Leaders in the entertainment marketing and advertising space gathered for the Variety Innovation in TV Brunch, presented by Google TV, at Cannes Lions to discuss how the TV landscape is changing.
Shalini Govil-Pai, vice president and general manager, Google TV said the TV business is in the middle of the “connected TV decade” in which TVs now offer a wide mix of content. For Google TV, that means trying to figure out what each individual consumer wants to watch. “Google TV is all about bringing together content from all streaming apps in a way that’s personalized for you. So Candice likes to watch a lot of sports. We probably have a lot of sports for her. I like a lot of Bollywood, so a lot of Bollywood shows show up in my stream. And so it makes it easier for me to find the content and then get to the apps that I want to directly in a very quick and easy manner,” she said.
And TV now includes short-form content, as seen in the rising popularity of YouTube Shorts and TikTok. “Shortform is a big wave that’s coming. Social is a big wave that’s coming. And then of course from the Google perspective, AI is another big wave that’s coming,” Govil-Pai said.
Nicole Parlapiano, chief marketing officer at Tubi, said that her company is integrating short-form content into its mobile app “so that people can see clips of what we have save for later to watch on their CTV.”
As short-form content continues to grow, brands are also taking user-generated content seriously as a way to boost engagement. “It’s not just about passively consuming content. Actually, if you really want to motivate a fandom, you want them out there doing stuff as well,” Nicki Sheard, head of licensing and brand, BBC Studios, said.
But the executives also noted that over-personalization should be avoided. Govil-Pai said too much personalization leads to a “rabbit hole” in which people are only offered a certain kind of content. She emphasized the importance of making sure people are exposed to different recommendations.
Josh Mattison, executive vice president of digital revenue and operations for Disney Advertising, echoed the risks of over-personalization within advertising as well: “You can get too narrow too quickly and miss out what the bigger opportunity is…there’s actually clusters of you and there’s probabilistic data versus deterministic data. And that becomes a real transformation in the advertising business where you’re not just getting to the precision of that one person, you’re trying to get the clusters of people that might be like that.”
