ITV is on solid ground as one of the U.K.’s major legacy broadcasters but the company is making streaming and advanced advertising a big part of its story.
Jayesh Rajdev joined ITV about a year and a half ago in the newly created role of controller of advanced ads. Rajdev—who’s also spent time at MediaCom and Videology—has been tasked with helping steer strategy at ITV Hub and build out Planet V, ITV’s self-service ad platform, among other responsibilities.
At the StreamTV World Show in November, Rajdev sat in for a fireside chat with FierceVideo Editor Ben Munson to discuss streaming engagement on ITV Hub, emerging trends on the Planet TV platform, and ad targeting based on pollen levels in the air.
The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
FierceVideo: I think we should start out with ITV Hub and maybe you could talk a little bit about what you've observed at ITV in terms of just viewing and other trends.
Jayesh Rajdev: None of us have escaped the huge seismic shift to on-demand viewing that we've seen across so many platforms, both globally and locally. No one's escaped this week or even this month how “Squid Game” has swept the globe, and this is really a testament to the size and penetration of SVOD platforms. And what they've really done from our perspective is sort of condition viewers to want and expect to be able to watch more of their content on-demand however and wherever they want to watch. And we, we're certainly seeing that locally in the U.K., across many platforms, but most notably the one that forms the biggest portion of my day job, which is ITV hub.
And here we've seen audience numbers go from strength to strength on the back of a really big summer where we had another amazing live series of ‘Love Island.” Who doesn't love “Love Island?” And the Euro football championships that were actually held here in the U.K. and in some European markets really kept British viewers given how well England performed. We're now up to 34 million registered users, which for us in the U.K., with a population of I think 65 million, that's huge It makes us the biggest platform in the U.K. One of the biggest in Europe, I think, and we saw some incredible numbers not only live linear but on-demand as well. In July, we saw consumption hours go up to an all-time high, over almost 99 million. And if you compare that back to September, which we we've just recorded and published, we we're back down to sort of around a 50 to 55 million mark, which also demonstrates the importance of the big shows that everyone wants to watch.
FierceVideo: Yeah, absolutely. What besides live sports, what's some of the content that's really driving the most engagement and viewing on ITV hub?
Rajdev: Certainly, live sports, but not withstanding that, I think for us at ITV, it's really important. We have a public service broadcast remit, which for us is about ensuring that we continue to fulfill and produce shows. I think for this audience and for us and for my day job, we want to continue producing mass entertainment shows which audiences still want to tune into live. They want to tune into live so that they can participate in the nation's conversation. They can participate in the conversation in their living rooms and on social media and the resonance that shows have nowadays. We've just seen it in the last couple of weeks for “Succession” amongst our sort of audiences, the resonance that mass shows still have in mainstream media when they get picked up. “Love Island” here in the U.K. was not only a phenomenon for young audiences, but at some points the show was delivering about half of young audiences watching. I mean, those kind of audience shares were unheard of for Friday TV, particularly young.
They made front page news near enough every day in the tabloid press. The storylines become part of popular culture very, very quickly. And, and ITV’s remit is about producing more of those shows and it's the shows that advertisers want as well, shows that drive that mass reach and mass cultural traction.
FierceVideo: “Love Island is obviously a huge hit. I think there is even a reference to it in a second season of “Ted Lasso.”
Rajdev: I think what's really interesting about it is its ability not just to capture the youngs, but also the sort of housewife house person, audience as well. So, you know, alongside my wife and I sitting there sort of tuning in 9 p.m. every evening, my teenagers crawled out their bedrooms to watch it with us. So, while we might be talking about it in our living room, our teenagers are busy on Snap talking about it with their friends. So, I think that’s the way in which debate and discourse around mass live entertainment experiences has really evolved both sort of physically and sort of socially. It's interesting.
FierceVideo: Definitely. U.S. broadcasters are still kind of in the space where they're having to decide what content goes to streaming platforms and maybe what content stays on their traditional linear platforms. I'm just kind of curious how those decisions are made at ITV.
Rajdev: Well, for us, we are a hundred percent linear first and that remains the mainstay of our business. Advertisers still want the mass linear audience wherever and whenever possible. There will continue to be huge demand for that. And we haven't seen that acceleration to online to the extent I think you guys have seen in the U.S. But notwithstanding that we are trialing more ways of stripping and stranding shows in accordance with how viewers want to watch. So, to cater for binge viewers, we are starting to do entire season drops. We're doing previews of certain dramas. We have a number of soaps in the U.K. that are incredibly important for the nation. “Coronation Street” and “Emmerdale” are two such soap operas that still drive a huge audience in the U.K. But during the Euros in the summer, we trialed, dropping the entire week's episodes of “Emmerdale and “Coronation Street.”
It worked for us because of the scheduling of the big evening football programs. But what it showed us is the appetites for those core audiences who want to binge on that week's episodes. What it showed really is it helped us grow overall audience. We did see some cannibalization of the live linear transmission, but not as much as we feared. So, what we've shown with experiments like that is we can grow overall audience.
FierceVideo: That's a really interesting strategy. That's something we don't necessarily see here. I wanted to make sure though we have enough time to talk about Planet V, so let's shift to that. That's ITV’s self-service programmatic platform, and it's about a year out from launch. So, I was wondering if you could give us a progress update.
