For any product, the aspirational path to “premium” often requires packaging that befits its lofty ambitions. This holds true for TV as much as it does for high-end liquor.
Once upon a time, a spirits maker crafted a clever bit of product packaging that drove the acceptance of its brand’s newly articulated “super premium” positioning. The trick was making the bottle too tall for anywhere but the top shelf.
What does “premium” look like on the video side? Historically, it was brought to consumers by brands like HBO and Showtime, and its benefits came down to uninterrupted viewing of a catalog of desirable content.
On the media side, we think of things differently: Premium video means just about anything that shows up in front of a consumer. There is some dithering about screen size, production values and format. But for the most part, we haven’t been particularly clear to media buyers about what “premium” means. This isn’t good for buyers and really isn’t good for sellers. Isn’t it time for a better definition?
A lost decade
The story of just how inconsistent we have been about what a “premium video” label genuinely connotes is notable. In 2013, one video-focused news publisher tried to get an answer by interviewing media people, and the diversity of responses was striking.
One suggested premium can be defined by its duration, that professionally produced “long-form” content from a “known source” is the baseline. Another replied that their client believed that anything their consumers watched is premium because their engagement with the content elevates it to that level.
By 2016, the IAB came at the problem through a predictable lens. Viewability, engagement and brand safety were called out as the key criteria for media buyers. None of this is inaccurate. It’s all very rational and only slightly self-serving. However, it remains more subjective than any useful definition should be, given that the metrics for any of these criteria are still debated.
This has forced a reckoning for publishers, programmatic intermediaries and buyers to come to terms around what “premium” really means and how to ensure video investment levels are appropriately decided.
Back to booze
What ultimately differentiated the spirits brand mentioned earlier as “super premium” was its packaging.
Like the spirit brand that used packaging to define premium, publishers are using the same playbook to establish different tiers of video for the benefit of their media buying customers. Today, we see national TV networks standing next to upstart FAST channels, all claiming to have a definitive claim on what constitutes premium video and premium video ad placements.
CTV advertising growth has made it clear that screen size matters for impact, engagement, recall and outcomes. Brands are making decisions around “premium” on the advice of their agencies, who are in turn being lobbied by programmers to include their wares in the premium column so it seems worthy of the additional cost. The $60 CPM for Netflix direct-sold CTV inventory affirms this trend.
After more than 10 years of trying, we seem to be accepting that if we wrap it up in a new package, give it a new name and put it right where our buyers see it first as a shiny new option, this will suffice as premium. Perhaps this is true, and it allows both buyers and sellers of video to come to terms with the premium label based on good old-fashioned market dynamics. But we may be allowing ourselves to be led instead of leading, following where we should be innovating.
Aligning on a definition
Eventually advertisers will develop their own rules for determining premium video to which both buyers and sellers will have to abide. A good start may be for the industry to agree that premium video has to be of a minimum length, available on a minimum screen size at a minimum resolution and be available on a delivery platform that is also defined as premium.
But, according to the definition above, a user-generated short video on a connected TV only meets one of these three criteria.
As the business of video advertising continues to change and mature, we should want to be more accountable to our customers about what we’re selling to them and provide legitimate and convincing arguments for the labels we are placing on our wares. The risk of not taking this opportunity today may set us on a path toward another lost decade.
“On TV & Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video.
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