THE EVOLUTION OF STREAMING: Insights for Advertisers on a Decade of Change and the Future of OTT

OVERVIEW

Streaming as we know it today has undergone a massive evolution, growing in importance for marketers throughout its rise to mainstream media. The viewing platform continues to grow as ad spend in the space is projected to surpass $10 billion in 2021, eMarketer predicts.

Once a nascent platform in the 2010s, streaming video platforms have matured technologically and grown to deliver engaged audiences at increased scale. The streaming marketplace is cluttered though, and laden with poor-quality, non-sophisticated platforms.

For marketers, working with streaming partners who are transparent in their advertising experience and house premium-quality video content is of the utmost importance when activating OTT (or “over-the-top”) campaigns. Even more essential is to incorporate streaming and OTT into a balanced media mix, inclusive of linear TV, in order to maximize reach to the intended audience.

Strategies that accommodate the overlap of how audiences are showing up in the video ecosystem—inclusive of streaming and more traditional platforms—are very important, or else you’ll miss or over-saturate consumers. More viewing will occur via streaming platforms over time, and many see it becoming the dominant way to view television content over the next decade. For OTT to thrive as a marketing channel and for streaming platforms to gain the economics they need to deliver premium content to their audiences, four dimensions of streaming will need to evolve: scale and unification, targeting, quality and audience measurement.

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