On A 'FAST' Train to Over Saturation in CTV?
There are suddenly too many CTV ads, and too many FASTs
Last week, PBS and Amazon announced a deal to bring 150 new FAST channels to the Amazon Prime service.
That brings the total number of free ad-supported, streaming channels in the US to 14,745,329.
Ok, so that number may be slightly inflated, but it does feel like that these days. If there’s anything I’ve been hearing from media buyers of late, it’s that:
After a few years of true scarcity, there is no shortage of 15 and 30-second spots in CTV
There are probably too many FASTs out there
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Considering that the CTV ad market was already upended earlier this year by:
Amazon turning on ads for millions of Prime subscribers
YouTube’s ascendancy on TV
Disney pushing down prices
The industry likely doesn’t need a flood of would be made for advertising streaming channels (no offense to PBS).
“In FAST, we’re seeing supply outpace demand,” said Ron Gutman, CEO Wurl, which helps power several FAST networks. “According to Wurl’s data, 2024 is showing noticeably lower fill rates than the previous three years, most likely due to this influx of inventory to the market.”
However, Wurl has found that FAST viewership was up 5% increase from Q3 2023 to Q3 2024, with average session length climbing by almost 7% during the same period.
Those consumption numbers are decent, but don’t seem to correlate with the overall growth in CTV, or the rate at which new FASTs are being rolled out. In my mind, there’s a reason none of these FASTs show up in Nielsen’s The Gauge report other than Tubi and Pluto.
Overall, this crowded market is making it harder for individual FASTs to stand out - and it’s not easy to begin with to market these channels, program them the right way, generate discovery, etc.
Take Fuse Media, a cable-born media company that now has seven FAST channels in the market, including Somos Novelas and El Rey Rebel, along with its own streaming service. I had Fuse Chief Business Officer Patrick Courtney on my podcast this week, who talked about how the multicultural media company was early in FAST, and how it’s evolved its strategy.
“It started with a lot of just sort of stringing together whatever programming you had and throwing that up,” he said. “And that's what we initially started with seven years ago. We had a channel called Fuse XL. And it was just like whatever we had lying around was stringing it together and just seeing what was going on.”
Just throwing stuff out there may have worked for a time, when the tech was new and the space less cluttered. But “pretty quickly, right around the pandemic when things really started to take off for free streaming TV, we started to [focus on] how we schedule this, how we program this, what actually matters to how the audience shows up and how they watch.”
That means borrowing lessons from linear, in terms of dayparts, lead-ins, channel flow, etc. However, there appear to be inherent limits, both in terms of viewer expectations, and what TV manufactures are capable of and willing to do with partners (something I’ve heard from other players in this space).
“I will say that FAST still primarily is a place where people go to find things that are familiar,” Courtney said. "It's to go to binge watch series or to watch studio titles that they've seen.”
“There is also a limited amount of information and data coming through as far as the content, the performance of the channels and what's working, who's watching it, that kind of thing,” he added. “[Until] we're able to start to measure these things and start to be a little bit more actionable [then] we can really achieve the potential that FAST has by programmers understanding their audiences and what's working there.”
Until then, we may be at a place where the TV manufacturers and streaming platforms need to either invest in more FAST support, or start saying no. Otherwise, we’re headed to a market of sameness, saturation, and major discovery problems.
“When you're talking about all these different fast platforms that you're distributing to and they all have their different priorities in the way that they want to do FAST based on their ecosystems, it creates a little bit of a challenging environment.”
Fuse is actually trying to bring some organization to this world through Culture Collective, something of an ad network for multicultural FAST content, which includes both Fuse brands and those of partners like Lionsgate and Tastemade.
Wurl’s Gutman would like to see more such collaboration, along with improved measurement and ad capabilities that go beyond 15s and 30s.
“To get more advertisers onboard with FAST will ultimately require greater transparency and accurate metadata that can attract high-quality, targeted advertising.”
Everything is Local
I recently chatted with Spectrum Reach’s Michael Guth about the ongoing push to get more local TV advertisers into CTV, as part of a video series on the subject produced in partnership with Blockgraph.
One of the more interesting points from this interview is the idea that local small businesses, the car dealers, the restaurants, etc., have more data than you might think.
“Small businesses are very curious and eager to experiment with TV advertising,” said Guth, CMO at Spectrum Reach. “The next step is to help them understand how to use the data they already have. Many small businesses have been using data for things like email campaigns or digital marketing, but now they can match that data with viewer data to unlock new opportunities and create more value.”
The other big hurdle here is obvious - creative. Many local businesses don’t have access or the ability to make splashy TV ads. Spectrum is working with a gen AI startup to help. “Small businesses still find it intimidating to create commercials,” he said. “That’s where we come in—we’ve trained our salesforce and have an in-house creative team that can quickly produce commercials for small businesses.”
Check out the full interview here: