Addressable TV extends its scope

Addressable TV used to be only available though SBS and Telenet. But Proximus recently made the option available, and RMB offered an access to the Proximus boxes that are enabled for this kind of campaigns. Now IP has announced to have reached an agreement with Proximus. It involves live and replay broadcasting.

At this stage, only Voo has no "addressable TV" option.

The extension of addressable TV to Proximus considerably expands the potential coverage. Table below shows the declared penetration of TV access providers at private household level. Worth noting that not all settopboxes are technically enabled to process addressable commercials and that the subscribers have the right to opt out. 

Brand Collabs Manager comes to Instagram

Facebook has opened its influencers platform Brand Collabs Manager to Instagram

As of mid-December, Instagram announced the opening of the platform, that already existed on Facebook, to 40 of its influencers. This huge database allows Facebook to connect Content creators (influencers) and brands looking to do some monetized “brand content”.

As Instagram is deleting the possibility to view the number of likes under a post, brands are left blind. Some tools are already available on the market (such as HypeAuditor) to evaluate the success of the influencers on Instagram, but Brand Collab Manager collects the certified numbers.

So far, the platform is only accessible for some brands and creators, with an objective to develop itself in the coming months. News and advices to start a creator profile, to monetize its content or even increase its views are also available on the platform.

DPG Media video developments

As of March 2, DPG Media will reboot its offering:

- linear: 

CAZ2 will start as a new channel dedicated to series, including the "Walter presents", that up to now are only avaialble on VTM Go. Other names announced: Clan, Cordon and Mr. Robot, generally "bing watching enabled" as several episodes will be broadcast in a row

VTM Kids will merge the former VTM Kids & VTM Kids Jr. (Nickelodeon & Nick Jr.) the "kids only" menu on VTM GO will be enlarged to fi Sponge Bob or Paw Patrol

- digital 

Thanks to an agreement with Viacom (Nickelodeon & Nick Jr.), the "kids only" part of VTM GO will be enlarged to fi Sponge Bob or Paw Patrol.

Ambition is to further develop VTM GO as a paid for streaming platform. Some call it the "Flemish Netflix", with a large focus on fiction. Prestigious projects as De Bende by Jan De Lichte will start on the platform. On a daily basis, VTM Go reaches 43K people aged 12+, peaking to 319K monthly (CIM Internet Nov-Dec 2019/Jan 2020).

Have you met BERT ?

Search is all about understanding language. Therefore Google introduced BERT an open-sourced neural network-based technique for natural language processing in 2018 (see also elsewhere in Mediafirst). This enables them to train their own excellent question answering system.

BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) is applied to ranking and featured snippets in Google search and this helped search better understand 1 out of 10 searches performed in English, more languages will be added over time. This is mainly the case for conversational queries with prepositions as “for” and “to” which have a great impact on the meaning. This will help Google Search understand the context of the words in a query. So users can now search in a way that feels natural to them.

What does this mean for your business? In the first stages there is not really a change happening. As soon as the people adapt their way of searching, advertisers will need to update their own content strategy and align it with new upcoming search queries. For SEA, your experts will adapt new queries when optimising the campaign and there is no need for a change in strategy.  

Eleven Sports at Transfer

Eleven Sports is to be commercialised via the sales house Transfer, that after the loss of TF1, comes back to its roots, thematic channels. The 6 channels of Eleven not only feature top football matches ("11" in their name is not an accident), but also NFL, NBA or Euro Hockey League. Strangely it seems that audiences will only be reported via monthly channel reports, not in daily TAM data. This means that advertisers will only be provided with average ratings and reach, something that has become unusual.