BVOD – the ultimate reach extender

Published mumbrella.com.au

Trying to get more reach? Here’s the answer you’ve been searching for.

Television has long been the king of reach. For decades, the platform has boasted unrivalled audience coverage and today, the average Australian watches 2 hours and 27 minutes of linear television per day as TV reaches almost 19 million Australians each week.

TV audiences remain incredibly valuable to brands. Where else could you put your product in front of a national audience of 2.6 million people – all watching the drama unfold live – as they did earlier this year when they tuned in to the finale of Married at First Sight?

There’s no denying television is experiencing fragmentation of its audience. Technology has led to an explosion of screens where television content can be consumed. According to the 2018 OzTam Video Viewing Report, there are currently 6.6 screens in Aussie homes meaning anyone can tune in anywhere, anytime whether that’s watching live linear TV in the lounge room, live-streaming on a phone or catching up on missed programs on any device.

And research shows that in today’s ‘TV is everywhere’ world, a combination of TV platforms is the ultimate way to maximise reach for your campaign. As part of ThinkTV’s research piece, The Benchmark Series, Professor Karen Nelson-Field established that advertisers looking to add a second channel to extend the reach of TV campaigns should look no further than Broadcaster Video on Demand (BVOD).

The research found that brands extending TV reach with BVOD see more than twice the sales impact compared to brands that combine broadcast TV with social video platforms such as YouTube and Facebook. This is because the inventory on BVOD generates more attention than inventory on social video. As the Benchmark research has consistently found, attention is key to generating a sales response, something that shouldn’t be forgotten in the cut and thrust of securing a better CPM.

BVOD also has the power to extend the reach of a campaign against some of the most popular broadcast content. Take the previous example of Married at First Sight. From this year’s stand out season, 17 episodes have attracted an OzTam Video Player Measurement (VPM) audience of more than 300,000 across a 28-day ratings window. And well after the final episode was broadcast on April 8, the program is still pulling in viewers. In the last seven days alone, it generated more than 300,000 minutes of viewing.

The story is consistent across the network broadcaster landscape for shows including House Rules, My Kitchen Rules, Home and Away, MasterChef and Bachelor in Paradise. All of this professionally produced, premium content continues to generate viewing well after its initial broadcast date.

And this is only going to increase as BVOD continues to break records left, right and centre from total minutes to most audience for a show. Since OzTam began measuring BVOD in 2016, the medium has experienced rapid growth of 63% year-on-year with an increase in viewing to almost 3 billion minutes per month. That’s the same as watching every one of the 13 Star Wars movies back to back, 16 times.

Based on this data, BVOD should be given due consideration in media plans involving digital video, either as a reach extender or as a sizable reach provider in its own right.

Complementing broadcast reach with BVOD is soon to be supported by a vastly improved measurement process driven by the introduction of Virtual Australia or VOZ, a database developed by OzTAM that combines broadcast viewing on TV sets and connected devices.

The opportunity is obvious for many advertisers, with more than 500 new brands from categories including auto, retail and FMCG advertising on BVOD in the past year. If your brand isn’t among them, perhaps it’s worth asking why.