e4m Martech India Bridge 1: 'Next 12-18 months will see significant investment on OTT'

In the past decade, tech giants like Google and Facebook managed to create a monopoly over viewer attention and advertising money. But now, there's been a discernible change in this norm. Digital advertisers have started investing heavily on OTT.

To decode the reason behind the change, exchange4media, under its ongoing webinar series Martech India Bridge 1, organized a Fireside Chat on the topic. Under the 'Let's Talk CX' webinar, Tarun Katial- CEO, ZEE5 India, and Maciej Zawadzinski: Founder Clearcode & CEO Piwik PRO discussed  'Collapsing Web Banner & 3rd Party Data While Shifting Ad Budgets to OTT.' The session was chaired by Nawal Ahuja: Co-founder & Director, exchange4media.

The discussion began with Ahuja posing a question to the panellists about the reason behind the changing digital landscape. Katial said, "The democratization of technology and platform is allowing this paradigm to change.”

Elaborating further, he said that OTT platforms have over 100 million users, with a significant amount of video consumption. According to him, “The picture started to change around 2-3 years ago when most broadcasters realized they couldn’t let OTT game be secondary and be played by either syndicating content to platforms like Netflix and Amazon Prime or putting their content on revenue share on a platform like YouTube.”

He added that broadcasters realized that they had to control their digital game and started building their own platforms. Once the platforms were in place, they started to witness a scaled-up consumption, which in turn made them realize that their investment behind analytics and ad tech was not enough.

“The next 12 to 18 months will see some significant investment on OTT for building up an independent networks in getting what they deserve and owning the end to end ad tech pipeline for themselves”, said Katial.

Adding to Katial's statement,  Zawadzinski said, "OTT has an advantage of creating grand experiences. It provides an end-to-end ad buying data analytics attribution.”

According to Zawadzinski, OTT is creating the first-party database with login details of the subscribers. In the future, there will be big reliance on first-party data. Some of the big publishers on web will no longer do the third party inventory selling. On OTT, by design, the users are identified. They log in with their ID and phone number, and therefore they are identified. The data is unlike the cookie data which can get lost if the user blocks it or cleaned their browser history.

“The advantage of OTT platform lies in it dealing with an identified user base. The tech giants and other digital platforms on the web use cookies, that’ll no longer be relevant in future”, he added.

He also said that OTT is the platform for big advertisements and identifies user requirements. There will be big data alliances for OTT in the near future.

Katial elaborated on how OTT players can overcome data deficit: “OTT platforms made a mistake in the beginning by allowing guest users without registration, and even after starting the registration process, they allowed users to forgo important information like date of birth and gender of the user.”

He added that now OTT platforms are correcting their mistakes and making every user register on the platforms. This opens up a huge first-party database. 

Zawadzinski further elaborated that forcing the users into giving data after they consumed information is a global trend.

“The advantage of login data is that it can’t be misplaced or lost. With cookie data, there were chances of it getting lost. Also, the data does not have to be sorted regularly, and can be done at once on a slow pace”, he added.

As per Katial, “The big advantage that OTT players have is that advertisers are used to buying ads on broadcast shows, but there they didn’t know what the typography and other attributes of users were. Now the same audience migrated from watching on TV to watching on OTT, advertisers will now know them on a one-on-one level. As more data flows in on OTT and advertisers get to know the audience better, and their ability to get more signals across the consumers with better results.”

He concluded by saying that, with first-hand data with the advertiser, they would be able to do the end to end optimisation themselves. “Our vision is to fully empower the advertiser in every way to be able to advertise on our platform, with minimal human intervention,” he said.