MTV, Sofia Digital make linear digital video ads interactive on Smart TV
September 27, 2021
MTV Oy and Sofia Digital have jointly developed a new way to make advertising interactive when watching content on Smart TV.
The solution helps to enable clickable campaigns to be activated through TV-screen using companion devices, like smartphones. This solution answers the problem, which many advertisers have – namely identification and targeting of individual TV users, in the same way, that is already possible on other online advertising channels on the Web and Mobile. The interactive module embedded into the TV-application such as mtv service, enables dynamic generation of personalized and scannable QR-codes that TV-viewers can read from their sofas and hijack the advertisements campaigns and giveaways to the viewer personal devices for further consumption.
This brings the advertiser the following benefits:
· Additional ad opportunities – new advertising device coverage
· Interactivity – possibility to engage their customers on smart TVs
· Premium content and brand safety – safety and quality of the TV environment
· Only one consumption environment (further ad opportunities within the same TV environment)
· Viewability (100% guaranteed full-screen visibility)
For the broadcaster, this enables the offering of the television advertisements with similar terms to the existing online channels while benefiting from the attraction of the big screen and a possibility to capture some of the market growth of the total ad revenue globally.
MTV and Sofia Digital co-operation with new advertising features is based on the long-term development partnership. MTV has the TV-advertisement business insight and networks, while Sofia Digital as the technical partner can create an innovative approach on interactive TV advertising using QR codes and utilizing second screen devices, without changes to the existing advertisement back-end infrastructure. The solution was piloted in Finland using the Hybrid TV (HbbTV) environment and after successful pilot it was made available on most of the mtv service enabled Smart TV platforms, like Samsung Tizen and LG WebOS TVs.
In the video advertisement the on-screen graphic shall be displayed, in the campaign with on-screen dialog for example: “Order C More service for six months with the price of one” and the viewer press “OK” with the TV remote controller to see more. After the viewer presses the OK button, the event is registered in the TV-application, and a personal QR-code is generated with the preview image of the advertisement campaign page. At the same time application back-end starts tracking the code and can identify when the code is scanned. The information is passed on to the advertiser, that a consumer click-through transaction has happened.
The Solution offers also potential new additional features for the advertisers, for example, use-cases that may relate to next-generation TV-commercials having integrated TV-microsite with interactive commercials.
In the advertisement backend, this solution should expect similar results as any other clickable ad tracking in other existing platforms. This phase has been implemented with HbbTV with the support of three types of most relevant televisions. In the future, this solution can be expanded to any form of interactive TV ads on television screens.