Comment: What Paris 2024 taught us about the future of ads

Sports viewing is growing rapidly across streaming services, delivering a captive audience and a long-established advertising model. It’s an extremely attractive proposition for advertisers whose opportunities to achieve highly-engaged, mass reach in the digital era are few and far between.

The increasing investment of streaming-first entrants to the sports market is testimony to the unique value of sport. The value of advertising revenues in sport cannot be overstated.

Enter dynamic ad insertion (DAI), which is the critical bridge between streaming tech and adtech that allows addressable advertising within a broadcast-grade viewer experience. In the digital realm, advertisers expect addressability and real-time measurement, both of which rely on DAI.

But adding such complexity within the unpredictability of live sports is a challenge, especially when you consider the scale required to process one-to-one ad requests for millions of viewers simultaneously, not to mention all the machinations of the adtech ecosystem operating behind the scenes.

To highlight the range of scenarios that DAI must support, I’ve highlighted a few examples from last year’s Olympics. 

Monetisation at mass scale

The Women’s and Men’s 100m Finals captivated viewers across the world and drove massive traffic spikes. The races lasted barely 10 seconds, which meant a huge number of viewers joined the live streams within a very short space of time. This creates a very small, yet absolutely critical, window of opportunity to advertise against.

A big risk in this situation, where millions of ad requests are triggered simultaneously across the world, is that the adtech ecosystem cannot process all the requests in time. The result is timeouts and blank holding slates where ads should be. DAI has to support the adtech ecosystem using prefetch technology to space out the ad requests.

We also saw an “afterglow effect,” where peak traffic remained steady for up to an hour after tentpole events: we saw ad breaks 10-15 minutes after a big race earning more views than ones immediately before.

Localisation drives ad engagement upswing

Local heroes played a critical role in driving traffic spikes at the Games. One of the breakout stars was homegrown French swimmer Leon Marchand. His first gold medal in the men’s 200m butterfly sparked a significant increase in viewership, which grew steadily as the session progressed with viewers lapping up the back-to-back events. Ad views surged by 14.7% 10 minutes after his initial gold, reflecting both an “afterglow effect” and a “stickiness” as viewers remained engaged for the whole session. The most-watched ad break of the entire session came 20 minutes after the Frenchman’s record-breaking second gold.

The ability to monetise local trends like this will be important for streaming giants like Apple and Netflix, who are investing heavily in global rights. They will have to monetise localised surges in traffic if they are to maximise revenues.

Fringe events driving unexpected demand

The afterglow effect carried across to other channels, too. Orchestration technology means it is far easier to run and monetise multiple event, or pop-up, channels than it used to be. Such channels benefit from viewers tuning in for tentpole events then getting hooked and browsing other events.

The kayak cross final, which lasted only 1min15s, is another great example of an unexpected surge in traffic. It triggered an 8% rise in audience engagement, with ad retention remaining high even after the finish. This undoubtedly came as a surprise to many rights holders.

This example highlights a different type of scaling issue. Event-based channels can be hard to monetise because applying top-end DAI technology for small audiences is not always justifiable. However, new orchestration tools allow broadcasters to run DAI across several event channels as a collective whole, making it far easier for operators to monitor traffic patterns and prioritise advertising based on real-time audience data.

Paris 2024 was a huge global event - the biggest streamed to date - and sports streaming viewing numbers are only set to increase from here. In turn, so will the demands on DAI for monetisation as addressable advertising becomes ever-more critical to business success for rights-holders.

Tim Sewell is CEO of Yospace