Connected TV Players Prepare to Aggressively Court Linear Ad Dollars at NewFronts

As they enter next week's NewFronts, connected and smart TV companies are eager to show the marketplace just how much the television landscape has changed since the pandemic upended last year's upfront season—and altered viewing habits forever. And several of those companies will get their chance as NewFronts kicks off on Monday, with Roku, Amazon, Vizio and Samsung Ads all set as Day 1 presenters. As linear viewing continues to decline—Q1 2021 saw a 10% quarter-over-quarter decline in the daily average number of TV-viewing U.S. households consuming linear, according to new data from Samba TV—hours spent streaming are accelerating. Roku reported a record year, adding more than 14 million accounts to surpass 50 million, while Amazon Fire TV also blew past 50 million active accounts in 2020. That's why connected and smart TV platforms will be focusing this upfront season on convincing marketers to shift ad dollars from traditional linear investments in media companies such as Disney, NBCUniversal, WarnerMedia and ViacomCBS to their offerings instead. More advertisers will be looking to manage investments across both linear and CTV this year, and “as we go into this upfront, I think this is going to be the biggest change,” Raghu Kodige, chief product officer of LG Ads, said during Adweek’s Convergent TV Summit earlier this week. A data-driven approach “When we sat in this place a year ago, we were telling a story of what our prediction was for the shift of consumer viewing from linear into streaming TV. Now a year later, we have the data to back it up,” Kristina Shepard, national brand team lead for Roku, told Adweek. More specifically, Shepard said that 39% of linear TV ratings points have disappeared in the past four years, and the median age of the top three broadcast networks is now over 60 years old. Roku predicts that 43% of traditional pay TV households will cut the cord within the next 12 months, Shepard said. “We're at a place where the data so clearly shows that brands need to shift high percentage of their volume into streaming television.” And those trends are appearing in all other major CTV players as well. Nearly 60% of time spent on Vizio TVs 24 months ago was in a linear environment. Now, only a third of viewing time is in linear, and the majority of time is spent streaming. “There has been a dramatic shift, not only in terms of cord-cutting, but in terms of actual time spent within a linear environment as well,” Mike O’Donnell, chief revenue officer of Vizio’s platform business, said during Adweek’s Convergent TV Summit. "I also don't think you necessarily need to convince advertisers to shift budget into streaming.” At Samsung Ads, “there's an insatiable appetite for video, and that's both by consumers and advertisers. So, where you're starting to see over the pandemic, we saw a lot of transitioning from linear to connected TV,” said Tom Fochetta, svp sales and marketing. O’Donnell pointed to the importance of having content available, and also the availability to target it. “The measurement component is big, right? It's about channel allocation. How do you arm them with the tools to shift those budgets more aggressively. You need to really leverage measurement to hit that business,” he said. Like Vizio, Samsung leverages and uses its own proprietary data to target users, which Fochetta believes is an incentive for buyers to head to connected TV. “You get all the benefits of linear TV, but you get all the great targeting that we have, and then all the data and attribution and measurement at the end of the campaign,” he said. “We think linear buyers are going to be involved and they're going to be paying attention.” The power of AVOD In their respective NewFronts presentations, connected TV companies will leverage the power of their in-house AVOD offerings to marketers as AVOD consumption continues to increase. Samsung now sees 20% more viewing time spent on AVOD than SVOD services, with a lot of that viewership coming from its in-house AVOD Samsung TV Plus. “For the NewFronts, we’re obviously going to focus on AVOD and tout those stats,” said Fochetta. “We're seeing even more engagement. TV Plus is the No. 2-watched app on Samsung TVs.” Amazon recently launched local news from 88 marketplaces in its internal ad-supported news app, which Charlotte Maines, general manager of device advertising products, Fire TV, said is not only a benefit for customers, but also for content providers as well. “They're seeing the increased engagement, both within that experience, but also about four times the number of installations of their standalone app,” said Maines. “It's really a win across the board. That kind of category experience is something we're really going to be continuing to lean into and look into in the coming time.” O’Donnell said Vizio has seen a “significant demand” for free content, especially over the past year, as well as growth of AVOD usage on its platform. “We want to continue to push that growth,” said O’Donnell. “But ultimately, for us, it's about engagement on the platform. So we need to have as much available as possible, whether the consumer wants subscription services, or whether they want a free, ad-supported environment.”