The Streaming Ad Experience is Only Getting More Un-Bearable
Plus, I found the worst sports app on TV
Amazon is ramping up its streaming ad load, as is Warner Discovery, and all these FAST channels that supposedly people watch.
While adding to the clutter - and inching the streaming experience dangerously closer to the days of basic cable - you might think that all this new inventory would at least increase the variety of advertising one sees on TV.
That coupled with this supposed wave of new-to-TV advertisers - at least we’ll stop seeing the same ads again and again, right?
But alas, not even close. If anything, things are getting worse:
My wife and I recently binged the Hulu drama “Paradise” - and were bombarded with the same handful of pharma ads, even though I’m actually too old to worry about HPV, and have no need for SKYRIZI.
A few weeks ago, I rewatched “The Office” on Peacock. At least there, we saw what I believe was a smaller, local advertiser - New York Presbyterian Hospital. We saw that ad so many times that by the end, I was actually rooting for heart disease.
Then, last week, season four of “The Bear” hit Hulu. It’s one of my favorites, and my wife and I watched the whole season in two sittings. How many times did I see the ad for Jeremy Allen White’s role in the Springsteen movie? Kill me Chef.
That ad at least made sense in terms of synergy - but the other ads- Eczema again - were just relentlessly irritating.
Just last night, my wife and I binged season 2 of “1923” on Paramount+, and were hit with the same jarring Dunkin ad again and again.
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During a Beet TV panel I moderated in Cannes, Lori Goode, chief marketing officer at Index Exchange, talked about how the industry appears to have gotten too far ahead of its capabilities, and that so much of the ad tech in CTV has been retrofitted from the web/display world. If that’s true, it shows.
The thing is, all we hear about are the big investments the media companies and tech investments have made in this realm. In the case of Peacock, it’s parent company owns the TV ad server Freewheel.
As for Hulu - if anyone should be good at this, it’s these guys. Not only has Hulu been delivering streaming video ads for close to 20 years, it’s part of Disney, which has touted its ad tech, audience graph, proprietary ID, and billions poured into BAM. In this case, I was logged into Hulu, and have been a subscriber for multiple years!
It seems clear to me that while CTV ad tech companies may not be able to do all they say they can. But the bigger issue is that the media giants don’t seem to care. They’ll take the money and hope consumers don’t rebel, or won’t remember how bad these experiences are over time. I think that’s a mistake. This is Disney after all! The company that cares so much about customer experience that it calls its theme park workers “cast members.” I’m assuming that CEO Bob Iger is spending his days worried about Pixar, not Hulu’s frequency issues. But maybe he should?
As for the CTV business itself, we so often hear about how X streaming service has a ‘special’ ad experience because it knows when people are binging. I have never encountered this. We constantly here about how this tech vendor or measurement partner can help brands manage frequency across platforms. At a certain point, the entire ecosystem starts to lose credibility. Why would you believe the next company promising to make this stuff better?
The Worst Streaming App in Sports Resides in New York
On a recent episode of Next in Media, I talked to Canvas CEO Paul Woolmington about the increasing (if that’s possible) importance of live sports in the media and ad ecosystem, as evidenced by the NFL delivering a game from Brazil on YouTube. Woolmington said his team had put together a chart detailing how there are now seven different streamers offering live sports, ad landscape that will only become more complicated once next year’s NBA deal kicks off on NBCU, Disney and Amazon.
This is great for the leagues, but it’s unquestionable worse for fans. It’s been well-chronicled how much more this is costing sports lovers, and it’s also super challenging to find games. Plus, the inability to flip back and forth between channels (cable, I miss you!) is brutal.
But it doesn’t get any worse than Gotham Sports App.
I recently decided to ditch cable for YouTube TV, since I can now get Knicks and Yankees games via the recently launched Gotham app. I began to regret this move very quickly.
Gotham is basically a combined streaming service for the cable networks Yes (owned by the Yankees) and MSG (owned by Madison Square Garden). Not only did it start cutting out for me during a Knicks playoff game, but there are times when it simply doesn’t launch. I’m told that my three year old LG TV may be part of the problem, which doesn’t exactly make for a great consumer experience.
But here’s the kicker. A few months ago, I was watching a Knicks playoff game on TNT on a night when the Yankees were playing the Mets. It was the first time that Juan Soto was going to be batting at Yankee Stadium after jumping from the Mets to the Yankees.
I wanted to quickly flip over to the Knick game to catch Soto’s at-bat, so I jumped to the Gotham App - and was greeted by - a pre-roll.
I ended up missing most of the Soto appearance (thanks VRBO!) And then came to realize that every time I turn on a game on Gotham, I’m subjected to a pre-roll - just to get into the app! Imagine not being able to log into Netlix, Hulu, or Disney+ - a service you pay for - without first sitting through an ad. Or flipping to a cable channel and being hit by an ad before you could tune in.
Talk about a terrible way to treat paying customers - particularly sports fans, who kinda care about watching moments live, in a timely fashion. And we’re not talking about some startup here. Gotham is the product of THE NEW YORK YANKEES - valued at $8.2 billion by Forbes. How much extra cash are the making from these VRBO ads? Not enough to get a real third basemen apparently. The other partner in Gotham is MSG Sports, which is valued at $6 billion. It’s not clear how much they’ve spent on Gotham, but right now, it’s an embarrassment.