Joanna Burton, VP of European strategy at SpotX, recently discussed some of the top video advertising and ad tech trends that developed in 2018 — from header bidding to the launch of new streaming services to increases in connected TV advertising revenue. Check out this video to learn more about the top industry developments in 2018 and our predictions for the region in 2019. Additionally, you can read the full interview with Burton below.
What are some of the trends that had the biggest impact on video advertising in 2018?
2018 was really a year of change in ad tech — lots of big and small changes. At the start of the year, questions were being asked about header bidding. We work with a lot of different partners on header bidding to provide the solutions that the individual publishers request.
In addition to that, SpotX partnered with another video-first company, which is JW Player, to engineer a product specifically for video. This is “video player bidding,” with the auction happening in the player — a product created specifically for video by two video companies. And through the course of of 2018, we’ve seen this adopted initially in the U.S. and UK and then broadening out to other countries across Europe.
In 2018, we’ve seen the launch of Pluto TV launched in the UK and Germany. We’ve also had FuboTV launching in Spain, and Roku has hired a European team in 2018. Critical factors, such as awareness of connected television, vary across Europe. The penetration of SVOD services vary across the different countries across Europe. And broadband speeds and the penetration varies across Europe.
Forty-eight percent of the households in the UK have smart TVs, compared with 41 percent in Sweden, and 41 percent in Germany, and 29 percent in France — where IPTV is very strong and triple-play or quad-play offers are very reasonably priced, bundling television services along with broadband, landline phone, and mobile phone.
Connected television really takes off when streaming devices launch. So many households, as I’ve explained, have connected televisions, but you can also connect your existing television to the internet with your Blu-ray player or with the Xbox or Playstation but also with the streaming device.
Learn more: 2019 Video Advertising Trends white paper
So when we spoke to broadcasters across Europe about streaming devices, they explained that the launch of devices had a big uptick on the use of connected TV in their region. So, in the UK, the launch of Amazon Fire led to a big increase in televisions being connected and connected TV being accessed.
The UK has really good broadband penetration, very high-speed broadband — over 91 percent of households have high-speed broadband — and very good awareness of connected television. And we really expect the UK market to have the highest advertising revenue across Europe in terms of connected TV advertising in 2019, and we expect this to continue to grow through the coming years.
Click here to learn more about how we expect traditional TV to evolve in 2019.
Check out the rest of our predictions for video advertising in 2019:
Data Activation Predictions for 2019
Traditional TV Predictions for 2019
Brand Safety and Transparency Predictions for 2019
CTV and OTT Predictions for 2019 (coming soon)