With Kiwis increasingly turning to smart TVs for their daily dose of entertainment, they are becoming an ideal platform for advertisers to reach engaged audiences. Alex Spurzem, Samsung Ads ANZ General Manager, speaks to StopPress about how this appetite can help advertisers and marketers get better results.
Originally launching in 2015 in the US, the Samsung Ads business was built on the goal of creating an audience platform that can help advertisers and marketers navigate the increasingly fragmented smart TV landscape while adding the consumer benefit of new content discovery.
Naturally since then, the business has expanded, launching in Australia in 2021 and closely followed by New Zealand.
“We knew New Zealand would be something that we wanted to do not just because of the relative proximity,” Alex says, “but also the maturity of the market. We know that half of all Kiwis own a smart TV, a figure that is up almost 30 percent year on year, so there is a lot of change afoot and Samsung Ads has a lot to contribute.”
As an Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) Samsung Ads is an opportunity to add value to advertisers and marketers in a rapidly changing landscape, Alex says.
“Television is changing and arguably it might be changing at its quickest pace in the last few decades. Like so often, a lot of that change is driven by technology.”
He compares the current changes to television as similar to the changes that have happened with mobile phones.
“Remember when your mobile phone was mostly for making phone calls and maybe playing snake? Fast forward a few years there is now nothing you can’t do on your phone because there is an app for virtually anything. If you squint hard enough there is a little bit of that happening to TVs as well.”
With half of Kiwis already on board with the idea of smart TVs, the opportunity is there for an OEM such as Samsung Ads to add value across media properties such as linear television, streaming, Broadcast Video on Demand (BVOD) and gaming.
“As that adoption grows, the data and the insight become important, if not even critical, to advertisers,” he adds.
This data falls into two categories; device data and Automated Content Recognition (ACR).
Device data includes things Samsung knows about the hardware, such as the size of the TV, its age, and whether a streaming device or gaming console is connected, whilst ACR is like “Shazam but for TV content”, Alex explains. This is useful when determining whether an advertising spot has been shown and can give deeper insight into exactly how consumers watch television.
“One of the things we are seeing is that most Kiwis are watching shows in a hybrid manner, watching both linear television as well as streamed content, however over a quarter of them are now exclusively streaming on their smart TVs.”
It’s this sort of insight that proves valuable for planners and marketers Alex says.
“We don’t see connected TV as something that replaces free-to-air television. We think they are supplementary, but it just happens to be that it’s a bit fragmented and there are some audiences that are arguably harder to reach now. That is something we can help with.”
Ultimately, Samsung Ads is most helpful through its ability to give marketers and advertisers a sense of where people spend most of their time.
“The visibility ACR creates for us can help advertisers reach people in a way that avoids over exposure or reach people that tend to be very heavy streamers, who have been harder to reach on free-to-air television. The main use case for us is to drive incremental reach.”
Alex says many people still think of television as free-to-air and BVOD on occasion but there is “so much more”.
“There’s a lot of traction in Video on Demand services so the advice we often give to advertisers is to speak to their agencies and their buyers and encourage them to discover what is out there beyond the obvious channels to work out where there is influential cost-effective reach to be gained.”
Get in touch for more info be emailing [email protected], visiting samsungads.com, or by checking out LinkedIn.
