text｜Wu Junyu
"iron-solid" Netflix, which originally claimed to be "standard for ads without ads", is embracing advertising.
On May 8, the American media The Street published an article titled "How Much Could Netflix Make From Running Ads?" (How Much Could Netflix Make From Running Ads?).
article mentions such a key message:
Netflix can earn about $3 billion in revenue every year through advertising.
When the "breathing" in August last year, users completely resisted Netflix's participation in advertising. After half a year of drying, brainwashing and experimenting, users have gradually accepted Netflix's advertising model.
In April this year, the advertising directors of YouTube and JPMorgan Chase hinted in a group at Newfronts of IAB digital content:
Netflix has no choice but to embrace ads.
In March this year, the article "Netflix Is Expanding Its Ad Business" published by American media Cord Cutters also revealed that
Netflix is recruiting a marketing team to expand its advertising business.
Netflix is embracing the "addressable ads" led by data and algorithm , and promoting the implantable "product placement" led by advertising creatives.
"Targeting Advertising + Creative Advertising" is also the latest choice for the global streaming giants today.
Netflix advertising reputation reversed
In August last year, Netflix, known as the "ad-free video website", decided to introduce advertising. This choice of course has a lot to do with the continued deterioration of Netflix's cash flow.
Netflix, which was "iron-solid" back then, now also makes money by advertising. Wang Jingze's "really fragrant" echoes for a long time and makes people unforgettable.
Of course, these are not the key points, the key points are the stories that follow. When
Netflix decided to advertise, it once caused anger among users, and users even threatened to unsubscribe.
In the fourth quarter of 2018, Audience Project, a big data research firm, warned Netflix in a poll in a report called "Insights 2019" that once advertisements are introduced, more than half of the users will choose to leave Netflix, and even if Netflix lowers the subscription price, it will be useless.
However, after half a year of tug-of-war, the data has undergone amazing changes.
US streaming market survey Mindnet Analytics' latest report released on January 16 this year shows that nearly 70% of users will not leave Netflix even after Netflix introduces advertisements. Only 3% of users decide to unsubscribe, and 27% of users are hesitant.
even after Netflix's price increase this year, users continued to stay.
You should know that at the beginning of this year, the charging standards for Netflix's US services were raised by 13% to 18%, with the monthly service of $8 and $14 high-definition service being raised to $9 and $16 respectively. This is the largest price increase ever.
Those users who claim to leave Netflix have slapped themselves in the face by taking practical actions.
For users, Netflix content is so good, you can’t rely on love to generate electricity, and you can tolerate it even if you look at advertisements. Netflix advertising has indeed not made users disgusted.
We can see how Netflix's advertising content and advertising format are done.
1. Positioning advertising, is the addressable ads that are most popular in the streaming advertising circle now, and can also be translated into addressable ads. The characteristics are high adaptation, low infringement and low user interference.
adaptation high: is based on complex live behavior positioning algorithms and audience segmentation, and recommends users through algorithms. This algorithm is not like Youtube, which analyzes searches, browses keywords and places advertisements, but dynamically analyzes the content of the videos users watch, and recommends similar on-site videos to users.
will also place some book advertisements according to Netflix's earliest plan in April last year. TV series and books themselves are strongly related, and Netflix obviously still insists on it.
violates the low: only has 30 seconds, and it appears between the two episodes after the TV series is broadcast, and there is no mandatory nature. If you don’t want to watch it, you can skip it directly. This is completely different from the previous “12-minute commercial breaks” (12-minute commercial breaks).
"addressable ads" indeed makes the ads more matched with users. Moreover, when recommending advertisements, Netflix pays more attention to methods, methods and strategies, and tries not to interrupt the user's viewing rhythm.
2, creative advertising, is a homemade native advertisement, which is deeply implanted in TV programs based on content without any trace;
itself is what Netflix is good at but has always ignored. In the American drama "House of Cards", BlackBerry Mobile , Windows Phone, and Samsung Mobile were originally exposed in large quantities, and these phones have become some symbols of character status and personality.
For example, President Shimoki's BlackBerry 9780 is the most "hard" mobile phone in BlackBerry's history. It has a good battery life and signal, and it can be called a classic of a generation. This is quite consistent with President Shigeru's simple, direct, ambitious and energetic personality. These advertisements such as
were originally loved by the audience, but most of them were "free" by the brand.
Netflix now intends to make good use of its strengths. Such in-depth implantation costs about US$50,000 to US$500,000 per episode.
