Marketing on OTT: iQiyi’s Elaine Tan on how to get your spend right

iQiyi International has been growing from strength to strength since its global launch two years ago. The streaming platform also unveiled its international headquarters in Singapore last December, and since 2020, the company has witnessed a 12-times growth in its daily active users.

Known for its Chinese and Korean content, iQiyi has also been doubling-down on its international slate of shows. Last month, it unveiled four new Korean original productions and two Philippine originals, along with new exclusive content from Thailand and Malaysia.

Aside from entertaining consumers, the streaming platform has also pushed the boundaries in terms of its offerings for advertisers. In October, it rolled out new creative buys for brands to maximise the effectiveness of its different ad formats. These included prime time, big day, combo video ads, and pre-roll companion ads.

Driving the growth behind iQiyi’s advertising in the region is Elaine Tan, who is the head of sales for Southeast Asia. She joined the team last July and is in charge of setting up the advertising sales teams, establishing key partner relationships and driving ad monetization. Tan also works with clients to devise customised advertising solutions for partners to achieve their business goals.

Before iQiyi, Tan held multiple senior sales roles with global media networks, with the most recent one being at Sony Pictures Television Networks (Asia), as well as Viacom International Media Networks, and the BBC.

In a recent interview with MARKETING-INTERACTIVE, Tan explains the advantages that premium OTT presents, the pressing issues in OTT that need to be resolved, and gives us a sneak peek into iQiyi’s content plans for 2022.

MARKETING-INTERACTIVE: What are some of the advantages premium OTT presents compared with regular OTT and even traditional TV?

Tan: Compared to traditional TV, premium OTT platforms such as iQiyi allow advertisers to target the desired audience segmentation, which enables better flexibility and targeting options as opposed to TV.

Personalised ads ensure relevancy to viewers, which aids with the prevention of damage to brand reputation and improves satisfaction. With frequency-capping tools in-built, advertisers can also do their part to minimise ad annoyance and create a holistic experience for their target audience.

Given our tech-enabled ad offerings, iQiyi is also able to enable direct advertising conversion which aids the marketer to achieve different objectives of campaigns, and set the buying models to achieve the goal of maximising reach, visibility, or specifying share of voice ratio through its display placements. All of this allows the OTT platform to provide brands with a higher level of measurement versus traditional media platforms.

For advertisers, brand safety is also a key priority when advertising on any OTT platforms. While short-form user-generated content (UGC) video platforms might have compelling offers for advertisers, the vast nature of content on the platforms does little to make advertisers feel a level of security that premium OTT platform providers can present.

iQiyi understands the importance of brand safety. iQiyi has been the top-performing video platform in China since 2015, and launched its international app in 2019.

Aiming to give advertisers peace of mind when it comes to brand safety, iQiyi currently invests heavily in purchasing only work from the top production companies in numerous countries.

It also invites the most well-known celebrities to participate in its self-made projects to provide exclusive entertainment to audiences globally.

iQiyi’s content strategy is professional produced content (PPC). Among the several types of content such as UGC, PGC (professionally generated content), and PPC in the video platform, PPC content is the most internationally influential, high-quality, and at the same time, the most expensive.

Advertisers are able to partner with us for their own content marketing initiatives and take advantage of our exclusive content, and high quality self-produced content, which can aid with heightened brand affinity.

Given advertisers have the option of choosing non-skippable ads, premium OTT platforms are able to deliver higher viewability and video completion rates as a result.

The platforms’ diversified, creative ad formats have also shown an increase in visibility and impact of advertising, and advertisers are welcome to customise planning solutions with the team through various business partnerships and innovative marketing methods.

MARKETING-INTERACTIVE: Who are some of the brands that you have worked with? What are some of the success stories you have seen from working with them?

Tan: We have been very privileged to have had the opportunity to work with many brands in the region and across various verticals ranging from eCommerce, FMCG, CPG, F&B to beauty and travel clients.

One of our biggest global advertisers to date is the Singapore Tourism Board, which is a multi-year partnership that we started earlier this year. Another success story we championed was with Mindshare and Unilever Philippines with the creation of a groundbreaking advertising execution for Cream Silk with the exclusive live stream of the 69th MISS UNIVERSE Competition on iQiyi Philippines. Since our inception, our partnerships with brands have always been about the creation of new ideas, constantly looking out for and pioneering the next big thing in advertising and by winning hearts and minds of our brand partners by embracing the spirit of innovation and evolution. 

