revenue are the ones that made their inventory fully biddable, attached genuinely useful first-party signals to it and let buyers control frequency and sequencing across everything they sell.” Cochrane cites Amazon. “Making advertising the default on Prime Video instantly created one of the largest premium streaming ad audiences in the market. But the more important move was connecting that inventory to the richest first-party commerce dataset in advertising and making all of it biddable through a demand-side platform alongside audio, display and online video. Netflix is following the same logic building out its ad stack.”
This super-granular approach can also improve the viewing experience. “When someone watches across four services in an evening, and each service caps frequency in isolation, the viewer can see the same creative eight times even though each platform believes it behaved responsibly,” says Cochrane. “Programmatic buying is currently the only practical answer, because a single buying platform holding the bidstream across services can cap and sequence exposure at the household level.” Measurement remains a challenge when viewers hop between media. “Most video services can see
IN THE FLOW Services such as 7fivefive (above) and ThinkAnalytics (below) provide useful data points
engagement inside their own app reasonably well, but the moment a viewer’s journey touches customer care, marketing, a distribution partner or a different device, that picture breaks apart,” says Bleuenn Le Goffic, VP of business transformation at Accedo. “Very few organisations have a genuinely unified, cross-surface view of a single viewer, which makes it hard to measure behaviour that now spans broadcast, streaming, social and live in the same week.” But seen in the right light, self- curated viewing per se can be more opportunity than threat. “Fragmented viewing is only a problem if you sell audiences the old way,” says Cochrane. “A viewer who assembles their own mix of drama, sport, podcasts and live events is telling you far more about themselves than a panel demographic ever could and platforms that capture those signals cleanly can charge a structural premium for their inventory. “The opportunity is to stop mourning the decline of the mass audience and start monetising the addressable one.”
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