, was more than $165 million in the U.S. alone in 2020, according to The Information. So far revenues are up 33% this year compared to last. 

Little wonder then why the former president of Condé Nast International Wolfgang Blau, who is known for being somewhat clinical, recommended Gamero del Castillo to the managing director role before he left a year ago. Unlike Blau, she has kept a relatively low profile. Her track record at the business, however, speaks for itself. 

“When I started in 2008 at Condé Nast, Natalia had just been given the responsibility of launching all the titles on the web,” said Santiago Oliete, managing director of ad tech business Teads in Spain. “She counted with little resources, and little support, but she managed to build a very solid platform and editorial strategy that made Vogue.es the biggest Vogue site globally just behind Vogue U.S.”

 Gamero del Castillo’s on course to have a similar impact across the wider business. 

May was a record month for British Vogue across the board. Digital ad sales for the publisher surpassed £1 million ($1.4 million) on the back of an interview with the singer Billie Eilish that had a total of 1.5 million readers and over 8 million video views over the period, per the publisher. It capped off a strong start to the year for the European arm of Condé Nast. Between January and April, Condé Nast Spain saw a 44% rise in year over year unique monthly visitors. Even the publisher’s gambles seem to be paying off. Glamour Germany partnered with TikTok for the first time for a campaign that had over 13 million impressions, and a conversion rate of 35%.

“While we’re diversifying our revenues we remain hopeful with advertising because we’ve seen across Europe that digital ad revenue has duplicated over the second quarter compared to the same period last year,” said Gamero del Castillo, who did not provide exact figures.

Not that she is getting carried away. After all, fortunes in media can change on a dime. That was brought into sharp focus last year when accusations were made about inequality at Condé Nast. A publisher oft-vaunted for its ability to keep its finger on the pulse of culture had seemingly let it slip. It speaks to the perils of balancing corporate with local culture — something Gamero del Castillo is all too familiar with as she tries to balance the local sensitivities of Condé Nast’s editorial and commercial teams with the global ambitions of the business. So much so that she went on a whistle-stop tour of the publisher’s offices in France, Italy, Germany, Spain and the U.K. where she will be based in London.

It speaks volumes about Gamero del Castillo’s character that she pinpointed this period as the best part of her new job to date. “Probably the most gratifying part has been traveling to the countries, meeting our teams in person, and identifying good practices here and there that could become wider European businesses,” she added. 

Meet-and-greets aside, the summer trip was a chance to scout new ways of working and confirming those aforementioned areas of growth for those markets. 

“Condé Nast has been brand-led for years and it’s been a very successful formula that was built on this idea that taste was the differentiating factor,” said Douglas McCabe, media analyst at Enders Analysis. “But that hasn’t translated successfully online. It comes down to commitment. Condé Nast’s team has tried to tweak pressured parts of the business but not nearly enough or with enough confidence to establish a sustainable online media business.”

Gamero del Castillo learned a long time ago the importance of doing things with conviction. 

When her father fell ill in the 90s it was a turning point. Until then, she was well on her way to a successful career in law. She had traveled to London to complete a master’s degree at University College London but returned home to Spain to be with her father. “It made me feel like I had to follow my real passion, which was media,” she explained. The decision kicked off a career that started at VIA DIGITAL, one of the first TV platforms in Spain, which acted as a springboard for becoming an editor at El Cultural de El Mundo, the prestigious supplement for El Mundo national newspaper before she settled at Condé Nast.

It’s a gilded career in media that goes some way to explaining Gamero del Castillo’s perspective on her current employer. She sees it all in the round; from both editorial and commercial sides. As she explained: “We have an opportunity to strengthen the uniqueness that defines our brands in all their markets but at the same time it’s an opportunity to create structures that help us to manage the business in a faster and more efficient way.”

The deck is often stacked against sustainable media, but figuring out ways around problems is the only option. And Gamero del Castillo has proven time and again she’s a problem solver.

“After just two months of working with Natalia I was pretty sure that one day she would become president of Condé Nast Spain,” said Oliete. “She is a true leader, a hard worker, someone who you want to follow, someone who you can trust will make the right decisions; this mixed with her great interpersonal skills makes her a person who you enjoy working with.”

“We [had been] looking for an acquisition to push our growth even farther,” said Bonnie Kintzer, CEO of Trusted Media Brands at Digiday’s Publishing Summit (DPS), who added that the company had been looking for several years.

