Author: aalasafidler@gmail.com

In the not-so-distant past, the rise of streaming services such as Netflix, Disney+, and Amazon Prime Video heralded a bright new dawn in entertainment, with promises to break free from the shackles of traditional TV by offering consumers unparalleled convenience, choice, and affordability. However, recent developments have left many questioning what exactly the future of these once-revolutionary services looks like – and if it’s actually more familiar than any of us would have predicted.

At its inception, streaming was a disruptive force, challenging the dominance of traditional TV. The absence of intrusive advertising, paired with on-demand viewing, offered a breath of fresh air to users tired of rigid schedules, limited variety and increasingly expensive packages.

In 2007, Netflix revolutionised the game and, followed by the likes of Hulu and CBS All Access (now Paramount +), and latterly the likes of Amazon Prime Video and Disney+, each platform provided its own unique content at the touch of a fingertip. The diversification of screen media consumption was seemingly changed forever.

Streaming Had Killed The Video Star. Or something like that, anyway.

What set all these platforms apart was their commitment to innovation and accessibility. Netflix, in particular, shook up the industry by introducing binge-worthy original series and an extensive library of films and documentaries. Disney+ capitalized on its vast back-catalogue of beloved franchises,while Amazon Prime Video combined streaming with additional benefits like free shipping, creating a comprehensive membership experience.

But despite these groundbreaking beginnings, the streaming landscape is now facing a paradigm shift that threatens to undermine all of its original promise.

The introduction of ad tiers – a departure from the interruption-free models that were the original hallmark of these streaming services – has left some users disenchanted. The platforms claim that these ‘cheaper’ plans are there to allow more people the opportunity to access their content, where they may not have been able to afford ad-free membership previously. However, the banning of password sharing could call into question the ‘we’re doing it because we care’ angle of their defence.

Additionally, it is said that the increased revenue generated from advertising will be reinvested to create more high-quality original content, further enriching the overall streaming experience. It obviously remains to be seen if this plays out as hoped – however, it will be interesting to watch how the promise of higher quality content stacks up alongside awards in the near future, given where each of those platforms were comparatively just a couple of years ago.

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Beyond that, we are now starting to see certain platforms integrating their catalogues together (Disney & Hulu in late 2023, alongside rumours of Apple and Paramount combining) – which to be fair, is no bad thing for the user – however it all begins to resemble the very thing we were told we should be moving away from when all of this began; all of our viewing options in one place, for a certain fee, with ads a necessary tolerance for that privilege.

Streaming services are seemingly on the brink of betraying their original USP – a rebellion against the constraints of cable television. The shift towards ad-supported models, rising subscription costs, and the potential convergence of platforms threatens to transform the streaming world into a landscape reminiscent of the cable era, only more expensive and therefor, less accessible.

As users, we must critically examine the changes occurring in the streaming industry. The promise of innovation and accessibility that once defined these services is at risk of being eroded. It is crucial for streaming giants to remember the values that made them revolutionary in the first place, and to strive to maintain the user-centric approach that set them apart from traditional cable TV. Otherwise, they risk losing the very audience they worked so hard to attract.

As the world becomes increasingly concerned with the impact of humanity on the environment, more and more industries are looking for ways to reduce their carbon footprint – and the world of Digital Advertising is no exception.

In fact, the industry has already taken a major step forward with the introduction of Converge’s Carbon AdTrack, a proprietary – and world first – measure of carbon emissions amassed within a digital campaigns journey, that gives advertisers the tools and information needed to then make informed and balanced business decisions around optimizing or offsetting the carbon output of their digital media output.

This is the first positive, tangible step towards measuring the emissions of all media – not just digital.

Developed in partnership with Scope3 – the world leaders in this field – this measurement has now been made available as standard for any and all campaigns run via our Select trading platform.

The need for measuring carbon output has primarily been driven by Advertisers reacting to a more socially and environmentally conscious consumer demand, and as a result there is a requirement for more efficient ways of ethical media buying so that these businesses can align their media investment with their corporate ESG values.

The measurement itself is calculated through a highly accurate model of website performances. This is built using a variety of data sources, both public and private, and utilising machine learning to fill in the gaps. To calculate the overall carbon emissions from a particular campaign, we follow a nine-stage process before being able to report back on the carbon weight (in kilograms) of any campaign that is bought, executed, and measured through our platform.

Carbon AdTrack is a major step forward for the digital advertising industry, providing a powerful tool for advertisers who are looking to find ways to not only improve the overall performance of their advertising, but also reduce their carbon footprint and take a more sustainable approach to their advertising campaigns.

By giving advertisers the information they need to make more informed decisions, Carbon AdTrack is now helping to drive the industry towards a more sustainable future.

How to reduce your impact

Since the first banner ad appeared on the Internet in 1994,Digital advertising has become a multi-billion-dollar industry that plays a crucial role in the global economy.

