CES is all about looking to the future and the possibilities it brings, so the show was the perfect forum for TV industry insiders to forecast the myriad opportunities in premium video in the year ahead.
“We have a media-rich year in front of us, with fixed opportunities such as major sporting and entertainment events, but we also have the Olympics and an election year,” said Storinge. “Think about all the content that’s going to be created out of those stories and the opportunities for brands to consider how that voltage may actually help drive their business.”
“How do we create a great consumer experience that includes the ad experience and how does that play out for the brand to have their connection with consumers be much more direct—and for the publishers to create something that allows the stickiness of the great content they have to resonate?” said McKee. “That is where I’d like to put my cards in 2024.”
For an independent agency like Kepler Group, “it’s improving creative largely through generative AI,” said Garrett Dale, chief partnership officer. “With AI, creative can be created faster with actionable insights to make premium video better for us and our advertisers this year.”
Joshua Lowcock, president of Quad, believes “the biggest opportunity in the premium video space is demonstrating to advertisers that there’s consumers that demand ad-supported video. There’s a lot of speculation and skepticism that ad-supported video is going to take off at scale, but we know it does and it will. We just need to demonstrate to advertisers that the market and consumer demand is there.”
For Melanie Hamilton, senior VP of enterprise sales at Comcast Advertising, the biggest opportunity relates to the last remaining criteria in the definition of premium video: proving that it is seen by real people.
“Addressable is having its heyday," Hamilton said. “MVPD data backed by deterministic data matched to physical address has 95% fidelity, whereas with CTV we're seeing hashed email addresses with just over 50% fidelity. Having a single view of the customer and a single view of the home, we can have real attribution, real insights and campaigns that make true impact, which is incredibly exciting.”
In the spirit of convergence, Loria emphasized that the appropriate theme for the year ahead is keeping things simple.
“We will continue to support interoperability and put the right controls in the hands of buyers and sellers in order to continue to facilitate transparency,” she said. “If there’s a call to action, it would be, let’s make the TV ad buying process streamlined, more transparent and direct.”