Madison Avenue May Make New Push To Create Streaming Shows, Series

variety.com:

Brian Steinberg Senior TV EditorRunning traditional ads on streaming services like Disney+, Netflix and Amazon can be difficult.

Some advertisers may choose a different route by creating some of the programming those broadband services use to get people to subscribe in the first place.A new study from Interpublic Group’s Magna media-research unit and Amazon Ads found that consumers don’t seem overly concerned whether a TV show they watch is created by an advertiser or a more traditional production studio, so long as the content is entertaining.

When asked why they chose to watch brand-funded entertainment, 59% of respondents said they found the show “fun to watch” while 45% “enjoyed the content” and 34% “‘earned something new.” “It’s just like any other content,” says Kara Manatt, executive vice president of intelligence solutions at Magna, in an interview.  “People watch it when it’s entertaining, and if it’s not entertaining, they won’t watch it.”The findings may lend new hope to Madison Avenue, which finds itself with one of its main avenues of promotion — TV advertising — reaching fewer people, while many streaming services run significantly fewer ads, and, in many cases, none at all.

Even those premium services that have started to run commercials — NBCUniversal’s Peacock and Warner Bros. Discovery’s HBO Max among them — only stream a few minutes’ worth per hour, fearful of antagonizing consumers who move to streaming to escape the commercial interruptions that are a bedrock piece of the economic architecture of traditional TV.Some marketers have already found a path to streaming venues.