October 26, 2018
Report: AVOD spend to double in next 5 years.
Ad-funded VOD (AVOD) is outpacing other paid media with spend set to double to $47 billion (€41.2bn) by 2023 worldwide, according to WARC’s latest Global Ad Trends report.
More broadly, both consumer and advertiser investment in OTT platforms is rising: globally, spend is projected to reach $129.3 billion in the next five years.
As a medium, AVOD is still young, though notable examples of Hulu, HBO Now, and Sony’s Crackle, as well as reported interest from Amazon, hint at its future power.
Compared to other paid media in WARC’s International Ad Forecast, AVoD is growing faster. The expected $23.8 billion in brand investment that AVoD will receive this year equates to a 5.2 per cent share of global ad spend, but spend has increased year-on-year. As a percentage of total OTT spend (estimated by Digital TV Research at $68.7 billion this year – up 29 per cent from 2017), AVoD will account for 34.7 per cent.
“Consumers’ voracious appetite for video content anywhere, on any device, has been propelled by SVoD services such as Netflix. But it is AVoD platforms which present the opportunity for advertisers to marry rich consumer data with pinpoint targeting during engaging content,” says James McDonald, Data Editor, WARC. “This is why AT&T and Amazon are exploring moves into the AVOD sector next year, with the ultimate aim of taking the lion’s share of a market expected to be worth $47 billion by 2023.”
At the strategic level, consumers’ appetite for cross-device streaming is creating an impact. A full 81 per cent of consumers now say it is important that they can watch TV programmes whenever they want.
The wide array of publisher specs, insufficient lead time required to track down all creative assets and a lack of standardised measurement when buying cross-channel audience-based inventory are cited as major concerns by practitioners.
As a result, OTT is not currently front of mind when building media strategies; just a quarter (26 per cent) of US CMOs regard OTT as either very or extremely important to their plans. This despite evidence showing integrated campaigns are 31 per cent more effective at brand building.