For example, in Netflix's Stranger Things season 2, there is a scene where two children have an awkward dinner at their friend's parents' house. Because these two children cicadas something they shouldn't know: their missing daughter was killed by alien creatures. To relieve the stress, they went crazy with Sekkenfund.
KFC CMO Andrea Zahumansky commented:
They (Netflix) are processing content in a respected way, and we think it is an asset to share values with everyone. We set boundaries, but we must give them the freedom to create.
"Users Don't Resist Advertisement"
American Marketing Observation Media eMarketer published an article titled "Next on Netflix: Advertising?" 》 (Netflix's Tomorrow: Advertising Revenue?) article uses this sentence to explain why users accept Netflix's ads:
Consumers Don’t (Necessarily) Mind Ads. (Users do not necessarily resist advertising)
As mentioned earlier, positioning advertising and creative advertising have become the latest unanimous choices for American streaming videos. Both have their advantages.
1. Low interference: is generally aimed at minimizing interference and improving matching;
2. Targeting: has made accurate calculations based on user viewing habits from the beginning, and advertised around specific groups and in specific time periods;
3. Measurable: For advertisers, this kind of delivery is measurable, and every penny is worth the money, rather than spending money crazy to name the past. After all,
advertising cannot be precisely delivered by simple big data. Will Lion, an executive at BBH, even called the precise delivery of big data an "efficiency bubble."
In his opinion, marketing is one of the complex areas of human activities. Like military strategy, it requires a lot of knowledge and prediction, so the correlation between efficiency and effect is weak. Sometimes advertising solves more emotional problems and identification problems, and it needs to hit people's hearts more.
advertising itself is a sentimental thing, and this phenomenon must be adapted to by homemade creative advertising. It also has its own characteristics compared to targeted advertising.
1. Strong controllability and good combination with content;
2. Solve the problem of "efficiency bubble". Although it is not as accurate as positioning advertisements, it is more controllable and integrated, and can achieve more emotional impact.
When you look at the positioning advertisements and homemade creative advertisements of Netflix, Hulu, , iQiyi , you will find that this is completely different from the advertising logic of Youtube in the past.
On the road of positioning advertising and creative advertising, Hulu and iQiyi have gone further and have also launched various creative content and creative forms.
Hulu: Develop "Pause ads", strengthen creative advertising, and even take pride in increasing the proportion of advertising-supported services users
Hulu's attitude towards advertising is not as clean as Netflix, but is relatively open. In fact, this is also the demand of many advertisers in the fast-moving consumer goods industry.
Hulu is expected to launch a "Pause ads" (pause ads) in the second quarter of this year. The ad pops up when the audience pauses the show they are watching, and the ad is a static ad. Hulu is currently testing this feature with Coca-Cola and Charmin tissues owned by Procter & Gamble .
Hulu has tried creative advertising cooperation with Lyft. The theme is "Escape", "Marvel's Runaways", in the movie, actress Nico Minoru plays Lyrica in the play, and rides Lyft to work every day.
According to the report of CNBC, compared with the traditional 30-second advertising, Hulu's creative advertising has increased users' purchasing intentions by 74% and brand awareness by 89%.
Due to the ad model that brought sufficient revenue, Hulu began to decide to reduce subscription fees by $2 in January this year. While Hulu only needs to pay $4 a month to eliminate ads, Hulu doesn't seem happy for users to pay the fee.
Hulu even included "advertising service support users" in the scope of company inspection.
In January this year, Hulu announced that the number of its "advertising service support users" has increased by 40% compared with last year. Less than 40% of users pay an extra $4 per month to avoid ads. Hulu is expected to have more than $500 million in advertising revenue by 2020. Jeremy Helfand, head of the Hulu advertising platform, even mentioned in an interview with the American media Quartz: Compared with traditional TV advertising, these advertisements are now more subtle and less destructive, and over time, Hulu advertising revenue share will be greater. Hulu aims to account for half of the company's total revenue by 2021.
iQiyi: Creative advertising that combines AI to develop contextual advertising and attaches importance to homemade content
iQiyi is also doing positioning advertising. This kind of advertising is different from Hulu's ideas and is called "situational advertising". The technical principle inside is about three steps.
1. Integrate user portrait analysis capabilities, DMP platform support capabilities, image recognition technology, video AI understanding capabilities, and conversion rate estimate model;
2. Through AI, intelligently identify celebrities, plots, behaviors, actions, emotions, lines and other categories to match;
3. Combining position × duration × styles to give different customization methods to meet the different needs of advertisers;
takes the Internet celebrity scene "Su Daqiang wants to drink hand-grind coffee" as an example. AI can recognize coffee, and various coffee brands can automatically appear.
