Why TV should play the performance game
Partner content
Television advertising’s growth problem is not what most people think it is. The common assumption is that Meta, Google and Amazon have been taking money from TV budgets. Broadpeak’s Julien Boyreau, advertising business developer at the French streaming technology company, disagrees.
“TV is a little bit stuck in what we call an innovator’s dilemma,” he tells The Media Leader‘s Jack Benjamin at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity. The industry has continued to serve the same agency-led brand advertisers it has always worked with, while the platforms built something different: a new market of ecommerce and app-commerce advertisers who have largely never bought TV and may never do so in the traditional sense.
Broadpeak’s mission is to bring those advertisers to television for the first time.
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New inventory, not cannibalised inventory
One obstacle has been economic: performance advertising typically commands lower eCPMs than brand advertising, so if both compete for the same inventory, performance advertising loses. Broadpeak’s response has been to create genuinely new inventory rather than divert existing supply.
Three sources are in scope: overlay formats such as L-banners and pause ads in space no one is currently using; unfilled inventory in FAST channels, where low fill rates currently produce a poor viewer experience; and off-target linear addressable inventory identified through operator data.
The last is the largest opportunity. A significant proportion of linear advertising reaches the wrong audience, and that wasted inventory is effectively unsold. Broadpeak’s spot-to-spot product redirects it to performance campaigns without displacing existing brand buys. Broadcasters, Boyreau argues, have nothing to lose.
The leanback principle
On ad formats, Boyreau draws on eight years spent trying to make shoppable television work and is direct about what does not work.
“Rule number one: TV is a leanback experience,” he says. Highly interactive formats that require viewers to browse product carousels or enter payment details on-screen have consistently failed.
The approach that works is minimum viable engagement: a single click sends a product link to the viewer’s phone for later consideration, rather than pulling them out of the viewing experience.
“What we call click to phone, so send to phone and click to cart, that is add to cart. For me, it’s very, very powerful,” he says. Telcos are a particular advantage, with an existing link between television and mobile numbers that enables SMS-based follow-up without additional friction.
Two games at once
Boyreau is clear that the performance opportunity does not come at the expense of brand advertising, which he sees as structurally secure. Television remains the most effective brand-building medium available, and the brands that have built decades of share of voice through it are not about to abandon it.
The opportunity is additive. By unlocking inventory that would otherwise go to waste, broadcasters can serve performance and brand advertisers simultaneously.
“We really have nothing to lose but to play the two games at once,” he says. His expectation for H2 is the first live deployments of Broadpeak’s click-to product, delivering proof that genuinely incremental performance demand can be brought to television and that the growth the platforms have long enjoyed is within TV’s reach.
This podcast was recorded at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity in partnership with Broadpeak.