TV advertising has always been seen as the ultimate in advertising: the place where you can tell longer form brand stories, reach a wide audience AND have the signalling effect of being a brand on TV. The phrase ‘as seen on TV’ still carries historical significance.
Advertisers always needed big budgets to afford the costs of production and cost per slot of a TV ad. And buying these sorts of ads was always tricky as there were lots of insider knowledge required in order to actually book a TV ad and get it live. It was all a bit opaque with language like ‘GRPs’ ‘OTS 1+’ and so on.
It all meant that smaller brands were kept out of TV.
On the other hand, Google, Meta, Amazon and TikTok openly embraced these lower budget SMEs to with performance advertising using self-serve platforms that serve millions of advertisers. These platforms offer a low barrier to entry for SMBs (small and medium-sized businesses) around the globe.
In a recent blog post, Roku predicted that “a meaningful fraction of these digital advertisers will launch their first streaming TV campaigns, bringing an estimated 20,000 new marketers to the biggest screen in the home.’ In other words, new digital-first advertisers, but now ‘seen on TV”.
According to Roku, this trend has already begun: Paramount currently serves thousands of advertisers, with plans to more aggressively court the SMB market, Paramount Advertising COO Steve Ellis told The Current.
One of the drivers are the availability of self-serve tools—such as Roku Ads Manager—that make it easy to set up, activate, and pause TV campaigns. Other companies are solving the production cost challenge, such as Waymark and Streamr.ai, who use AI to create complete video ads.
Why does this mean for retail media?
Andrew Lipsman of Media, Ads and Com explains it as follows: ‘Streaming TV is finally ready for primetime in retail media. The streaming TV opportunity has been held back by several factors, including lack of available inventory, lack of familiarity with the ad buying process, and lack of integration between RMNs and ad-supported streaming TV content providers. That’s all changing.’
In the US, a number of retailers have a partnership with Roku, just like in the UK, local RMNs have a partnership with ITVx
Insider Intelligence analyst Sara Lebow explains it as follows: ‘It will become increasingly hard to delineate between CTV ad spend and retail media ad spend, as retail media moves increasingly off-site.’
How much is this worth?
Brian Wieser, media analyst/writer of Madison and Wall, estimate that the 20,000 largest advertisers who don’t buy television at present have annual advertising budgets of around $500,000. If these advertisers shifted half of their spend into television, this would represent $5 billion, which equates to 7% of all TV advertising or 24% of CTV advertising.
Wieser points out that this will take many years, so underlying declines would only be slightly mitigated.
Let’s look at how Retail Media and its army of SMB users could create a brand-new opportunity – Retail Media – and make it work combined with the power of TV advertising:
- The biggest – Amazon Advertising – has already been experimenting with Prime TV advertising – and it has the largest self-serve SMB users of the lot. And, it has one benefit that few have: many of these brand’s advertising on Amazon Advertising are SMBs owner-operated businesses, who know how to use self-serve, know how to make fast decisions and are open to creating their own creative.
- Roku has TV-centric ACR data (Automatic Content Recognition) and access to major audiences from retailers.
- TV inventory would expand Retail Media ad inventory availability and offering better transparency than most TV networks. Zero TV networks offer closed loop reporting now.
- Ideally, the RMNs would recognise that the high cost of TV advertising – the barriers to entry that put off others for so long – can now be addressed through new tools as well as lower ad pricing to act as a temptation.
Perhaps we are looking at this the wrong way: just like low-cost airlines created a new market for travellers that simply did not exist before, perhaps Retail Media audience powered TV advertising, using AI tools for production, would simply create a new market that we could not have imagined before?
Perhaps the future of tv is actually retail media driven growth?
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OPINION As seen on TV… how CTV will deliver for SMBs
Colin Lewis
TV advertising has always been seen as the ultimate in advertising: the place where you can tell longer form brand stories, reach a wide audience AND have the signalling effect of being a brand on TV. The phrase ‘as seen on TV’ still carries historical significance.
Advertisers always needed big budgets to afford the costs of production and cost per slot of a TV ad. And buying these sorts of ads was always tricky as there were lots of insider knowledge required in order to actually book a TV ad and get it live. It was all a bit opaque with language like ‘GRPs’ ‘OTS 1+’ and so on.
It all meant that smaller brands were kept out of TV.
On the other hand, Google, Meta, Amazon and TikTok openly embraced these lower budget SMEs to with performance advertising using self-serve platforms that serve millions of advertisers. These platforms offer a low barrier to entry for SMBs (small and medium-sized businesses) around the globe.
In a recent blog post, Roku predicted that “a meaningful fraction of these digital advertisers will launch their first streaming TV campaigns, bringing an estimated 20,000 new marketers to the biggest screen in the home.’ In other words, new digital-first advertisers, but now ‘seen on TV”.
According to Roku, this trend has already begun: Paramount currently serves thousands of advertisers, with plans to more aggressively court the SMB market, Paramount Advertising COO Steve Ellis told The Current.
One of the drivers are the availability of self-serve tools—such as Roku Ads Manager—that make it easy to set up, activate, and pause TV campaigns. Other companies are solving the production cost challenge, such as Waymark and Streamr.ai, who use AI to create complete video ads.
Why does this mean for retail media?
Andrew Lipsman of Media, Ads and Com explains it as follows: ‘Streaming TV is finally ready for primetime in retail media. The streaming TV opportunity has been held back by several factors, including lack of available inventory, lack of familiarity with the ad buying process, and lack of integration between RMNs and ad-supported streaming TV content providers. That’s all changing.’
In the US, a number of retailers have a partnership with Roku, just like in the UK, local RMNs have a partnership with ITVx
Insider Intelligence analyst Sara Lebow explains it as follows: ‘It will become increasingly hard to delineate between CTV ad spend and retail media ad spend, as retail media moves increasingly off-site.’
How much is this worth?
Brian Wieser, media analyst/writer of Madison and Wall, estimate that the 20,000 largest advertisers who don’t buy television at present have annual advertising budgets of around $500,000. If these advertisers shifted half of their spend into television, this would represent $5 billion, which equates to 7% of all TV advertising or 24% of CTV advertising.
Wieser points out that this will take many years, so underlying declines would only be slightly mitigated.
Let’s look at how Retail Media and its army of SMB users could create a brand-new opportunity – Retail Media – and make it work combined with the power of TV advertising:
Perhaps we are looking at this the wrong way: just like low-cost airlines created a new market for travellers that simply did not exist before, perhaps Retail Media audience powered TV advertising, using AI tools for production, would simply create a new market that we could not have imagined before?
Perhaps the future of tv is actually retail media driven growth?
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