During ‘Advanced advertising opportunities for FTA broadcasters’, the first panel on Day 1 of Nextv Ad Latin America, Alina Arango, Commercial VP at Canal 1 (Colombia), reported that, two years ago, the channel made a first trial with a TV attribution tool and, after the good results it featured, the company is already working with its first client starting this month, with a complete campaign. The executive shared the panel together with Michel Ibáñez, Head of Programming and Data at America TV Peru; Ricardo Minari, VP Business Development Latin America at Ateme; Fabian Rodriguez, Marketing Director at Renault; and Juan Pablo Jurado, CEO at Wunderman Thompson Latam.

Regarding how Canal 1 structures its different advertising inventories, Arango assured that they aim ‘to offer flexibility for our advertisers and to have a new option so that audiences can complement each other’. According to the executive, ‘even though TV has had tough competition with the digital environment, this has been an important challenge, and even more so in these times of pandemic, because there was a new opportunity for people to have the need to turn on the TV and find real and more reliable news. We are taking advantage of that opportunity. There are two other large competitors in the country (RCN and Caracol TV), which have been in the market for many more years, and although it has not been easy to compete, less than four years after our launch, we already feature about 10 points of rating points. Since the channel’s launch, in 2017, the number of TVs on in the country has increased by more than 135%, and we try to strengthen ourselves with live TV content’, she said.

When asked about his vision regarding the evolution that TV advertising business has had in recent years, Jurado reported that ‘it is very wise to be able to talk about issues related to technology and data about the TV business in general. I think the TV business has been transformed with the pandemic, and it has accelerated itself in an incredible way, as technology has generally accelerated based on customers and media. TV was transformed into an absolutely holistic system, which gathers all the technologies that are around, including social networks and data. The TV business has been transformed and potentiated in an incredible way, to the point that it no longer includes only the TV screen, but everything that encompasses the screen, with all the technologies for customers, for the media, and creates an extremely interesting and diverse monetization business’, said the executive.

Later, Minari expressed himself about the possibilities of inventory monetization that come up as TV broadcasters migrate to OTT, and assured that ‘the most important thing is to keep in mind that we are talking about a much bigger change than simply technological. We are talking about a new paradigm. These are new times, which bring new challenges, and, together with them, come opportunities. So when broadcasters migrate to OTT, they open the doors for new monetization possibilities. In the current model, the most valuable element that I see are the spots, that is, 30-second windows that are broadcast during the final of a football match, where millions of people are watching the same content at the same time. But, currently, the value is no longer in time, but in the audience. So, we no longer have prime time as a parameter, but rather the prime audience, that is, the audience that is most interested in buying a product or acquiring a service. We no longer look for spots of 30 seconds only, but, for example, for a football match, we look for men between 20 and 30 years old, gaming fans, in a certain city. This opens up great possibilities for FTA broadcasters to monetize new revenue. We used to have a time limit, but now we can create an infinite number of targets, according to our creativity and needs. As technology providers we are here to make this process easier and provide tools and solutions to connect user behavior data, and transform it into intelligence, that allows broadcasters to deliver the right advertising, at the right time, to the right people’, said the executive.

Regarding the sale of tvGO’s (America TV de Peru’s OTT) inventory, Ibañez, assured that ‘the platform’s model is based on subscriptions, for the on-demand content of the channel’s programs, where users access the full episodes without advertising, previously edited, at any time. Additionally, the app has the option of watching America TV live, both for subscribers and non-subscribers’, said the executive, who later assured that ‘this is where we find a great opportunity, and where we monetize a commercial format, which is the pre-roll, less than 30 seconds, before the users watch the content. The KPIs that we get are very good, basically due to the behavior and intention of users to consume the video content. That is why this also gives us a very important value for advertisers’. On the other hand, according to Ibañez, ‘comparing tvGO’s pre-roll videos with other options on the market, the KPIs are quite good, which is why they have become a very important tool’. Ibañez also pointed out that ‘we have evaluated at various times the possibility of changing the tvGO model and opening it up to advertising on VOD, but at this time the current model is the equation that works best for us’.

Regarding the operation of the ‘dynamic ad insertion in Latin America and the benefits of this technology, Minari assured that ‘we all know that they work, that the technology already exists, but they still do not have force in Latin America, because of the need for a culture change. I believe that dynamic ad insertion works in Latin America and anywhere in the world, simply because it is a more efficient and intelligent way of managing inventory. When we work with dynamic ad insertions, the broadcaster has the ability to manage its inventory a bit more holistically. We know that a broadcaster may not sell 50% of its inventory, but with dynamic ad insertions a part of that inventory can be made to sell for a type of sale, and the other part can be reserved for programmatic advertising, and, this way,  it will be possible to achieve a good balance between programmatic and direct selling, and surely new income and new possibilities will be generated, as well as better inventory management’. Regarding the benefits of dynamic ad insertions, the executive emphasized that it achieves ‘a reduction in costs for customer search, an optimization of sales and advertisements, added to the creation of new sources of income by broadcasters, outside  advertisers, who may be at some times and interesting content for a cheaper value’.

‘Last year we had an approach with a company that offered us the possibility of implementing a programmatic advertising system in our FTA TV network’, said Arango, who later added that ‘we had an important advance, but the problem is that, as not yet implemented in the region, our technology system with which we serve our banner is not compatible with the technology that is used to implement programmatic advertising. We had to make a significant investment to implement this technology and make it compatible but, definitely, we want to do it in the short term, because nobody does it in the region, and we believe that it is an opportunity to continue pleasing customers, who we know are looking for this type of opportunities and options in the market’.

‘TV revenues are quite strong. America TV is the FTA TV channel with the highest rating in Peru, but the generation of digital content represents around 2% or 3% of our income’, said Ibañez in relation to America TV Peru’s income. ‘We still have to invest in infrastructure, human resources and equipment. Although we tend to generate more, our digital field has not yet achieved our results on TV ‘, the executive completed.

When asked about the evolution of the percentage of the advertising budget that Renault allocates to digital media, compared to traditional media, Rodriguez assured that ‘we have seen a dizzying growth. In 2017/2018, the distribution included 80% in traditional media and 20% in digital, but today the proportion is 60% / 40%; that is, we have 40% of our budget for digital media. This new context that we live in forced us to react much faster, because audiences changed their habits very quickly.

‘Two years ago we made a trial with a TV attribution tool, which allowed us that, every time we sent an advertisement on our channel, clients could see in their social networks, applications or on the website, how much the traffic according to what was being communicated. Understanding that advertisers are getting used to working with more metrics than the ones we can offer on TV, we implemented this trial  two years ago and had very good results. In May, we started working with our first client, with a full campaign. It is a way of innovating in the sale of TV and adapting ourselves to what advertisers expect’, the executive reported.