Adsmovil: Product placement is the origin of everything we are going to know as interactivity on tomorrow’s TV

The transformation of TV has also influenced the way advertising is showcased on different screens. One format that has been used for a few years now is product placement, which according to Alberto Pardo, founder, and CEO of Adsmovil, will evolve thanks to digitization.

“I would think that digitalization will surely allow a series of interactions between the user and the screen, which perhaps we do not have yet,” he said at the FIAP Face To Face entitled Future Scenarios: Television in 2030.

Pardo mentioned, for example, YouTube’s Live Shopping, where the video platform is in the process of setting up a structure to connect video content with ecommerce. He said initiatives like this have huge potential. “Two trillion-dollar industries, that mix can be explosive and that is going to require that those behind it imagine the storytelling, understanding how the digital component is going to be able to help.”

“I think that this is the beginning. It is the tip of the iceberg of where we are heading and surely in five years, it will seem like how we today see black and white TV. I believe that, effectively, product placement is the origin of everything that we are going to know as interactivity on tomorrow’s TV,” he highlighted.

This TV democratization thanks to digitization, according to Pardo, has given rise to a large amount of content available. “I feel that TV is going to become more important than it was before and the reason is that there is going to be an explosion of content.” This in turn implies that the consumer will find different cheaper options than what they paid to cable operators.

“I feel that the cable operators are not going to sit idly. I’m sure they’re going to react to the market in some way and that means investment, there’s going to be a lot of news and that’s why I feel that the television business in terms of viewership is going to grow a lot”. As happened with the music industry where, according to what he said, 20 years ago it was democratized and demonetized in the way money was made, the same path is being followed by television. “I don’t know if it will be in 5, 10, or 15 years, but surely that path of demonetization that we are already seeing -which is no longer traditional cable, but rather a number of options-, is the way in which TV is being demonetized, taking a very similar path to the one music took in 1999-2000 regarding the user”.

He explained that in the last ten to 15 years there was the paid segment, the cable operator, and the linear segment, or open signals, basically consolidated by advertising. This model is going to be replicated in a lot of free alternatives, AVOD, and others like SVOD. “Then you are going to have a mix between content that is going to be sponsored by advertising, such as that you are going to be able to buy, surely, without any advertisement.”

He gave as an example the case of Netflix which realized that the advertising business is attractive. “I don’t really know what will come out of the merger of Microsoft with Netflix in terms of commercialization, but the message from Netflix is clear and is that the number of subscribers has a limit and perhaps the subscription model in terms of business is less attractive than that of advertising”.

Advertising this year is going to be more or less a trillion dollars industry. “There are not many industries that handle volumes of money as attractive as advertising. For that reason, Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple are after this business, and I think Netflix realized how important that was.”

“So surely we as users are going to learn to watch again, just like when we did with the advertising campaigns on linear television, the commercials we liked, that we commented about, and in which creativity was part of the conversation and the history of what happened in our homes,” he added.

View Face to Face Webinar with Alberto Pardo de Adsmovil