Setting the video

New Media Age

19/06/2007

As ITV launches its new website with video at its heart, Michael Nutley asks if its content and advertising models are appropriate to the channel and its audience.

This week ITV begins the rollout of its new itv.com site with the section devoted to soaps. Over the next few weeks this will be followed by sections for broadband games, drama, lifestyle, sport, entertainment and news.

ITV is keen to stress that this is a completely new offering. "This is not a relaunch," says Annelies van den Belt, MD of ITV Broadband. "We needed a new platform. Our aim is to have the most comprehensive TV site on the web.

"According to van den Belt, the idea was to have a site where everything was available for free and was click-to-watch. "There are no downloads, it's all streamed," she explains. "The concept of the site is that it's easy to get to the content and it's easy for advertisers to work with us to reach a mass audience.

"ITV has always been a mass-audience play. With broadband penetration at over 50%, our audience is now there, so we have to be there too to be true to the brand and true to the company."

There will be four basic components to ITV's offering: live TV from the broadcaster's existing four channels, a 30-day catch-up service, a 'best of ITV' archive, and TV made for broadband. There will also be broadband games, polls, voting, blogs and news updates.

As with rival services, such as Channel 4's 4oD and the BBC's iPlayer, it's the catch-up facility that has attracted most attention.

"The 30-day catch up is important not just because it's more than what Channel 4 offers but because it gives us a way to bring people back to ITV," says van den Belt.

"So if you go on holiday and miss a couple of episodes of a series, it gives us a way to bring you back in."

This desire to re-engage people with ITV is also evident in the way the site is split by genre. According to van den Belt, traffic to the old site was very show-driven. "Having genres gives the shows somewhere to live and it gives people two points of entry into the content," she says.

Content created specifically for the site will include behind-the-scenes material, interviews and alternative endings. The first example of dedicated broadband content is Web Lives, a daily three-minute show where members of the public document their lives, created in collaboration with acclaimed documentary maker Roger Graef.

ITV also announced its first venture into UGC, called Uploaded. "ITV News has selected 100 citizen journalists to contribute stories via the site," says van den Belt. "This will highlight the best ones, which will also go on the TV news bulletins."

Welcome move

But Jo Lyall, managing partner at media agency Mindshare Interaction, is more sceptical. "It doesn't have a choice; it has to do this," she says. "Having an on-demand service is critical so that it can compete with Channel 4 and Sky. Any broadcaster has to have a service like this to protect its audience, but it isn't going to grow ITV's audience, at least in the short term."

Rhys Williams, co-founder of planning agency Agenda 21, is another who welcomes the move because it brings more high-quality video content online. "ITV has such great content and there's a real lack of that out there," he says. "Advertisers and clients are looking to push online video and they need content to advertise around."

"ITV and the BBC are the only broadcasters that produce their own content," agrees Ling. "That gives them an advantage in that they can involve interactivity from the beginning."

Van den Belt confirms this is something that's already happening within ITV. "With this new site, it'll be far more logical to drive people from TV to online," she says. "We're working very closely with Simon Shaps [ITV director of television] and his team. We need to be involved very early on with commissioning when there's a 360-degree opportunity."

Flexible advertising

ITV's ad model for the new service depends on the way the content is being viewed. The simulcast service will show the same ads as on TV, but the broadcaster has built its own content management system for the catch-up, archive and made-for-broadband elements, to free it from the limitations of traditional ad breaks. Van den Belt says that the team is now experimenting with the tools to come up with a balanced offering that suits both content and advertisers.

"We'll never know what the ultimate model is since that depends on the advertisers and the consumers, but we have the flexibility to be far more bespoke in our offering," she says. "It'll require more creativity and better relationships with agencies and clients, but we'll be producing more creative solutions."

But media agencies question whether ITV's typical audience is ready for the service.

"ITV has something of a unique audience, so it'll be interesting to see how this works out," says Mindshare's Lyall. "What's working on 4oD is things like Peep Show, which appeal to the 18-25-year-old early adopters. I'm not sure ITV has much to appeal to that sort of audience.

