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Samsung Ads, after a six-month soft launch near the end of 2020, officially opened in Australia at the end of March 2021.
Samsung Ads’ advertising solutions are built on a unique source of TV data from Samsung Smart TVs. Samsung Ads provides the opportunity to connect linear, OTT, and gaming to help brands see the total advanced TV picture.
The managed service and programmatic offerings help to achieve incremental reach, compliment linear TV campaigns, manage frequency, find difficult-to-reach audiences and most importantly, measure outcomes.
When Alex Spurzem, general manager of Samsung Ads in Australia, began the brand’s rollout here, CTV was still in its infancy.
“I’m pretty sure I was able to count the number of advertising partners that we had around a year ago on one hand,” said Spurzem
“That’s now grown tenfold and and we’re now working directly with a raft of advertisers in almost an always-on capacity.
“We’ve struck up a bunch of partnerships, working with the major holding companies, all the broadcasters, and we’ve expanded our connectivity through SSPs.
“Magnite has also recently come on board as a partner to add Samsung CTV inventory to their programmatic media buy, which includes Samsung TV Plus, our free, ad-supported television service that comes pre-installed on all Samsung TVs.”
Spurzem said the local team has grown from just himself to around 30 people. This expansion is made up of ad sales, data scientists, operations, marketing and content acquisition related to Samsung TV Plus.
That partnership with Magnite adds to a growing list of partners for Samsung Ads, including Yahoo and PubMatic amongst others.
“From our point of view, programmatic brings a degree of convenience and automation that previously wasn’t present and was an inevitable and natural evolution of giving buyers more control.
“The underlying infrastructure in terms of programmatic has been quite helpful to the industry, so we try to marry that with the best of both worlds. It’s an execution layer for us, but it’s not a substitute for being close advisors and partners to our customers.”
The future of Connected TV, from a Samsung Ads perspective, has them bullish on more advertising-supported services, whether that’s free ad supported television or advertising-supported video on demand (VOD).
“We have a lot of insight in terms of what happens on Samsung Smart TVs. One of the things we’ve seen, according to Roy Morgan, is that the average smart TV in Australia is subscribed to 2.7 subscription services.
“I believe the average monthly digital entertainment budget for Australian households is around $55, so it seems that there’s a natural limitation to that. When you fold in things like rising interest rates, we think it will cap out at some point.”
Spurzem said that he sees connected TV creating both opportunity and challenges in terms of fragmentation and changing viewer behaviour.
“One of the things that’s happened over the last couple of years, probably assisted by the pandemic, is that consumers got incredibly comfortable with app-based television.
“Samsung has the largest smart TV data set in the industry. We work with a technology called automated content recognition (ACR) and one of the things we can do is help marketers and advertisers reach those consumers that are harder to reach now.”
ACR is a proprietary piece of technology that identifies content shown on a Samsung TV and matches that against their content database, whether it’s a show that’s watched on the TV, a video game that’s played or a particular ad that’s shown.
“When you do that deterministically as we do, across literally millions of TV sets, it unlocks a whole lot of different use cases: one of them being that you create visibility across the whole of the smart TV. This is the data that we go to an advertiser with and say, ‘Hey, how about we help you find all of those TVs that weren’t reached by your linear campaign?’”
Spurzem said that if you were to ask those in the industry about the problems with how TV has evolved, however, the majority would say that standardised measurement is tricky. Samsung Ads tries to be part of the solution with their deterministic data sets to enhance measurement capabilities.
“We’ve come from a place of having a unified currency to plan, buy and measure TV. That’s been the traditional panel-based systems that then get extrapolated on to the whole population in a world where TV is fragmented and a lot of it is digital.
“That kind of measurement isn’t in all cases as fit for purpose as it used to be. I think where that leaves us as an industry is that you now have a lot of experimenting with additional data and insights.”
Spurzem said that agencies that are at the forefront of that development and can navigate the degree of complexity that exists on behalf of their advertisers will add disproportionate amounts of value.
“Now, is that more complicated than it used to be? Yes, but there is also obviously a lot of innovation that comes with connected TV in terms of combining the best of television and the granularity of digital.
“I think over time that will get simpler. There’s no reason why you wouldn’t buy and measure television based on things like impressions or unique reach rather than TARPs.”
After a strong first half of the year, Spurzem said that Samsung Ads sees increased demand for the solutions that they bring to the table as they continue to educate the market about their offering.
With 76% of marketers in Australia looking to increase spend on CTV in 2022, and 76% of Australians willing to see ads in exchange for free quality content, Samsung Ads looks set for more growth in 2023.
Luke Fox - Head of Product and Partnerships Australia
What do you wish people better understood about Samsung Ads?
Really simply, it is our data. Our data is deterministic not probabilistic, it is not panel based. We are the market leader in ACR (Automatic Content Recognition) which is used to identify what is playing on the TV. We use this to derive viewership insights across linear, streaming, and gaming.
What do you like most about your role?
It is going to sound cliche, however it is the people I get to work with; not only our growing Samsung Ads team here locally, but also our global colleagues. Samsung Ads has done a fantastic job of building a company filled with not only smart but also great people to work with.
What are your key goals this year?
The big focus this year is to expand our platform partnerships in the Australian market and enhance and evolve the solutions which we bring to our advertising partners. We’re always working towards solves that provide a better local product & market fit.
Luke Carmichael - Head of Advertiser Partnerships
What is your one key goal for 2022?
Growth! For our advertising partners, our business, and also personally. Despite the challenges of the past couple of years it feels like now is the time to redress the balance and spread our wings. This is as true for Samsung Ads, as it’s true for our partners. My main focus will be on how we can deepen relationships, build out more robust insights and evolve our offering with our key partners in mind.
Have brands in Australia been quick enough to embrace Samsung Ads?
We have seen excellent up-take from content partners, which makes perfect sense in terms of driving viewership when consumers are in that perfect moment of discovery before deciding what to watch. However, there is a big job to be done more broadly around educating the industry and raising CTV awareness across other categories, which will be crucial for driving adoption.
Is there anything about Samsung Ads you’ve learnt since joining that surprised you?
For me it is almost a double ‘ah-ha’ moment in meetings, the first is when the client looks under the hood and can see just how deep we can go, and secondly when we can get a better understanding of their core business KPIs and how we can connect the two. That is when you know you have a win, win partnership.
Daniel Palmisano - Head of Business Development, Samsung TV Plus
What does a typical day look like for you?
I’d like to say it is reviewing and selecting content for Samsung TV Plus every day. But a lot of the groundwork is negotiating, drafting and reviewing licensing and commercial agreements. We’re also meeting with content providers and distributors both locally and internationally to see what’s new. A big component of this is looking at channel and genre performance, viewing time share and monthly active users on the platform.
What goals do you have for the next 12 months?
It is a quality not a quantity game. We want to expand premium content to drive viewership and awareness . A big focus is on well known, bingeable content and channels that engage viewers. We’re also in the process of a global re-brand of Samsung TV Plus to help establish its position as a free lean back TV service that Samsung TV owners can switch on. The next 12 months is about increasing our offering and giving channel distributors another avenue for eyeballs and revenue.
What’s the most challenging part of your role?
Launching the first FAST service in Australia was a great first mover advantage but it doesn’t come without complications. The biggest one being the perception and value of ad-funded TV services in comparison to other traditional content distribution models. But the growth and adoption has been strong here and if you just look to the US; they now have over 1,000+ FAST services and counting! We are seeing the tide change, as both consumers and distributors hit their tipping point for distribution and share of wallet.
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