The Opportunity Windows for Premium Video Content

The thing about high-quality premium videos is that they can actually repair one’s mood in a few different ways. High-quality dramas often show the good side of human beings in a way that can strengthen our inner core values. This happens below the level of consciousness, which makes it even more powerful.

High-quality comedies offer a sense of perspective that dials down our attachments to certain outcomes and makes us more worldly in our acceptance of what is. They also give us verve to deal with our worries in a calmer way. That is also a subconscious process that we’re not aware of, and yet we watch those shows because we like the way we become when we do so.

High-quality sports show incredible achievements earned by people who train hard and focus. This inspires and excites us. This is conscious.

Advertising in these relatively healing environments has much more positive effect (branding, new customers, incremental sales, brand love, stock price, brand equity, brand growth) than the eye-grabbing mechanisms of nonpremium digital. Nonpremium digital also works, largely by reinforcement, which keeps our current customers, and also by introducing brands in new ways when the marketer and agency are on the ball. But for brand growth by getting new customers, premium content is much more effective and delivers new customers at a lower CPNC (cost per new customer) than nonpremium digital.

The opportunity for purveyors of premium video content (producers and publishers) is to prove what I have just said with unassailable data. Some of it is data I have generated with TRA, FOX, Wharton Neuroscience, and you can easily find it in past articles in this column, for example here and here. But why stop there? You probably have a lot of the data yourself. Why not put it together and make sure to show it to the buy side. Do new studies with the buy side, and use impeccable research companies, and widely share the findings. Focus on brand growth, new customers, as Peter Drucker taught us in the prior century.

But use all the data. For example, compile the attention data to prove that premium has far more attention power than nonpremium, as detailed hereand here.

Moving on to other opportunities besides proof that premium pays back better, take a look at the condition of programmatic buying of CTV: The buyer doesn’t know whether they are bidding on premium or nonpremium in almost all cases – see, for example, this article. The exceptions are where the DSP/SSP is using Gracenote metadata or other metadata to let the buyer bid appropriately – for example Magnite and Pubmatic. Programmatic is 84% of all CTV ad spend in the US (Source: EMARKETER), and most of that spend is based on insufficient evidence of the quality of the environment one is bidding on. Premium producers and publishers must do more to change this situation, for the benefit of advertisers as well as the premium video part of the industry.

Another opportunity area is to creatively rethink the entire business. For example, at the Advertising Research Foundation’s (ARF’s) AUDIENCExSCIENCE 2025 Conference, Nielsen’s Brian Hughes presented a report entitled “Quantifying the Netflix Effect,” in which he showed that the same series performed better on Netflix than it had on its prior network, and that after running on Netflix, series have higher ratings on other networks than they had before*. This suggests that producers -- and even competitive publishers -- exhibit their wares on Netflix early in the life of a new series. This may only be scratching the surface of how the premium video industry can unearth new ways of being that yield far greater returns than by following what used to be the old tried and true paths.

Premium video content is one of the strongest art forms ever created. It has enormous effects on society and on brand success, and it is being treated as if it is old hat and overpriced. Nothing could be further from the truth.

*In most cases, the series airing on Netflix have finished their initial runs on their original traditional networks. In the case of Lucifer, Netflix picked up the show AFTER Fox ended it. Riverdale hit Netflix after it concluded on the CW. Same with Suits. Fire Country is the only example in the deck that is still on Fox while it's also on Netflix.

COVER IMAGE: chones - stock.adobe.com.

Posted at MediaVillage through the Thought Leadership self-publishing platform.

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