The internet allows advertisers and ad insertion platforms to collect valuable consumer data. Access to this information enables personalized advertising experiences, allowing advertisers to display users with specific ads that match their interests and needs.
Personalized ads are available on most digital advertising real estate, but they are becoming increasingly crucial in video streaming. Video broadcasters can enhance the user experience by serving personalized ads that viewers find relevant.
In this article, we will discuss everything you need to know about personalized ads in video streaming. We will explain ad personalization, its effectiveness, and how to deploy a personalized ad strategy in your streaming content.
What is ad personalization?
Ad personalization is an advertising technique that curates ads to users based on their presumed or observed preferences. This approach to advertising helps to improve the success of ad campaigns since it presents more relevant products to viewers.
For example, personalized advertising enables a media publisher to serve makeup ads for demographics who consume beauty content or hardware store ads to demographics who show interest in home improvement.
By creating a more personalized advertising experience, brands can get more targeted in their advertising, and media publishers can enhance their viewer experience.
Are personalized ads effective?
Personalized ads are often more effective than generic ads because they promote items or offers relevant to the specific viewer. Personalization can improve revenue from advertisements by up to 25%, and personalized video ads can create an even more engaging experience.
In addition to boosting sales, personalized video ads are great for fostering brand awareness. Your ads will either expose your brand to prospective customers for the first time or target people who are already familiar with it. Either way, this exposure is valuable for getting attention for your brand.
Downsides of ad personalization
Although personalized ads are effective, they also come with drawbacks.
A notable downside of personalized ads is that many consumers are aware they are only made possible through the collection of personal data. The fact that a media publisher can serve personalized ads means that they’ve gotten access to data that users may feel is private.
This privacy concern is significant for some people, but most have come to accept it as a regular part of internet use. With that said, this concern is not substantial enough for most brands and media publishers to opt out of advertising, but it’s worth keeping in mind if your audience is sensitive to this sort of thing.
Some localized legislation, such as the GDPR in Europe, requires data protection in order to respect individuals’ preferences regarding how their data is used. This can hinder broadcasters’ ability to successfully execute ad personalization in some instances.
How do personalized ads work?
Ad personalization uses data about consumers’ identity and preferences to anticipate what products or brands specific viewers might be interested in. The advertiser or ad insertion solution can collect or purchase the data for personalizing ads. This data is collected with a special tool called cookies.
Also known as pixels, cookies are snippets of code meant to monitor consumers’ behavior. This code travels with them from site to site to collect data on their searches. Cookies also track shopping behavior, ranging from items added to the cart to successful shopping trips.
Types of ad personalization
Ads can be personalized based on different categories of data collected. The top types of ad personalization include:
- Demographic personalization: Ads are personalized by demographic information such as age, gender, occupation, marital status, and so forth
- Behavior-based personalization: Ads are curated based on observed online activity, such as shopping history, web browsing history, social activity, and more
- Context-based personalization: Ads are personalized based on situational context, such as the location, weather, and time
- Predictive personalization: Ad servers use machine learning and data analytics to serve relevant ads
Retargeting is another essential tool for personalizing ads, but it differs slightly from the personalization techniques covered above. Retargeting sends ads to customers who have previously interacted with a brand’s content or visited their site. This approach tends to be very effective.
How to incorporate personalized ads in video streaming
Now that you understand how personalized ads work and why they are valuable for media publishers, let’s look at the three steps for incorporating personalized ads into your video streaming workflow.
1. Create a strategy
Creating a strategy is the first step to implementing personalized ads in your video content. At this stage, consider how advertising fits into your video monetization strategy.
For some broadcasters, advertising is the entire monetization strategy. However, most incorporate personalized advertising into a broader approach that uses other monetization methods, including subscriptions, pay-per-view, live commerce, and sponsorships.
Typically, broadcasters and media publishers lean into ad-supported content to generate revenue while keeping their content accessible to viewers. In this case, viewers pay for their content with their time by watching short ads. Paywall-based monetization methods, such as subscriptions or pay-per-view, are helpful if your audience prefers ad-free content.
2. Integrate an advertising solution
An advertising solution is key to serving personalized ads to your viewers. The solution must be able to serve personalized ads and work with your streaming workflow.
Consider which ad insertion method you’d like to use as you compare solutions. Three methods are available: Server-Guided Ad Insertion (SGAI), Server-Side Ad Insertion (SSAI), and Client-Side Ad Insertion (CSAI).
SGAI is the most innovative and powerful of the three because it combines the strengths of the other two techniques. This ad-insertion technique is particularly valuable for live streaming since it can create an ad experience that plays alongside the video within the player rather than taking over the stream, causing interruptions. Plus, it supports personalization at scale without a significant cost increase.
Dolby OptiView provides a robust solution for creating personalized ad experiences for various use cases. Whether you deliver ads on streams in real time or monetize on-demand content, our solution is here for you. Contact us to learn more.
3. Test and launch
Once you’ve integrated your ad solution, you should test the experience to ensure it’s ready for launch. Identifying any snags in the system before you launch your ad-supported content is essential.
If you’re deploying a cross-platform video strategy, your testing should assess as many combinations of devices and browsers as possible. Of course, this can become quite a heavy lift, so start with the most popular combinations among your viewer base.
After you’ve tested your workflow, it’s time to go live. Whether kicking off your first live stream or deploying a new monetization strategy for your streaming service, you’re ready to start serving personalized ads.
Final thoughts
Using personalized ads in your streaming content is an excellent way to create a more engaging experience, yielding better results for both media publishers and advertisers. Fortunately, serving personalized ads is made easy with innovative ad insertion technology, like the Dolby OptiView Ads.
Ready to start serving personalized ads on your streaming service? Dolby OptiView is here for you. Contact us to learn how our solution can fit into your streaming workflow to help you create more engaging experiences with ad-supported video content.
