How important is advertising for consumers?

Recent discoveries have challenged the widely accepted idea that users naturally appreciate and engage more with well-tailored marketing. Evan Shapiro, CEO of ESHAP, discusses this topic with Smriti Sharma, Consumer Insights Manager at Publishers Clearing House, and Matt Farina, Senior Vice President of Content Distribution at NBCUniversal, in this Streaming Media Connect 2023 video.

Many companies have heavily invested in the personalization of their products in recent years. But when we conducted the study, 54% of people did not care about ad personalization, 35% did not appreciate personalization, and only 11% liked personalization. So, even though the vast majority of people didn’t care, they would watch the ads if they wanted to or skip them, but personalization itself wasn’t something they cared about—which was surprising.

How important is personalized advertising in streaming?

Personalized advertising is still important, but it’s not the only approach to optimize the user experience. Scale is essential, he says, but even more important is “making it easier for buyers to transact on our inventory.”

“There are many things that come into play here, but when it comes to personalization—beyond data and crafting an ad for a single user—there are all these improvements where we can use advertising opportunities to delight the consumer. Things like ‘pause ads’...”

What are pause ads in streaming?

Pause ads are advertisements that appear when you pause the TV to grab a drink or something else. In the background, you see a card that represents a brand experience, which is essentially an ad space. It’s a new and interesting technique to avoid ad disintermediation. It’s somewhat similar to the first-screen experience. Samsung gets a huge advantage from this, but in my opinion, Roku doesn’t benefit as much.