" The same point is raised by Williams at Agenda 21. "ITV's audience isn't particularly made up of early adopters. The 4oD audience is much more of a match for that sort of behaviour, but although the numbers I've seen for it are okay, they're not going to blow anyone away.

" This also raises the question of where the money to pay for this new advertising is going to come from. ITV is hoping it will be new money, but is being pragmatic. It has set up a dedicated sales team but its existing teams will also be selling video advertising.

"The sales teams talk," says van den Belt. "They may not talk enough, but we can improve that."

Williams expects the money to come from existing TV budgets. "We're not seeing clients that don't already use TV producing video ads," he says. "Also, TV budgets are so big you can shave £100,000 off without it making much difference; that's not true of interactive budgets.

"What's more, TV budgets are brand budgets and it's much easier to justify these investments for the brand. Clients will happily run existing TV ads in those channels."

He also questions the value of ITV's "very bespoke" approach to creating new advertising opportunities. "How many people are going to invest that much effort for that size of budget? The question is what it adds above what you're getting from TV. There's a lot of buzz but the numbers are minuscule. However, if people see decent levels of response, then they might start to develop something specific for the platform." Lyall is more enthusiastic, however. "You can put 30-second ads on there, but I think that's a bit lazy," she says. "You need to think about what the consumer does next. This part of the medium will build very quickly as people get used to it. You don't want to be on the back foot, you want to have experimented with it and be able to deliver something valuable when user numbers start to become significant. It's a question of making sure you go in with the correct objectives, and those are to test the medium."

Among the areas that need to be explored and tested are the types of ad format that viewers will accept. Last month in NMA, online publishers warned of the possible impact of pre-roll adds on the take-up of online video (NMA 17.05.07). "Pre-roll advertising could become as loathsome to users as pop-ups if it's not done in a way that's sensitive to the user," CNET Networks head of consumer media Jill Orr said at the time.

Van den Belt is more relaxed. "Research from the US shows that pre-roll advertising before quality content is very popular and generates an 86% brand recall rate," she says.

"People will sit through ads if the content is good enough and the context is right," Williams concurs. "They won't watch a 30-second ad if the content is only 60 seconds long, for example."

Lyall agrees, and believes that the online audience will be more demanding than that for linear TV. "People choosing to watch TV on the web are going to be early adopters, so they will be among the hardest to advertise to. That's why I think just putting existing ads on there and expecting them to work is naive."

The agencies also have important questions about the tracking of ads.

"The tracking that's been launched so far hasn't been great," says Lyall. "In interactive, we're used to knowing what's going on so that we can optimise the campaign. What we're getting at the moment from Channel 4 is delayed and non-specific, so we're not learning anything.

" ITV is using Accipiter to manage ads served on itv.com, which it says will enable reports to show the number of ads served almost in real time depending on the campaign's complexity.

The rise of video-on-demand services from broadcasters also raises an important question for media agencies: who will handle the planning and buying of the ads? Will it be digital agencies or will it be traditional TV teams?

Williams sees a blurring of the lines between TV and digital departments in big through-the-line media agencies, with considerable interest among the TV teams to take this new interactive opportunity for themselves.

"IPTV is still a very nascent opportunity," says i-level's Ling, "but we're positioning ourselves to deliver solutions for the more TV-based internet of the future. It will be the clients' choice what sort of agency they use. We believe the richness of the interactivity involved means we have much more finely honed skills, but both sides will have to make their case."

No matter who ends up owning the planning and buying, there's little doubt that IPTV and video-on-demand are changing the face of TV. "We need to get away from thinking there's only one way for people to interact with our content," says van den Belt.

"We need to be available wherever and whenever both our audience and our advertisers expect us to be."

Quick take

ITV this week begins the rollout of its itv.com service

The first section to go live will be soaps, followed by broadband games, drama, lifestyle, sport, entertainment and news.

The key elements of the service will be simulcasting of the four ITV channels, a 30-day catch-up service, ITV archive content and made-for-broadband programming.

The move has been welcomed by media agencies but some have questioned the fit between the service and ITV's traditional audience.

There are also questions about which budgets the money for advertising on the service will come from, how ads on the service will be tracked, and whether the ad planning and buying will be done by digital or traditional TV agencies.