CANNES \u2013 Creating better television ad experiences for viewers seems to be a never-ending conversation for agencies, brands and publishers. But judging from a panel at the Cannes International Festival of Creativity, ad relevance and personalization is expected to vary widely by platform and provider for the foreseeable future.<\/p>\n
Reasons for the variations include corporate financial \u201cshort-termism,\u201d thinking in narrow silos and measuring campaign performance in ways that aren\u2019t always the most accurate or pertinent.<\/p>\n
The panel by media agency Wavemaker<\/a> was moderated by Joanna O\u2019Connell, VP, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research. It brought together Peter Naylor, Hulu\u2019s SVP of Advertising Sales, Twitter\u2019s Managing Director of Media & Entertainment, Jennifer Prince, and Jacqueline Corbelli, the Founder, Chairman & CEO of BrightLine.<\/p>\n Citing Forrester research showing that not all consumers love or hate advertising, O\u2019Connell posited, \u201cMy suspicion is that marketers don\u2019t understand this at all.\u201d<\/p>\n Hulu\u2019s research has revealed \u201ca spectrum of ad acceptance,\u201d responded Naylor. \u201cOn one extreme end are people who are ad avoiders at all costs. The trap people fall into is that everybody avoids ads at all costs, and that\u2019s just not true.\u201d<\/p>\n According to Naylor<\/a>, among those who sign up for Hulu on any given day, \u201cThe wide majority will take advertising.\u201d<\/p>\n On Twitter, brand marketers \u201cexpect to hit consumers because eighty two percent of our users expect to see a message from a brand,\u201d said Prince<\/a>. Another thing she believes differentiates Twitter is that its advertising is \u201cextremely native, it\u2019s within the timeline and a tweet and so there\u2019s not as much of a separation between ads and content, there is this blend.\u201d<\/p>\n Given its \u201cleaned-in, receptive audience,\u201d Twitter does see marketers thinking a lot about consumers and the consumer journey, according to Prince.<\/p>\n Brightline has taken its cue from the desire of consumers to bring together their experiences with premium video and other content, said Corbelli. Giving credit to Hulu as an innovator, she explained that Brightline got involved \u201cwhen we started noticing folks like Roku and streaming consoles like Sony PlayStation were vehicles for actually bringing these two things together.\u201d<\/p>\n As for consumer ad tolerance, Corbelli believes \u201cabsolutely that viewers will not just tolerate but I think that in certain cases they\u2019ll even embrace advertising. I think the personalization piece of this is really big. Things as simple as geo location and being able to personalize the dialogue a little bit.\u201d<\/p>\n