FASTs Are The New Cable, Part 2: Advertising

Part 2 of TVREV’s groundbreaking series on the FAST ecosystem.

Back in December 2018 I had no idea that the term I’d just made up (FAST) was about to take on a life of its own, but it did and here we are and FASTs are on the cusp of becoming the biggest piece of the ad-supported television industry.

Hence our latest report “FASTs Are the New Cable, Part 2: Advertising”, co-authored with the legendary Mike Shields, which provides a deep dive into the ins and outs of the growing streaming TV advertising universe.

The report, like all TVREV reports, is designed to take a complex and often confusing topic and make it simple and easy to understand. Years ago I worked for an ad agency known as Anderson & Lembke whose founders had built the business on the premise that “just because people are reading about business doesn’t mean they want to be bored.”

It’s a lesson that’s served me well and one we’ve tried to replicate with TVREV.

The flow is pretty straightforward: here are the challenges the industry is facing, here are the likely solutions, here’s one solution (contextual advertising) that can solve a world of hurt and here are our projections for how the industry will grow in the years ahead. (There’s even a section on how FAST advertising is bought and sold that explains all the different flavors of programmatic and when and why you should use them.)

For those of you who prefer bullet points, here’s what you will learn from this report:

  • Why FASTs are on track to surpass broadcast and cable for ad spend and when it will happen

  • Why contextual advertising might be the solution for many of the issues that streaming advertising is facing

  • Why transparency (or the lack thereof) and overfrequency have become such problems and what the industry is doing to solve them

  • Why big TV advertisers are less concerned with targeting than smaller brands

  • The opportunities FASTs present for DTC brands

  • The various flavors of programmatic ad buying, how they work and who should use them

  • The measurement conundrum, the overall lack of standardization and some likely solutions

  • In-depth Innovator Spotlight interviews with top executives Field Garthwaite, Tony Marlow, Paige Bilins, Christo Owen, Travis Hockersmith and Ed Laczynski

  • Plus five pages of predictions and projections

  • Our usual dose of wit

For a limited time you can download the report for free thanks to our sponsors, Zype, VIZIO Ads, Pluto TV, Magnite, LG Ad Solutions and IRIS.TV

Alan Wolk

Alan Wolk veteran media analyst, former agency executive, and author of "Over The Top. How The Internet Is (Slowly But Surely) Changing The Television Industry" is Co-Founder and Lead Analyst at TVREV where he helps networks, streamers, agencies, brands and ad tech companies navigate the rapidly shifting media landscape. A widely published columnist, speaker and industry thinker, Wolk has built a following of 300K industry professionals on LinkedIn by speaking plainly and intelligently about TV and the media business. He is also the guy who came up with the term “FAST.”

https://linktr.ee/awolk
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