MARKETING-INTERACTIVE: Measurement is also an area brands want to better understand in the OTT space. How are marketers’ investments being measured on iQiyi’s platform?

Tan: Measurability is really important and has always been for advertisers. We are building our proprietary ad serving platform which offers more transparency and visibility to both the publisher as well as our advertising partners.

What this means is we can offer more metrics to brands when it comes to measurability so they can collect more data points, and be able to have more transparency in their reporting. That’s going to be launching very soon next year.

We believe that with our own proprietary tool, we can now offer advertisers that granular level of measurability that they need, including granularity on the different data points that we need when it comes to ad campaign optimization and execution.

Third-party players can also help advertisers to easily track multiscreen advertising activities on both TV and OTT platforms, and understand the on-target incremental reach brought by OTT platforms, so that advertisers can measure the effects of multiscreen advertising.

Third-party brand lift studies can also be used to measure the performance of OTT brand advertising campaigns, helping advertisers understand the impact of advertising campaigns on the brand’s awareness and affinity, ad recall, purchase intent, and recommendation intent, among others. 

MARKETING-INTERACTIVE: What are some of the pressing issues OTT players face?

Tan: The lack of aggregation makes it difficult for ad buys and is also a big concern for OTT players. There is no consolidation of OTT as a channel and everyone is selling media space on the platform separately. There should be an aggregated OTT offering with third-parties as the standard for in-target advertising.

At the same time, there is also a lack of scale and inventory, with OTT inventory being dwarfed by social media platforms. Premium non-OTT outstream video ad inventory also has higher frequency than OTT.

Plenty of education and mindset shifts are also needed for the market when it comes to understanding premium video. We have been having talks with key partners in the industry to see how we can ramp-up these efforts in the new year and come together as one. That is our top priority for next year.

MARKETING-INTERACTIVE: How can the OTT industry come together to help solve these challenges?

Tan: Coming together as one is a good starting point, whether it is a brochure or a webinar. I think the openness of coming together as one to address the challenges and issues we are all facing, and demystifying some of these misconceptions that brands or agencies have, would be a good start. Working with independent and neutral parties to help us premium OTT players drive a common voice and narrative will be extremely crucial and helping in achieving this goal. 

MARKETING-INTERACTIVE: iQiyi is known for its wide array of titles for Chinese, Korean and Japanese dramas. What are your content plans for 2022?

Tan: iQiyi is positioned as an Asian entertainment and cultural content platform, which sets it apart from European and American OTT platforms. The full spectrum of Asian content, especially top-class Chinese titles, makes our platform an attractive one for Asian viewers.

Moreover, to keep our competitive edge, we have also increased the distribution of Korean dramas, Japanese comics, and Southeast Asian local dramas.

As the leading global streaming player rooted in Asia with a global footprint, iQiyi will double down on its investment in introducing premium pan-Asian content to the world. We are excited to play a crucial role in putting Asian content front and centre in collaboration with top-notch creators and talents from Korea and Southeast Asia to bring more compelling original stories to our users in 191 territories.

MARKETING-INTERACTIVE: What do you think the future of marketing will be like in Southeast Asia?

Tan: We see a rising trend in brands investing more into content advertising especially in this region as advertisers follow the eyeballs that are currently growing at an exponential rate on OTT streaming, drawn in by the huge investments made by premium OTT publishers into world class quality productions, engaging storylines and exclusively licensed content. This year saw a number of great successful campaigns that we’ve done with multiple brands across the region. And brands are realising the value that content advertising brings to them and are particularly excited by the potential partnerships our brand new slate of content offering presents.

OTT streamers are also most likely to see more TV-like advertising campaigns and executions as brands embrace the incremental reach available on OTT and unlock the potential of this untapped premium audience in this space.

The cookie-less future will also see publishers develop their identity solution strategies as buyers seek more authenticated and valuable audience segments and capabilities that publisher platforms can offer.

This post was done in collaboration with iQiyi International.

Join us in our webinar next Tuesday to find out how marketers can take advantage of the rise in video streaming consumption.