But, like most other human activities, digital advertising has an environmental impact through its generation of carbon emissions. These come from different sources including:

• The energy required to run power-hungry data centres where servers that host websites and deliver ads are typically located.
• The energy that powers devices like laptops, smartphones, and tablets where we consume the internet.
• The ‘supply path’ which is the series of networks and servers that an ad must travel through when an impression is bid for, won, and then served to a user

At Converge we are dealing with this in two ways:

1. Through our Converge-Select platform where we give advertisers the tools to build their own ‘Curated Marketplaces’ using quality, high-reach and named publishers. Campaigns are then delivered through a much-reduced supply path, which means far fewer carbon emissions generated.
2. By using data (provided by Scope3) to measure the carbon emissions generated by individual publishers and campaigns. This provides advertisers with the information they need to either optimise (re-plan) their activity or offset the carbon generated

But it’s also important to focus on the other ways of reducing carbon emissions that can be built into sustainable planning and buying, and these include:

• Choosing quality over quantity – that’s matching carbon efficient publisher partners with effective inventory
• Analysing all data points to identify the right balance between achieving business outcomes (e.g., a target CPA) and reducing carbon output
• Working with lighter-weight creative and use attention metrics to understand the real impact of advertising by format

As a company and industry, we are still at the beginning of the journey, but Converge will continue to lead from the front in industry efforts to make Digital advertising more sustainable.

A tiger team is originally a military term for a specialised, cross-functional team brought together to solve or investigate a specific problem or critical issue.

That’s what we do in Converge, but we do it every day of the week (and without the khaki!).

Our Dublin-based support team are real and ready to help existing or new advertisers in getting successful advertising campaigns up on the internet. We promise you a team of experts, experienced and mature in their different skills sets, who will understand your digital marketing needs and deliver upon them. That’s from the very biggest of requests right down to the smallest.

With our help, and in using our platform, you can:

• Have the confidence to ask the questions (none of which will be ‘stupid’)
• Save time and money for your business
• Introduce new innovations into your media and marketing
• Define your target audience and campaigns through context, attention, carbon emissions, kantar TGI data, brand safety and more

Please get in touch, and we’ll visit you or come and see us, and we’ll buy you a coffee in our fab new offices

Best of all, and unlike tigers, none of us bite!

Like any burgeoning technology, Advertising Technology (AdTech), has all the positive potential to disrupt existing work practices and create additional value.

For Advertisers and Publishers using a platform like Converge-Select, that means value in time saved, and money better invested in product or marketing. This can be done in a number of different ways including:

• Automation – AdTech can automate laborious tasks or processes that are often inherited (“It’s just the way we have always done it”) and frankly no longer needed. Using the automation advantage frees up people to do better, higher value work as well as increasing overall AdOps efficiencies and productivity.
• Innovation – using good AdTech makes room for advertisers and agencies to develop new products or services or to improve existing ones. This can create value by meeting unmet or emerging needs. For example, being able to measure and quantify the Carbon Emissions of a campaign and arm the advertiser with that information, so that they can decide on the next appropriate action – whether to offset or optimise.
• Connectivity – Converge AdTech can facilitate more and better-informed conversations between people and businesses around what kind of digital advertising works and what doesn’t work. Advertisers can then get to see where their money is going by building their own dedicated, transparent marketplaces, using quality brand-building publishers. That’s in stark contrast to the increasing opaqueness of the platforms and the products they focus on selling.
• Data Analysis – AdTech can be used to collect, process, and analyse advertising data on a large scale, helping marketing organisations to make better informed decisions around where, when and how they should invest their media budgets in order to get the best RoMI (return-on-marketing-investment)

Not when you consider that Thomas Davenport and John Beck wrote a book back in 2001 and called it ‘The Attention Economy’. What prompted them was a feeling, and this is back then, that in “today’s information-flooded world the scarcest resource is not ideas or even talent: it’s attention”‍

So, what happened? Life moved on, the established marketing metrics stayed in place, and information became a daily digital deluge. As the commercial internet grew, so did the confusion around how to properly measure it as an advertising medium.

Which brings us to the start of 2023, where forward-thinking advertisers and marketers are at last starting to look at attention as (potentially) a potent new metric for judging the success of their communications – whether it’s in judging the quality of the media they buy or the creative that they produce.

As Sander Bosch, Global Head of Brand & Communication Insights at Heineken, describes “…it’s about the ability to attract consumer attention to brands through various touchpoints with our distinctive brand assets, and both creative and media play a role here… in delivering some kind of impression or leaving some kind of meaningful mark”.

‍In other words, all impressions are not equal, and we can probably say that the oft-quoted ‘viewability’ is not a competent measure of attention.

Which brings us to the thing about Attention that is new – how we can now objectively measure advertising’s ability to capture and hold the attention of its target audience.

Critically important, because the higher the measure of attention then clearly the more successful the advertising will be in achieving its objectives such as brand awareness or sales.

Historically, attention has only been measured through self-reporting (asking people directly about their attention to an advertisement, either through a survey or focus group), or by making large inferences around advertising’s effect on sales and other KPIs.

With objective measurement, we use new research technology to track people’s attention to an advertisement through eye-tracking software. This data, based on highly robust panel methodology, and provided by Lumen, is now available on the Converge-Select platform for Irish advertisers.

As an industry, we are still in the early stages of attention measurement and how best to deploy it, but we can already see ways of helping advertisers in optimising their campaigns and improving their return on investment by using the data.

Now that’s something worth paying attention to!‍