The music video service was once weighted heavily toward online and on-demand viewing.
But, in this video interview with Beet.TV, Vevo advanced TV VP Rob Christensen says CTV is exploding.
“Prior to the pandemic, when you look at five quarters ago, connected TV revenue represented 4% of our total direct ad sales,” Christensen says.
“As we close out two to 2021 here, as we sit in June, connected TV will represent just about half of our overall advertising revenue directly.
“We’ve officially reached the inflexion point of supply and demand in TV. And we look forward to surpassing that 50% mark as we head into 21 and 22.”
Vevo, like other digital publishers, has been going through its NewFront, a period during which it touts its upcoming content roster to secure advance ad sales commitments.
During the season, WarnerMedia’s head of ad sales JP Colaco said: “We believe IP is the new primetime.” Vevo’s Christensen adds: “We happen to agree with that.”
For his company, TV consumption was growing 40% year-over-year for the two years before the pandemic. Now it has grown even faster.
But it’s not all about VOD. “We’re looking at linear as well as VOD opportunities for launch,” Christensen says. “We have linear channels here in the US live on Samsung TV Plus, Vizio, Xumo, Pluto TV and more to come.
“You’ll start to see some more channels launching here this year globally.”
To build everything out, Vevo is assembling a range of ad-tech suppliers to support.
For self-service platform (SSP), it has used SpotX, FreeWheel and Christensen says “others to come”.
“We’re very excited to work with Beachfront for their ad pod bidding solution,” Christensen says. “It will maximise every single ad pod that we’re running.
“We’re testing varying lengths on VOD and linear right now. As we’re running ad pods and multiple minutes per hour, it’s important for us to make sure that it’s a great experience for brands to create experience for users and of cost maximising the monetization opportunity.
“So we’ll be utilizing their tool for all those things, as well as managing competitive separation for our clients and frequency.”
In the new environment, Christensen acknowledges there are difficulties around measuring success, since consumption platforms and patterns have proliferated.
He wants to answer questions like “How do we increase yield?”, “How do we maximise every ad opportunity in real time?” and “Can we better unify ad decisioning and monetization?”
There is a particular challenge around measuring incremental reach.
Vevo has turned to iSpot.tv to help it distinguish connected TV audiences from those viewing and other platforms to authenticate a campaign’s incremental reach.
And it uses TVision, which has an opted-in panel of users throughout the country, to measure attention for content as well as advertising.
You are watching “Convergent TV: Driving Addressability Across Traditional and Connected TV,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Beachfront. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>Having historically found two-thirds of its users from mobile, now – thanks to a strategy called “Vevo Everywhere” – it is finding 20% of its audience is from connected TVs, thanks to carriage on platforms like Roku, Apple TV, Amazon Fire and Echo Show, Pluto TV and Samsung TV Plus.
Vevo and MTV, on-demand and linear, may be different kettles of fish – but now Vevo is targeting the same kinds of main-line TV advertisers who are staples of traditional TV.
To seal the deal, Vevo will need to measure its audience and prove the success of its inventory.
“(It’s) very challenging … to measure CTV audiences,” says Adam Butler, Vevo’s director of brand insight and measurement, in this video interview with Beet.TV. “If you look at lists of market(ers’) concerns when it comes to media quality, ad measurement is often very near the top.”
Butler says Vevo recently tapped TVision, a measurement provider that offers detailed viewer metrics, to get a better handle on its audience, by using a panel-based solution. Here is what they found:
From snacking to sessions: “People are viewing our content in sessions. More than 70% of our views on CTV are sessions – people are watching 2+ videos; they’re sitting down enjoying it in a long-form type way, much like music television was way back when.”
Group viewing: “We’re also seeing that over 60% of the viewing sessions are co-viewed… there’s more than one person viewing the content during the session.”
Butler doesn’t just want to measure viewing – he also wants to prove to advertisers that connected TV can work. But that is a work in progress.
“When it comes to CTV and proving attribution, it’s an emerging space,” he says.
“We’re talking to various companies that are out there, trying to find what the right solution is for Vevo and for our clients.
If Vevo can get the numbers right, its own growing audience scale means it could be sitting on a very large opportunity. Butler says Vevo’s audience stats look like this:
In other words, Vevo’s audience is turning up the volume – and the metrics will catch up soon.
“The way I see, consumer adoption always outpaces measurement,” Butler says. “The genie is out of the bottle.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s leadership series Vevo Everywhere: Evolving Content Distribution. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>In this video interview with Beet.TV, the company’s ad sales SVP Jesse Judelman explains that partnerships with a host of other platforms have given it large scale that rivals traditional TV and that it is now offering to marketers.
“We reach upwards of 30 million people in the United States a day,” he says. “We have about 400,000 music videos that we happen to represent the rights for that spans 40 years.
“(When) marketers come on board, they have the ability to really do big tonnage plays the way that they have typically used television.”
That scale is partly the product of several carriage deals Vevo has done, including Roku, Apple TV, Amazon Fire and Echo Show, and last year Pluto TV alongside Samsung TV Plus.
“Our scale (is) broadcast scale,” Judelman adds. “we like to make comparisons to the television world, but the fundamental difference is we’re growing – we’re growing 20% a year.”
It’s a message Judelman will be taking in to this year’s upcoming upfronts season, when premium content publishers preview their future content roster to tempt marketers and agencies to make advance ad bookings.
