In this edition of Sell-Side View, VideoWeek spoke with Dev Sangani, director of capabilities at Sky. In this interview Sangani discusses the impact of the industry’s privacy shifts on long-tail media businesses, the need for buyers to understand the tradeoffs that come with asking for more from the sell-side, and why Sky is looking beyond the concept of platforms.
What is the greatest challenge facing broadcasters today?
The context for the broadcast industry is changing quite a lot. There’s so much more competition for people’s time, and our customers expect to have a much more seamless and frictionless experience than they’ve ever had before, where it’s easier to get into the content they love. And there’s almost a low attention span from audiences in some senses. If you don’t like something, you can move onto something else very quickly.
So, from a broadcaster’s perspective, you really need to have meaningful engagement with your audience, and to make their experience simple and easy so that they spend a lot of time with you.
At Sky, we’re doing lots of different things and lots of innovation around that. That includes: working to have better content recommendations; investing significantly in content; and even having all the different platforms available via our set-top box – where it’s very easy to access the likes of Amazon Prime, Disney+, Netflix, and Discovery+.
So, the key thing for us is to have all the content audiences love easily accessible in one place.
Which ad tech vendors are delivering the most value to your business?
What’s really important to us as a premium broadcaster is that we want to ensure that our environment is better than any other environment out there. And we want to make sure that all the rules we apply around consumer experience and quality still continue to exist as we move to a more automated and programmatic world. Plus, we also want to make sure we’re continuously innovating.
So, it’s those partners who are operating in lots of different spaces but understand the requirements of Sky and of premium broadcasters, who are very valuable. Companies like FreeWheel and Landmark are working very closely with us around One Campaign – helping transform the TV industry by connecting our linear and on-demand audiences. And we’re working even more with data and addressable – so there are many players in there.
But I’d say Landmark and FreeWheel are key to our business, and we’re working quite heavily with TVBeat on data now as well.
If you could change one thing about the buy-side, what would it be?
I think at the broadest level, a lot of the focus over this last couple of years has been about driving down price. I think we need to look at how we can move away from focussing just on one metric, and also be looking at outcomes and the quality of the media as well.
We all want more automation, more flexibility and shorter A/Bs, but there has to be more give and take. For example, where people are pushing for shorter and more flexible A/Bs, that’s possible, but the quality might be different. If buyers want more innovation around things like addressability and shoppability, then we need to talk about prices and how we incentivise that innovation.
So, I would love to see more of a culture of partnership and collaboration between the buy and sell-side.
Do you think the demise of the cookie and privacy will help or hinder broadcasters?
The first thing I’d want to say is that the industry is moving in the right direction. I think the value exchange that we have with consumers has probably tilted the wrong way. And in some senses Tim Cook’s statement that the consumer has almost become the product themselves is right.
So, I think it’s good that we are starting to move to a more transparent world where consumers feel they have more control of their data.
Obviously, in a world where data has become even more scarce and the quality of that data becomes even more important, that puts even more power in the hands of those with significant direct-to-consumer relationships and scale. Facebook, Google and Amazon are the companies you tend to think of, because they have those relationships across the board.
But I don’t think it’s game over for the broadcasters. I think there needs to be more collaboration between us, and conversations between platform owners like BT, Virgin, and Sky, and broadcasters like ITV and Channel 4. Sky is lucky as we sit across both those areas and have significant consumer relationships; and there are things we can do in the digital space where we actually start to have some advantages.
What I worry about goes beyond just the broadcasters, and that’s the smaller-scale long tail media – which is heavily reliant on ad-funding. I think the value of that inventory is going to decline, and that business model is going to be more and more challenged. And if you don’t have scale, you become more reliant on the parties that do have scale, in order to be able to monetise.
What is your company’s strongest USP?
As a business, we want to be the leading direct-to-consumer media and entertainment company. We are making everything simpler and easier from a consumer perspective, where you get everything in one place – top level sports, award winning entertainment, content from Netflix and Amazon. Whatever it might be, we have it all.
We’ve been investing in our own content, and have doubled our content investment to £1 billion, with 125 Sky Original shows set to be released this year which is 50% more than 2020. And I think we’ve got the best content discovery and some pretty cool stuff you can do with voice [activation] – where you can ask your set-top box “what should I be watching?” and it will pop up on your screen.
But then from an advertising perspective, again, we’re trying to make it as simple as possible for advertisers. So, with One Campaign they can join up fragmented audiences across on-demand and linear, and with CFlight they can use one measurement standard – and we’re working closely with Channel 4 and ITV for that. We’re also testing formats like Shoppable and pause ads, and looking to transform the measurement side as well – to directly link when someone has watched an advert and then taken actions on the brand’s app or website.
I think at Sky we always want to be better and keep moving forward, and that’s what really makes us special.
Which content types and ad formats are working best for you today?
We’ve been really fortunate that over the last several years we’ve invested heavily in advanced advertising, and that’s been one of our shining stars which has continued to grow even during the pandemic.
On the linear side, sport continues to be amazing content that people engage with, and we’re winning more and more awards for our content at Sky. It’s been amazing to see the pivotal role TV has played for the nation over the last year, keeping us all connected, informed and entertained. As well as winning Broadcast Channel of the Year Channel 5’s reach and performance has been doing incredibly well. So, we’ve been performing very well on the linear side.
Then looking at our more advanced products, our on-demand offering has been very successful. I think we’ve got the lightest ad loads out there in the industry, and our 60-second mid rolls are getting incredible cut-through and recall.
And AdSmart continues to go from strength to strength, with a combination of loyal advertisers who have stuck with us for six years, and new smaller advertisers who are coming to TV it for the first time. Over the entire industry, 46% of all new TV to advertisers last year came to TV because of AdSmart,
And lastly digital has been growing at an insane rate, whether that’s advertising on our own website or our distribution via YouTube.
Which platforms are working best for you in terms of distribution, engagement and revenue generation?
From an advertising perspective, we’re trying to shrink down the concept of platforms. That’s the entire point of One Campaign. We don’t want advertisers to worry about which platforms they need to use to find the right audiences. We want to simplify it and say, for example, if you want to reach 16-34y/o males, we’ll join that together for you seamlessly across the different platforms.
In terms of where we’re seeing more money coming in, some of the performance applications that you can do in the advanced advertising space have been growing significantly. And some of the bits and pieces where you can get the reach and frequency you actually want in an addressable manner, and pick up the light viewers, or reactivate audiences, or extend reach across different platforms, those have been growing very well for us.
So, we really want to stop talking about platforms and start talking about audiences – but we have been seeing some really interesting use cases beneath that.
What does the future hold for broadcasters?
I think whoever can build something that allows individuals to find and engage with the content they love in the simplest way is probably going to win.
We’re seeing so much fragmentation now that it’s becoming really difficult for audiences. They don’t know where they need to go for the content they want. And we’re almost seeing a world where if you can aggregate all this content and have it in a beautiful, simple, seamless UI, as well as having your own content, you’re going to have a bright future.
