GLOBAL ACHIEVEMENTS RECOGNIZED
Aiming to be a media group with a cutting-edge, comprehensive approach that is suited to the digital age, TV TOKYO is both a broadcasting company and a content company. It provides video content for all types of media, including terrestrial broadcasting, BS broadcasting, CS broadcasting, the internet and mobile. Its edgy perspective, which is not seen at rival stations, is popular with viewers in a variety of segments.
The company is also proactive in web distribution of content. Viewing content as an asset, the company aims to maximize its revenue and viewership, and in addition to the multiple services it operates itself, it also provides popular content to TVer, the official commercial TV portal.
In 2013, there was a need to insert advertising into video web distribution. An advertiser came forward with a request to advertise on a catch-up video distribution service for a variety show. Ryusuke Hori, Video and Data Business Department, TV TOKYO Communications, Inc. says, “At the time, we were not using a video distribution platform to develop our business with an advertising model. We needed a good system to operate our service while flexibly inserting advertisements, and we adopted Brightcove Video Cloud after evaluating its global track record.” This was the start of the company’s use of Brightcove.
LIVE SPORTS BROADCASTS ON A COMMON PLATFORM
The big advantage is that we can now explain to our clients and internal members how our programs are viewed online and how the ads are viewed./h4> Ryusuke Hori
General Manager, Video and Data Business Department, TV TOKYO Communications Corporation
Brightcove Video Cloud is highly compatible with live streaming, and we have been using it for a number of live broadcasts. In particular, for the online live broadcast of the 2016 World Table Tennis Championships in Malaysia, we used Brightcove Live and SSAI to achieve live streaming and flexible ad insertion. We were able to successfully carry out our first large-scale broadcast.
Furthermore, from 2017, the subscription-based anime streaming service “Ani-Tere” will also be provided through the same platform. About six years after it was adopted, Brightcove Video Cloud is continuing to provide powerful support for TV Tokyo’s web distribution of content, expanding its scope without causing any major problems.
Using Brightcove Video Cloud, we can now see exactly what our viewers are doing. Through the Brightcove Player, we can get detailed information on things like “when, how many times, how much, and on which websites” our content is being viewed. This user behavior data not only provides important insights for program production, but is also used to design optimal user interfaces for smartphone apps.
USING VIEWING DATA FOR MARKETING
On the other hand, TV Tokyo also provides content for content distribution services run jointly by commercial broadcasters. And with these types of distribution, it is not possible to obtain complete viewing data. Free YouTube channels are a low-cost tool, but it is not possible to obtain user data and communicate with them yourself. Furthermore, there is a need to combine this viewing data with information about people who visit websites and analyze it at the device level.
Mr. Hori says, “By obtaining more accurate viewer attributes and viewing data, we can prove that we are helping advertisers with marketing activities that are truly valuable. Ultimately, I thought that we could bring our content to the point where it plays a part in the customer journey based on the data specified by the advertiser.”
Therefore, in 2016, they adopted ARM Treasure Data’s CDP and began efforts to accumulate all data obtained from various channels in the CDP and to merge the data. In order to obtain as much detailed information as possible, they devised a way to acquire data. For example, when content is distributed through an external service, it is not possible to clearly grasp viewer behavior such as pausing or resuming, but the company uses its own ad distribution server to insert ads into the content. Therefore, they devised a way to grasp viewer behavior to some extent by using the time stamp when the ad distribution was executed. At the same time, they also used the CDP to merge the behavior logs of website visitors.
The CDP data that was accumulated was useful for understanding the image of the viewers. “Gaia no Yoake”, “Cambria Palace”, and “Mirai Seiki Zipangu” are the company’s flagship economic programs, but their viewer demographics were previously only an assumption. There was a hunch that there were many business people in management positions, but there was no way to prove it. However, by using CDP, we were able to grasp the trend that there were many men in their 40s and 50s. To dig deeper, we cross-checked with an external database and obtained quantitative data showing that 60% of viewers were managers or higher, 14% were company presidents, and 7.8% were board members. This has been put to use in advertising sales, and the video advertising product called the “Economic Premium Package,” which can be distributed to economic programs, has been almost fully booked.
They also plan to start a new initiative: utilizing the targeting advertising distribution function of Brightcove SSAI. Mr. Hori says, “We’re thinking of starting with just gender and age segments, but in the future we’re also considering more personalized advertising distribution. We’ve already cleared the technical requirements, so we’ll probably start when the timing is right.”