After growing up on mobile, Judelman is targeting the living room, where Vevo could better align with the TV ad buying world.
“Mobile has been where we’ve been dominant historically – about two thirds of our audience is there,” he says. “But right now we’re around north of 20% overall within OTT, that’s growing exponentially – 40, 50% a year.
“So that behavior’s different and how we reconcile those behaviors within screens, both for artists as well as ultimately advertisers that’s the secret sauce, that’s what we’re constantly trying to optimize.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s leadership series Vevo Everywhere: Evolving Content Distribution. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>In this interview with Beet.TV, McGurn explains the company’s new relationships with distributors and why the upcoming Cannes Lions event is “always a dealmaker’s paradise” for Vevo, which is owned by Universal Music and Sony Music and has global music video licensing rights with hundreds of other labels as well.
About this time last year, Vevo decided to phase out elements of its owned and operated platforms. With its business centered on YouTube distribution, it wasn’t cost effective to continue funding video distribution on its own.
The subsequent strategy was “finding endpoints of distribution in neighborhoods that users frequent where they might enjoy music videos again on television,” says McGurn. Vevo is about to divulge “a number of partnerships” and is offering “inventory anchored in connected television in the YouTube application on the TV’s and in living rooms to market in the UpFront.” McGurn quantifies the inventory at “about a nine-figure body.”
Vevo has typical inventory sharing relationships with MVPD’s in the 10% to 15% range “and they sell it on an audience basis, nothing specific to music or videos.”
The company handles sales for the rest of its inventory, including the use of various programmatic channels and working with SpotX. “We have the mass majority of inventory that’s there and we are a centralized point of buying for music television on all these distributors,” says McGurn.
“The demand is there. We have a larger supply than most people would even know about. The reaction so far from those buyers has been very positive and we think we’ll be able to sell it out in the UpFront.”
McGurn says Vevo’s “technology stack in the living room starts with FreeWheel. That’s our dynamic ad insertion vehicle.”
Vevo is counting on search, discovery and recommendation to ramp up ad sales, along with its understanding of the viewing behavior associated with music television that “far exceeds short-form behavior. We can see all the way up to sixty-five minutes of viewing behavior in a lean-back experience on TV’s if that search and discovery and recommendation is hit right.”
Looking ahead to next month in France, McGurn says, “Cannes for us is always a dealmaker’s paradise” as the company seeks domestic and global deals based on its extensive video licensing rights. “Audiences are aging in the living room and we represent a great counterbalance, to reaching almost twenty-five percent of every country’s population that we operate in.”
This video is part of the Beet.TV preview series titled “The Road to Cannes.” The series is sponsored by 4INFO. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>“We’re pretty well 50/50 (viewed) mobile and other devices,” Vevo international SVP Nic Jones tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “But the fastest growing area is on big screens. It completely changes the experience.”
Whilst mobile users consume Vevo in a very personal way, Jones says those who sit down to watch Vevo on the many IPTV boxes on which it has carriage watch for longer: “Views explode. Users are watching many more videos. On a platform like Roku, that is nearly 10 times higher than just about any mobile platform. It gives us a very interesting landscape to offer to advertisers.”
This video is part of series of videos covering DMEXCO. Please find all of our coverage of the show right here. Beet.TV’s coverage of DMEXCO is sponsored by Videology.
]]>“This set of pipes and plumbing that fuel a programmatic system was created for anonymous inventory,” according to Jonathan Carson, chief revenue officer of Vevo, the world’s biggest music video distributor. “For someone like Vevo, that’s not going to be a very interesting space – we’ll probably never release our inventory in to a big anonymous pool just like that, because there’s value in the quality of the inventory.
“However, the private marketplaces have been an important evolution – that gives the ability for that set of plumbing to be applied to content like Vevo’s – a brand that wants to transact in that way can transact both in the open marketplace as well as with individual partners.”
He was speaking at the BrightRoll Video Summit. In the same session, Heineken USA’s senior media director Ron Amram said ad tech platforms had to be easy to use, have good content partners and be able to scale with enough inventory to make it worth advertisers’ while.
You can find more coverage of the summit here. Disclaimer: BrightRoll sponsored Beet.TV’s coverage of the event.
]]>“(Programmatic) inventory is typically lower-tier, lower-quality inventory,” the music video distributor’s chief revenue officer Jonathan Carson tells Beet.TV.
“That marketplace is not what Vevo is about. It’s not very interesting for us to participate in. But that is the marketplace that programmatic plumbing was first crated to serve.”
As a “premium” publisher of music labels’ official videos, Vevo wants higher rates.
“Vevo has just gotten involved more recently as those pipes have started to be applied to higher-end premium content,” Carson adds. “That, all of a sudden, makes the programmatic space interesting for Vevo.”
Carson’s company has been working with AOL’s Adap.tv programmatic video ad tech platform for the last year on creating a private exchange to sell its premium inventory on an automated, programmatic basis. But he says the whole thing is still “in the early stages”.
Beet.TV spoke with Carson at the Adap.tv Worldwide Publisher Conference. Carson also interviewed with AdExchanger’s David Kaplan.
]]>In interview, Caraeff speaks about the opportunity to expand the business with its existing infrastructure which will not need a “million dollar” Times Square studio.
Andy Plesser
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