TMB’s Mission: Grow its audience with a brand acquisition

On the surface, the pair might appear different. But Kintzer refutes that assumption, pointing to the companies’ joint focus on “the consumer.”

Both companies also have focused on user-generated content: Jukin with its video content and TMB’s titles with jokes from Reader’s Digest readers and recipes from its Taste of Home fan base. “There really is a commonality. Even the things we don’t have in common are super important,” Kintzer said, noting Jukin’s strength in social video and streaming and TMB’s ability to build out its owned-and-operated sites.

“We look at the differences and see tremendous amount of opportunity,” she said.

The expanded portfolio is focused on OTT and social moving forward, Kintzer said, teasing an expansion of TMB brands into OTT spaces. The brands will also collectively work together on expanding their content acquisition, which will give the brands some editorial cohesiveness — and power — operating as one unit.

TMB will also have access to Jukin Media’s library of over 70,000 videos, some of which will be deployed across brands.

Kintzer said TMB is coming off its own successful year with “multiple growth” channels, growing both its books business and digital advertising, as well as 70% growth year over year in affiliate revenue. “We really saw a lot of different areas working,” she said.

Jukin Media, as Kintzer admitted, is “younger” than the TMB audience. However, both have a sizable millennial audience — TMB’s is 33% millennials. While she didn’t share exact figures, Kintzer also noted that Jukin has “tremendous reach” among the Gen Z cohort.

Kintzer said she expects these audiences will continue to grow as the teams create content that will interest their evolving lifestyles: for example, as more of them cook, Taste of Home can serve them up recipes, just as Family Handyman can help guide them as they take on DIY projects.

Find brands that can complement — and push one another. As TMB continues to build its first-party data strategy, as another example, Jukin’s reach will come into play. Those 240 million viewers, in other words, will be crucial data insights for the brands.

“You have so much of it en masse to say ‘here’s what the market wants to see.’ That’s very valuable,” Kintzer said. Jukin will provide aggregated data, while personalized experiences will be shared with the brand from TMB’s portfolio.

Certain brand websites — including Jukin’s FailArmy — will be relaunched, capitalizing on the data insights gleaned from Jukin’s reach, among other findings TMB has in its back pocket. The company’s strategy on commerce will also be applied among FailArmy and its pet-focused brand, Pet Collective.

As an example, Kintzer shared how she found interest in a viral video of a cat funnily drinking water. Alongside that video could be a piece of content that explains why cats drink water that way.

“Having that companion content will be really strong,” Kintzer said.

The key details:

• On Sept. 27, ByteDance told Reuters that TikTok has 1 billion monthly active users. Analysts had forecast that TikTok would cross the billion-user mark this year, with eMarketer forecasting it would grow to 1.2 billion.
• That represents 45% growth year over year, and exponential growth over the past three years; at the beginning of 2018, TikTok said it had 55 million global users. Much of that growth was driven by ads TikTok bought on rivals’ platforms: In 2019, close to 80% of its ad budget went to Snapchat, and in 2020, 73% of it went to Facebook. (This year, the greatest share of its ad spending has gone to broadcast TV.)
• TikTok remains in the midst of a hiring spree. It has over 1,400 job listings posted on LinkedIn, including several for roles that will define many of the moves it plans to make in social commerce, how it will approach small business advertisers, and how it will build out analytics infrastructure for advertisers. 

Frenzied expansion

While TikTok has been hiring aggressively for a while, the pace of its recruiting and growth has been so frenzied that it has warped the job market for key ad tech roles at publishers, brands and agencies. 

Many of the jobs it posted recently will be pivotal for its future monetization prospects. It is hiring someone who will “oversee product strategy and adoption of our native commerce experience,” which it recently expanded with Shopify. 

TikTok is also looking for executives who can help establish its relationships with small and medium-sized businesses, a business segment that has effectively insulated rival Facebook from things like last year’s boycott. Those include a global marketing lead for SMB advertisers, as well as someone who can help lead marketing for SMB ad products. 

Lots of ground to make up

TikTok’s torrid growth helped convince lots of advertisers to try out the platform, mostly using their experimental budgets. For some advertisers, TikTok has already become important; Digiday+ Research from earlier this year found that TikTok has already vaulted past Snapchat in importance as a driver of revenue and brand-building. 

