Adland’s streaming opportunity

Was there really a time when people used to like the TV ads more than the programmes? There was, but only if you compared the very worst of the programming with the very best of the ads.

A drearily talk-heavy edition of This Week might be enlivened by any Hamlet spot you care to name, but especially the one with the golfer you never see, in the bunker he never escapes.

On the other hand, when an engrossing episode of Coronation Street was interrupted by a man trying and failing to persuade doorstepped housewives to swap their Daz for two rival powders, it was a signal in real-world households to put the kettle on.

Even then, though, somewhere in a three-minute break, there might be a commercial that would put the tea-making on hold, and have the tea-maker pop their head round the kitchen door and exclaim, “Oh, I love this one!” Cadbury ‘Gorilla’. Cinzano ‘Airplane’. Carling Black Label ‘Dambusters’. Honda ‘Cog’. They could all do it. They could all earn a little forgiveness from viewers for muscling in on what they had actually sat down to watch.

What was it that linked these spots, that helped them stand apart from the far more voluminous rump of boorish advertiser repetition?

It wasn’t a single genre. Some were funny – a man fights dirty against a grizzly bear over a live salmon for John West. Some were wry – a Yorkshireman fools his wife into thinking he’s fishing when he’s down at the pub with a pint of John Smith’s. Others leaned into storytelling – most sweetly, JR Hartley locating his remaindered masterpiece with the help of Yellow Pages.

Meanwhile, in the bare 30 seconds that it took for the Guardian’s ‘Points of view’ spot to unfurl, the defining elements of film drama were evinced: the inciting incident, the raising of stakes, the overcoming of tremendous obstacles to achieve a desirable goal, the unexpected denouement. You could even throw a character arc in there – that of the viewer, chastened by their lazy assumptions at the outset, newly open-minded by the end.

To understand what unites this body of watchable work, you have to come up a level of abstraction and zoom in on the attitudinal palette of the marketers and agency talent that lay behind it. This went beyond a simple quest for increased ROI, since there was no objective evidence back then that likeable ads were more effective. Instead, it was rooted in something altogether more human – a belief that if you were going to step in front of people, unbidden, in their own living rooms, it was only respectful to give something back. To entertain. To charm. To make your points with lightness of touch. At the very least not to badger and bore.

In the UK, this vaunted golden age of TV advertising lasted the three decades up to the millennium, or just beyond. What it couldn’t survive were the realities of the digital revolution, which atomised audiences and saw marketers abandoning the broad avenues of mass communications to chase consumers down narrow alleys of personalisation.

Programmatic targeting and hypersensitive measurement served to prioritise efficiency over enjoyment, and a generation unlearned both the tenets and the techniques of rewarding people for commandeering their attention.

Well, it’s time to relearn them now.

Streaming subscribers opt for ads

Last month, UK streaming service plans that include commercials overtook ad-free options for the first time. The industry consensus is that the ad-supported model is the future globally, as consumers struggle to afford the high costs of the now myriad streamers open to them in the viewing repertoire.

This is a watershed moment since it puts mass audiences and advertisers together in the same space again. According to research firm Antenna, ad supported subscriptions surpassed 100 million last year, a figure that analysts at Amazon predict will double before the end of 2027.

The trend is not without its detractors. A recent Los Angeles Times opinion piece lamented the prospect of more ‘brainwashing’ from ‘low-rent spots’. It is a critique based on the paradigm that advertising is always so crude that it deserves to be loathed and avoided. But what if it isn’t?

There are three constituencies that would benefit from higher creative standards in advertising on streaming platforms, the most obvious of which is the viewing audience, who might find themselves actually enjoying at least a part of that enforced break.

The streamers themselves would benefit, because it could help prevent erosion of the subscriber base that old-fashioned bombastic advertising might promote – to the extent that the likes of Netflix, Hulu and Disney+ might consider encouraging creativity by offering preferential rates for the most popular ads.

For marketers the opportunity is to once again deploy funds away from the bottom of the funnel to the top – to use the creative possibilities to build brand equity and even a little love at scale. It’s also germane that ad-supported streaming is biased towards 18- to 34-year-olds; a desirable, hard-to-reach cohort, critical in every sense.

Reaching new heights

There is actually a fourth constituency for whom the growth of ad funded streaming will be an interesting new challenge: creative agencies and their brief-hungry teams. Is this a chance to get back to that golden age again?

No. That would be to undershoot. Because the opportunity is now bigger and more exciting than that.

It’s bigger in the most literal sense, that screens are now wall-sized, a million miles from the quaint Sonys and Fergusons of old. And on them, audiences have had their critical thermostats raised by sensationally cinematic content. Ad scripts will need to be even stronger to survive in this environment, and production values will need to be decidedly high rent if ads are not to be a tawdry come down mid-way through shows like Bridgerton or Stranger Things.

The excitement is coming from innovation. Netflix is experimenting with generative AI to help advertisers adapt their commercials to blend with the worlds of the shows, so the transition is more natural and less jarring. And interactive tools like second screen buttons will open up new possibilities for engagement. Increasingly, the gauntlet is being thrown down to advertising creatives by the streamers: can your imaginations rise to our capabilities?

It’s diverting to look back at the great TV ads of old, but sobering to realise that most wouldn’t cut it in the coming environment. What should excite marketers and agencies alike is the prospect of raising creative standards to new heights, of giving back something to new generations of viewers for the privilege of harvesting their attention.

We should be ambitious: the traditional tenets embracing the new technologies; audiences hanging on in there despite themselves throughout the entire break; millions of cups of tea that never get made.