Of course, variety show creativity is also an important part of iQiyi's advertising business. In " China New Rap ", there was a portable homemade advertising song " Planet Falling " customized for advertisers. This advertising song is mainly integrated into the melody of the song in the form of scenes and rap music, and uses RAP to string together brands such as vivo, Meituan Takeout, and Baidu App. Of course the benefits of creative homemade advertising like
are obvious.
1. It has strong controllability. Compared with external procurement content, it has stronger monetization capabilities and controllable broadcasts;
2. It has a high tone. The deep integration of content advertising can have creative barriers and is easy to be recognized by advertisers;
advertisements can also be included in non-disruptive formats (non-destructive) advertisements. The model of
has also received attention from American investors. Because the US market implanted advertising market is growing very fast.
According to US media PQ Media, as demand for higher value brands continues to grow, the US creative advertising implantation market is expected to be US$10 billion in 2018. There are already a variety of creative advertising agencies in the United States.
NBC Advertising Interactive Entertainment Network (NBC Branded Entertainment Network) is an advertising agency founded by Bill Gates .
, the advertising company integrated 6,000 brands into various types of video content in 2018. The deals generated a total value of $1.2 billion, up 20% from last year.
has fewer ads, better results
In January this year, Rory Sutherland, vice chairman of Ogilvy and American, published an article titled "Advertising is in crisis, but it's not because it doesn't work" on the Campaign UK version website (the advertising industry is in crisis, not because it doesn't work).
This article mentions a point:
efficient advertising identifies potential customers, while effective advertising can create potential customers.
To analyze the two major choices of Netflix, it can be found that what positioning advertising hopes is to solve the problem of "identifying potential customers", while creative advertising hopes to solve the problem of "creating potential customers". The purpose of the former is to explore the existing stock, while the purpose of the latter is to explore the incremental stock.
Rationality and sentiment achieve dialectical unity under these two advertising models with completely different dominant ideas.
Under the influence of positioning advertising and creative advertising, the American TV and streaming advertising industry has even emerged a new concept: reduce advertising and improve results.
Under this trend, the latest report of eMarketer in 2019 in 2019 shows that the scale of addressable ads in US TV advertising is increasing exponentially every year. TV stations can even spend less advertising time to achieve better advertising results.
Many TV stations are considering shortening the time for TV advertising. NBCUniversal said this year it will reduce prime time advertising time for all networks by 20%.
Joe Marchese, president of advertising business at Fox Networks Group, said that by 2020, it hopes to reduce advertising time on all channels to two minutes an hour. Turner has been cutting advertising volumes over the past few years, with a cut rate of up to 50%.
NBC's executive vice president of insight measurements Kavita Vazirani mentioned in an interview with TV News Daily that
marketers need to understand the improvements in brand considerations, purchasing intentions and sales effectiveness of their advertising. This is a pretty powerful thing. On the one hand, accurate delivery can save advertising costs, and on the other hand, creative advertising can also affect more people. Advertising is no longer something that is completely annoying.
As Rory Sutherland, vice chairman of Ogilvy and American, said at the beginning of the article: efficient advertising identifies potential customers, while effective advertising can create potential customers.
Positioning advertising and creative advertising start from two directions, and at the same time deal with the paradox of advertising delivery.
The former has the weaknesses of the former. Under the influence of precise delivery, more users outside the circle cannot receive advertising coverage; the latter also has the limitations of the latter, and coverage will inevitably face waste.
The former is the dominant concept of rational calculations. As the 18th century mathematician Laplace mentioned in "Introduction to the Philosophy of Probability":
The latter's pursuit of perceptual cognition will most likely be like the famous advertising master John Warnermaker proposed that I know half of my advertising fees was wasted, but unfortunately, I don't know which half was wasted.
But the combination of the two is exactly the same as the effect of " positive and negative combination " mentioned in Hegel's dialectics.
positioning advertising as the "topic" solves the problem of precise delivery, and creative advertising as the "counter-topic" solves the problem of user coverage.
The main topic and the negative topics continue to flow according to historical changes, and finally the "combination question" reaches unity. After the "combination of questions", the streaming media and TV advertising markets have been comprehensively improved in terms of advertising technology and delivery results.
The "pro-resistance and reverse combination" of rationality and sensibility, precision and vagueness is exactly the charm of the advertising industry. (This article was first published on Titanium Media)
[Titanium Media Author Introduction: Wu Junyu Official Account: Shenjidu, the author is an independent writer, WeChat ID 852405518]
More exciting content, follow Titanium Media WeChat ID (ID: taimeiti), or download Titanium Media Appp
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-