need to be branded consistently. Cross-promotions should make it clear which channel you’re watching and how to get to the other channel to watch the programme being marketed. Promos are time-sensitive. At its simplest, you might have a series of trailers for a new programme: coming soon; next week; tomorrow; later; next – along with variants for this channel, pointing you to another channel. That is a lot of marketing assets: ITV in the UK makes a huge amount of items to promote more than 35 programmes every month. All of this creates a dilemma. You need strong, consistent branding to build and maintain your audience and consequently maximise revenues; but to do so is extremely expensive in editing and creative time. For broadcasters, the $64m question is when and how to implement that branding, and over how many channels it is cost-effective for branding to be applied. The answer to the first question is straightforward – the branding should be applied during playout. But the answer to the second has developed over time, hand in hand with the evolution of playout systems. Let’s take a look at the real world and how broadcasters are really using such technology. BIG NAME IN THE UK ITV operates the largest commercial family of channels in the UK and delivers its content through traditional broadcasting, as well as on-demand via the ITV Hub. ITV has the largest share of the UK television advertising market and its family of channels attract over 20% of viewing – the largest of any UK commercial broadcaster. It should be no surprise that ITV takes its brand very seriously. Creating a coherent and integrated set of marketing campaigns across the networks means generating more than 1000 promo versions each month to deliver to the broadcast and digital channels. Until recently this was a manual process YOUNEED STRONG, CONSISTENT BRANDING TO BUILDAND MAINTAINYOURAUDIENCE
fraught with production challenges, but ITV transformed this into a self-service model using Pixel Power automation tools – the very same software solution that drives playout branding. The result was a system that became a single source of truth for the marketing teams, creatives and media planners who worked seamlessly to enable the automation of the versioning process. SKY CREATIVE Another example is Sky Television, which was looking for ways to save time, resources and, ultimately, money while increasing the on-screen presentation of its brand across all its channels. Sky is well known for always looking at ways to push the boundaries and become more efficient. Brand automation eliminates tedious and error-prone manual entry and gets the technology working with systems that already have the data. Feeding the system with the most up-to-date assets meant accurate-first-time promotions. Using the intelligence within the Pixel Power automation software allowed Sky to understand data better, resulting in better promos across all channels. Implementing Pixel Power ’s automated branding solution enabled Sky to achieve several business objectives: delivering a consistent brand across its channels and (the most important goal of all) providing the best viewer experience. But while branding itself has been a real driver of such automation in advance of, and at the point of, playout, it’s the technology enabling this that has triggered additional benefits for broadcasters. When metadata and graphics are integrated, secondary events come out on top. Greater monetisation of thematic or content-driven channels is imperative
CHANNEL SURFING ITV used Pixel Power’s automation tools to create marketing campaigns for its channels
feedmagazine.tv
Powered by FlippingBook