Month: April 2021

Heightened by significant enablement in mid-2020, the video streaming landscape has quickly become a vast realm of widespread choice for consumers. Amid the options, subscription-based video on-demand (SVOD) content remains hot around virtual water coolers, the Nielsen Top 10 list and social media. Without advertising, however, SVOD platforms are easy for marketers to disregard when they’re looking for brand messaging channels. But new research about branded integrations suggests they shouldn’t.

Product placements in video content are certainly nothing new, but few are objectively measured—even when they play a key role in a program’s storyline. FedEx, for example, almost becomes a character in the 2000 film Cast Away starring Tom Hanks, yet the brand integration didn’t cost the global delivery company a penny. Speculations about the end value of the integration are varied and widespread, which is a key reason why many of these types of integrations aren’t readily monetized.

As more content becomes available via streaming platforms, including movies that are simultaneously released in theaters, the 30-second commercial—the time-proven unit of advertising—becomes a viable means to measure and steward brand integrations in SVOD programs. And in that regard, Nielsen, in conjunction with clients, developed a metric* that allows for SVOD brand integrations to be tracked in ways that put it on the same playing field as traditional advertising. 

For example, we recently used this metric to calculate the actual impressions of several brand exposures in the first two seasons of Cobra Kai in its first month on Netflix, including Mercedes Benz. Given that much of the inventory at Daniel LaRousso’s car lot is luxury cars, Mercedes-Benz takes center stage throughout the episodes.

Dell Computers is another brand that Cobra Kai weaves into the storyline, largely through the tech ineptness of Johnny Lawrence’s character, who at the onset, doesn’t even know how to turn on a laptop, let alone connect it to the internet or conduct a search for something. And in the first four weeks of being available on Netflix, season 1 of Cobra Kai delivered Dell more than 70 million impressions to viewers 18-49, a key age demo for computer users.

Given that SVOD content is free of advertising, product placements and branded integrations provide advertisers and agencies with a modern way to integrate brands into the burgeoning streaming realm while simultaneously gaining incremental reach. While there’s little doubt that including a brand in a program has an impact, zeroing in on the incremental contribution of the exposure has historically been challenging. But that’s no longer the case.

For additional insights, download our recent Branded Integrations Come of Age in a Streaming World report.

Note

Using the traditional 30-second spot as a baseline, the methodology adjusts for duration and integration type to arrive at valued, equivalized impressions. The resulting metric illuminates both delivery and incremental reach. Importantly, the metric provides full visibility of the value of branded integrations in the SVOD space. That visibility means that advertisers and agencies now know that they reach their target and get what they pay for.

Today’s world celebrates what makes us all different, and marketers need to carry that forward into the media ecosystem, but getting to know your consumers can seem difficult amid emerging privacy regulations. In the traditional advertising ecosystem, brands and content owners have been able to use external data sources like third-party cookies and free device or browser identifiers to target and measure their audiences. But as these groups think about the future of advertising without third-party cookies, they will need to re-assess the sources and quality of their identity data.

There are two paths for brand and content owners to make connections with consumers: rely on one common ID/definition of the audience that rules everything or leverage many IDs and datasets that can learn and adapt to form a complete view of the audience. To understand which approach will be most successful, we spoke with Matt Krepsik, General Manager, Planning and Outcomes Products at Nielsen, about why taking a democratized approach to identifiers will help marketers build those direct relationships with their diverse consumer bases across platforms.

Learn more about the Nielsen ID System, a new approach that modernizes data assets, direct integrations and technologies so advertisers and publishers are able to understand the entire consumer journey across platforms, optimize spend and prove the impact of advertising with longevity and flexibility.