That same growth — as well as TikTok’s status as a new platform — also afforded TikTok some leeway when it came to its ad offering overall. Advertisers say that TikTok cannot currently compete with Facebook or Google when it comes to targeting and analytics capabilities, but it is the new, shiny thing, and that affords it some flexibility.

Some of the things TikTok needs will be addressed through third-party integrations. TikTok announced Tuesday that it had partnered with Integral Ad Science to offer the latter’s brand safety assurances to advertisers seeking to advertise on the former. 

And yet, the way in which people upload and enjoy images online has essentially remained unchanged since the internet became commercially available. True, people may now be more reliant on phones than dedicated cameras as a means of capturing images, but they are still largely using JPEGs that can be easily shared. And what’s easily shared can be easily stolen, misused and debased.

When people consider just how vast and varied the issues around using these antiquated formats are today, it’s baffling to think that people continue to use them. Any image online is only a right-click or a screenshot away from being anyone else’s to do with as they please. For individuals, this could translate to personal harm. For photographers and other creatives, it could mean a loss of livelihood.

Stealing images online is so commonplace that many are unaware they are doing anything wrong, or even perpetuating someone else’s theft. A Copytrack report estimated that 2.5 billion images are stolen every day. The lack of awareness of copyright restrictions has meant that the line between fair and unauthorized use is far from clear, and this has only worked to erode the value of images to many. But if something is being stolen, its value should be obvious. 

As a principle, streaming has already succeeded in transforming the music and film industries. While nobody would claim it has dealt a fatal blow to piracy wherever it is used, many have become accustomed to the idea of either paying for access to the content they wish to enjoy, or to accept advertising where content is consumed without charge.  

So, why shouldn’t this be the case for images too? Like music and films, these are still creative works in their own right and ones that may have had considerable involvement from many individuals and each with a legal copyright holder. Perhaps people don’t see them as such, as the volume of images taken and shared every day means that many fall more into the camp of casual snaps than artistic masterpieces. But in the absence of any objective means of delineating between the two, it only makes sense that if people can protect one class of image, they should protect them all.

The industry has long been aware of these issues and has started to wake up — not least because the benefits go far beyond the simple protection against theft. 

As anyone who has made their content available on YouTube or Spotify will know, streaming delivers a broader range of insights into the usage of that content and the audience drawn to it. It provides content creators and disseminators with the ability to amend content where necessary and to withdraw it if necessary. And, crucially, it doesn’t just protect its value by stopping theft, but it also allows creators to realize greater value through contextually aligned ad placements.

Third-party cookie deprecation means that now is a particularly pertinent time to understand how the two can come together into a model that can benefit advertisers as much as content creators. Images are, in many respects, an ideal vehicle for contextual advertising. Not only do they occupy the most prominent real estate on a page for maximum visibility — the specific advertising served within them can be made highly relevant when a comprehensive metadata set appended to the image is fused with AI-powered image recognition tools.

But all of this is academic unless it is shown to be effective for advertisers. Nielsen research showed display ads within images to be 34% more relevant, 14% more memorable, 13% more engaging and 11% more enjoyable than a site that employs conventional advertising. Video advertising delivered in the same way was also shown to be more engaging; among those who recalled advertising from a website, 57% of people claimed not to have interacted with conventional advertising in any way, while only 35% of people claimed the same for in-image video advertising.

Such a model can benefit content creators while simultaneously serving the needs of advertisers looking to balance the effectiveness of targeting with regulation compliance. But what’s the incentive for publishers? In short: longer dwell times and a stronger user experience. 

The same study showed that the presence of in-image video advertisements in streamed images increased the chances of a viewer reading an article in its entirety by 7% over sites that employed conventional advertising. Separate research carried out by IAS supports the idea that consumers prefer contextually relevant advertising, with nearly three in four people claiming to find contextually relevant ads more appealing.  There’s a clear logic behind a principle that combines the two.      

When people consider the path that music and videos have taken, streaming images seems to be a perfectly natural progression from what people have now. But when people consider that such a system can also deliver the right incentives for content creators, publishers and advertisers alike, its potential to grow into a far more significant component of online publishing should be obvious.

Nielsen Digital Content Evaluation measures the impact of native, social or branded digital content by exposing a relevant and representative sample of online panelists to a campaign’s content. Commissioned by SmartFrame, this study assessed whether the content generates better engagement for advertisers by providing a better visual experience for users. This research analyses 1,200 responses surveyed in August 2021.