Samsung Ads’ Justin Evans On Why Smart TVs Are Having A Moment

From our upcoming series on the emerging smart TV ecosystem, Justin Evans, Samsung Ads' Global Head of Analytics and Insights, talks about why smart TV's are having a moment and why ad-supported streaming having a major growth spurt.

JUSTIN EVANS: One of the reasons we're having a moment is that streaming is having a moment.

There's so much adoption of streaming as a new way to engage with television, that the advertisers who are trying to reach those audiences who are making that change are favoring the streaming platforms and Samsung Ads is one of those key streaming platforms.

We saw a big acceleration in that adoption curve during the pandemic, we've now seen a little bit of plateauing in the last couple of quarters, but we now see the percentage of time spent on the television that's spent in streaming hovering around 60-63 percent, which means now a clear majority of time spent on our platform is spent in a streaming environment. So that's one inflection point that's happened over the last year or so, and I think everyone would say much more quickly than anyone would have anticipated.

There's another inflection point we're seeing now, which is the parity of AVOD with SVOD. So the rap a couple years ago was, "Hey it's all very well that people are streaming, but Ii can't reach them there as an advertiser because everybody's there in a subscription environment." And we're now seeing that that's not true.

In fact, I've just been processing our Q1 numbers with my team and one of the things that we've seen is AVOD and SVOD are virtually on par with each other with 72 percent of our users watching subscription-based VOD or SVOD and 72 percent of our users using ad-supported streaming, so SVOD and AVOD now have the same reach on our platform, and we also see that SVOD and AVOD have reached parity in terms of time spent, which is a big surprise.

About an hour and 20 minutes per day are spent in each format, AVOD and SVIOD, so first we had the the inflection point where streaming surpassed linear, and now we're having another inflection point where AVOD is caught up with SVOD. And what that means is that streaming has become a scalable ad environment for advertisers and it connects to the smart TV.