Rajdev: So, it's actually a year old this week. We launched it in November 2020. It certainly wasn't our intention to be launching it as we have done virtually into agency's hands, and it is quite an undertaking. We've never done anything like this before. In fact, no broadcaster, certainly no broadcast in Europe, had attempted something like this before. I think we've seen TV4 in Sweden do something very similar in the past few months in terms of launching a self-service booking platform. But with it, we sort of recognized the opportunity in building a self-service programmatic platform, one that aids the convenience to our existing ad buying customers to enable them to effectively create, book and manage campaigns in minutes.
They don't have to wait to speak to one of our contractors. They're not waiting for that email with an agreement with what's been booked. They can log online and literally book a campaign in two minutes. And I think that convenience has been really, really key and it's been really appreciated by ad buyers. But critically alongside that, what it's helped us do is appeal to a new generation of advertiser as well. We're seeing a lot more startups. We're seeing a lot more startups scale, particularly in the DTC. We call it direct consumer space. We've got entrepreneurs launching new brands in every category from the delivery of vegetables through to the manufacturing of mattresses, all of whom are building brands using the digital platforms. But the point of entry for those digital brands into TV might have been prohibitive before. With Planet V they've now got that point of entry to brand building media within which they can apply their own media. They can apply their own targeting. They can apply digital-like tactics in audience targeting and measurements. We are really, really pleased. We've carried over 400 advertisers in the last year. But the critical KPI for us was that of those, 150 of those advertisers have been new to ITV. Of all the big stats that we've got circulating around one year at Planet V, that’s the one we we're most proud of.
FierceVideo: I would imagine that improves the user engagement too, to have a wider variety of advertising.
Rajdev: The audiences are certainly appreciating this new world. So many advertiser markets have become more democratized. They're centralized around legacy retailers and legacy distribution. And I think what's really pleasing is that traditional media can play a part in that. What's also really interesting is the tactics that we are now offering programmatically. Our data match solution allows brands to have their own advertising-compliant first-party data and be able to bring that through Planet V for targeting and measurement on ITV hub. And we're seeing some great traction for features like that.
FierceVideo: And that's a big deal for brands to be able to bring their own first-party data to a programmatic platform like this and to be able to have it secure where they're not pooling their data or sharing it with competitors who might monetize it.
Rajdev: Yes. And, and look, we we're very aware that big tech platforms do that, that it's the very basis by which intent pools are created. But they then monetize for the entire market. We don't do that. We've invested in a third-party data bunker solution gaining a lot of traction in the advertiser market over here right now and I think in the U.S. as well. They have an incredible piece of technology that effectively allows advertisers to place their customer data in their own secure data bunker. It's then matched with ITV first-party data without advertisers ever losing control of that data. ITV never actually sees an advertiser's data. We'll never share or pull advertiser exposure data.
FierceVideo: I think the platform has some pretty interesting targeting capabilities as well. One specific one I wanted to ask you about was that weather targeting, which is a fairly new addition.
Rajdev: We only launched it a couple of weeks ago. We put some press out announcing it and we've been surprised at the interest. I think the British obsession with the weather I think is very well documented. We have very changeable weather over here, which I think differentiates us to large sways of Southern Europe, which enjoy consistent levels of sunshine.
These shifts really impact consumption behavior consumption, purchase behavior. And this BRC study identified that the weather impacts more shifts in consumption purchase behavior than any other factor barring economic shifts. So, we launched this product with a big U.S.-based global weather metadata provider. We've built an integration of their real time metadata into Planet V and they have 22 different weather points. I mean, three different forms of pollen. But obviously advertisers don't want or need to be able to target three different types of pollen, so what we've done is sort of simplify it. So much of what we've done in Planet V is about simplifying the experience for programmatic buyers. So, what we've done here is just synthesize it to three sort of broad areas so you can target by temperature, precipitation and pollen and all you do is specify your criteria. And the moment that criteria is met, the heavens open, your advertising goes live in any one of 42 different ITV regions. So, we are really, really pleased with early testing and we just want to see more brands use it.
FierceVideo: I think that's fascinating. I can't believe we're already running out of time, but before we wrap up, I just wanted to ask you really quick what the next phase of development looks like for Planet V.
Rajdev: We are really excited for so many things. That's the big part of my day job, really is focusing on the next wave of innovations. We're about to launch a dynamic creative solution, launching that to market in the next couple of weeks, which will allow brands for the first time to tailor their TV ad creative specifically for different regions or audiences or product ranges. We're about to go live with a specific advertiser with over 180 different variations of their TV ad across ITV Hub. That is unheard of to have that level of granular creative messaging in broadcast.
We're working with a number of retail partners to bring on board their data. The idea of being able to deploy a retailer's data to more accurately target a category buyer is really interesting. We’re looking at addressable media in the live linear feed across certain digital channels. We're really excited about that. We think that that that will really catch on. There are some really interesting other targeting devices, for example, automated content recognition which we think will be really neat in a world where context is all of a sudden more important. The ability of AI tools to crawl our content and be able to surface to advertisers specific moods, moments or objects that they can appear adjacent to; we're having early conversations with advertisers have been really positive about that kind of innovation. So, I think 2022 is going to look really positive.
FierceVideo: Definitely. Well, this has been fascinating. Thank you so much for your time, Jay.
Rajdev: Thank you very much for having me. It's been great to talk to you.