How do on-demand commercials work?
December 26, 2020 2:36 PM Subscribe
During the holiday weekend, my wife and I watched One Night Only: The Best of Broadway via On Demand on Verizon. It originally aired December 10. Every single commercial was "The More You Know," a type of PSA with NBC talent. It got annoying after a while, but I couldn't believe no company was paying to advertise to us.
When the 3-hour special originally aired, on a weeknight on a broadcast network, there must have been real commercials. So why wasn't there a single one two weeks later? Did no advertisers think anyone would watch the special? It's timeless; just Broadway performances, so it wouldn't be "dated" a month or even three months later. Was it some kind of Verizon glitch? Did NBC not want any commercials for on-demand? Wouldn't they lose money?
I don't know how TV advertising works, so I'm hoping someone else has some insight.
When the 3-hour special originally aired, on a weeknight on a broadcast network, there must have been real commercials. So why wasn't there a single one two weeks later? Did no advertisers think anyone would watch the special? It's timeless; just Broadway performances, so it wouldn't be "dated" a month or even three months later. Was it some kind of Verizon glitch? Did NBC not want any commercials for on-demand? Wouldn't they lose money?
I don't know how TV advertising works, so I'm hoping someone else has some insight.
I have had hulu-with-ads off and on, and watch some IMDB-with-ads via Amzn Prime. For a while, Hulu was crappy at using my bandwidth, and during this time would serve me the same ads over and over, presumable from cached data. They are slightly better now, time out less often, serve a wider variety of ads. If I binge for quite a while, over several hours (usually middle of the night when I can't sleep) I will stop getting ads, or get far fewer.
IMDB serves up a limited group of ads as well.
Both services serve ads when I restart a show because I fell asleep. I'm not trying to skip ads by clicking 15 minutes ahead, I'm trying to get close to where I fell asleep. but, sure, play that ad again.
Internet-served ads convince me of the stupidity of advertisers, the avarice of ad sellers. On the rare occasions that an ad is interesting, it's not possible to rewind it. And ads on broadcast tv and the web are not captioned, which seems foolish.
posted by theora55 at 3:01 PM on December 26, 2020 [2 favorites]
IMDB serves up a limited group of ads as well.
Both services serve ads when I restart a show because I fell asleep. I'm not trying to skip ads by clicking 15 minutes ahead, I'm trying to get close to where I fell asleep. but, sure, play that ad again.
Internet-served ads convince me of the stupidity of advertisers, the avarice of ad sellers. On the rare occasions that an ad is interesting, it's not possible to rewind it. And ads on broadcast tv and the web are not captioned, which seems foolish.
posted by theora55 at 3:01 PM on December 26, 2020 [2 favorites]
I don't know the answer to this either but I had the same question when streaming Investigation Discovery -- for the past several weeks I am getting the same commercial, and only that commercial, and the commercial appears to have no relationship to the channel (it's for some kind of customer support service, I think? I seem to have done a good job scrubbing it from my memory).
posted by sm1tten at 6:32 PM on December 26, 2020
posted by sm1tten at 6:32 PM on December 26, 2020
Aleyn has a very good summary of the basics, although some broadcasters are seeking to further tie together broadcast and streaming inventory, NBC being one of them. Technically they can't necessarily deliver by algorithm in all places yet, but they are trying to build that functionality, and in the interim, they sometimes still sell commercial time that can be delivered anywhere as long as it hits the audience targets the advertiser wants - a live broadcast, a video on demand viewing, or even ahead of watching a video on one of their owned internet properties - and they manually just set it up in multiple places. The advertiser in this case doesn't get guaranteed locations or times, but guaranteed audience segments and the advertiser only gets a sense of where their ad delivered after it runs.
When an advertiser buys the time, they can purchase against audience targets that vary from extremely broad to highly specific - literally you can have no targeting restrictions and just buy time anywhere, or you could add things like gender, age range, location, etc, with each additional layer of specificity making the cost of the ad time more expensive. Another thing you can pay to control for is frequency i.e. the number of times the same ad will deliver to a person or within a time frame. This also makes the commercial time more expensive.
Another thing to consider is what is called house ads. House ads are ads that the owner of the broadcast time creates to advertise their own products and services utilizing the commercial or ad inventory they control. An example of this could be when you are watching the ABC nightly news and you see an ad for the bachelor - ABC owns the bachelor, so they may have a set amount of ad time the other networks they own have to give to the bachelor to launch the new season and help make it successful. They also could have bought the time - this happens too, where an ad budget buys time from the parent company - but a lot of it is gifted/set aside when it's owned by the same network. This might have been what you saw with the PSA, especially since it had NBC talent in it. They often create special spots of that kind with network talent, because they theoretically feel more "integrated" and less like a traditional commercial (how true that is to the audience is debatable).
My guess is you saw a house ad, and it was put in rotation without any frequency limiters or audience specifics, as house ad inventory is often the less desirable time that wasn't able to be sold to an outside advertiser.
posted by amycup at 2:04 PM on December 27, 2020 [2 favorites]
When an advertiser buys the time, they can purchase against audience targets that vary from extremely broad to highly specific - literally you can have no targeting restrictions and just buy time anywhere, or you could add things like gender, age range, location, etc, with each additional layer of specificity making the cost of the ad time more expensive. Another thing you can pay to control for is frequency i.e. the number of times the same ad will deliver to a person or within a time frame. This also makes the commercial time more expensive.
Another thing to consider is what is called house ads. House ads are ads that the owner of the broadcast time creates to advertise their own products and services utilizing the commercial or ad inventory they control. An example of this could be when you are watching the ABC nightly news and you see an ad for the bachelor - ABC owns the bachelor, so they may have a set amount of ad time the other networks they own have to give to the bachelor to launch the new season and help make it successful. They also could have bought the time - this happens too, where an ad budget buys time from the parent company - but a lot of it is gifted/set aside when it's owned by the same network. This might have been what you saw with the PSA, especially since it had NBC talent in it. They often create special spots of that kind with network talent, because they theoretically feel more "integrated" and less like a traditional commercial (how true that is to the audience is debatable).
My guess is you saw a house ad, and it was put in rotation without any frequency limiters or audience specifics, as house ad inventory is often the less desirable time that wasn't able to be sold to an outside advertiser.
posted by amycup at 2:04 PM on December 27, 2020 [2 favorites]
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Streaming looks more like other internet advertising where you have a pool of ads and a pool of places to show them and The Algorithm matches up one to the other based on various signals the ad service might have for figuring out an optimal match, including what an advertiser is willing to pay for the slot. Since it's an entirely different pool with entirely different price structures, you're pretty much guaranteed to see different ads (unless the advertisers and broadcaster have worked out a very specific deal in advance, which I've honestly never heard of happening). Not only that, but you might see different ads from someone else that's streaming the same show since the algorithm will likely use whatever ad personalization signals it has available to it. And since these companies kind of make their algorithm inscrutable in the first place it's generally difficult to say exactly why you were shown an ad you saw.
posted by Aleyn at 2:56 PM on December 26, 2020 [2 favorites]