High-Quality Content Quickly Attracts the Viewer's Attention

Sales Director at bTV Media Group Mrs Dessislava Proeva commented on the trends of the advertising market in an interview for the Manager Magazine

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Mrs Desislava Proeva is Sales Director of bTV Media Group since January 2018. Prior to that she is Head of TV Sales since 2017. She has been part of the company’s sales team since 2007.

She has more than 10 years of experience in sales and media, in the enhancing and the implementation of highly influential advertising strategies. Her interests focus on the state-of-the-art media sales techniques, on strategic planning and on enabling the latest developments in media sales and advertising for the brands on the local market.

Mrs Proeva, what are the latest trends on the advertising market - what media channels and positioning are brands looking for?

Today’s CEOs and CFOs know that brands are important, supporting short- and long-term sales and margins. All businesses are under constant pressure to deliver short-term results, making it harder to sustain investment in long-term brandbuilding. The focus is on mass personalization – reaching the right people, at the right time, simply complementing their information flow with the brand communications. Contextual binding with high-quality content and well targeted multiplatform presence is where bTV Media Group meets the expectations of businesses and our partners from the advertising industry. We enable the use of even more integrated formats, where video reigns supreme, as they get instant attention and easily unlock the door through which the marketing communications successfully enter the mind of the consumer. We align our strategies with the changing media consumption habits of the viewers, who are looking for high quality content, regardless of the channel. And the audience’s criteria for what stands for high quality are constantly evolving, so today quality definitely wins over quantity from the users’ point of view.

Naturally, our main focus is on creating only the highest quality content for our TV, online and radio channels. We provide the advertisers with the right environment that enables them to share more, engage more, and reach more across different platforms.

For example, our key primetime project this fall The Farm has extended its TV content also for our online and radio platforms, gaining a higher reach and a more diverse audience. We are launching an exclusive video project for The Farm’s website, developing the storylines with additional characters, and we also have engaging contextual games with bTV Radio, related to the TV production. Such synergies are also developed with the other radio brands and productions, such as N-Joy and Dear Heirs for example, and they enable us to successfully deliver even more touch points to the advertisers. 

TV advertising is a powerful business investment because of its scale and popularity. In the current evolving and tech-driven media eco-system is the business also sharing feedback and requirements on measuring effectiveness and sustaining the power of brands long term?

Indeed advertising is a powerful business investment, with TV delivering the highest ROI and undisputed results for growing profitable, sustainable brands. That is again easily explained by the huge impact of video content. Advertisers and ad agencies are better equipped than ever before to create, plan, execute and measure the effectiveness of their advertising. In bTV Media Group we enable our partners to efficiently plan each touchpoint with the audience. We provide the freedom of planning and selecting the right vehicle for each brand. Then we simply deliver as planned. Of course we receive instant feedback by our partners about KPI delivery and profit impact. We know it matters when contacts are performed. That is why we deliver as promised. We are focused on ensuring that all the campaigns of our partners are fully accommodated according to the plans. It happens for 99.5% of the campaigns. Especially pleasing is the feedback by our partners about advertising campaigns delivering profitable return that also contributed to the maximizing the growth and value of the company.

A very important trend to mention here is related to brand safety. Brands are increasingly re-evaluating how to achieve maximum value and return from their investments, and choosing a safe environment for advertising is equally important to them as the completely accountable delivery and the near certain viewability around the TV content. Our advantage is that bTV Media Group creates the most watched, trustworthy, positive video content on the market, be it news or entertainment. In our digital channels clients see no impact from ad fraud and ad blocking, and overall the brand safety guarantee is a very important reason why we remain the preferred partner of the advertising industry. 

What kinds of ads work best for the clients in your channels? How should a company prepare its advertising mix, so that it be most effective?

Relevant video formats reign supreme. Especially when utilizing the combination of the mass impact and the completion rates of the TV world with the promising opportunities of the digital world for delivering content to audiences. All this blended by the targeting possibilities and the sophisticated data leveraging techniques of our time. An individual approach to every advertiser to identify its communication needs is part of the consulting we do for our partners, so that we together come up with the most effective proposal. Our partners increasingly see the benefits of tailor made creative solutions, which combine traditional with deeper integrated ad formats, positioned in the diverse channels from our TV, radio and digital portfolio. For example, our superior local fiction production Dear Heirs is providing opportunities for contextual advertising on air, creative ad forms in the online platform btvplus.bg, where the series is available up to 7 days after broadcasting and advertising synergy with our leading radio station N-Joy, where additional content related to the series is created. As proof for that development we currently see a significant increase in the demand for integrated communications. The market recognizes that we know how to engage our viewer’s emotions. Our team is prepared to provide impactful integration opportunities for all our titles – the strongest media brands in Bulgaria, and to enable advertisers to share more, engage more and reach more. Also with regard to the next Bulgarian series that we are currently producing – Sunny Beach. It is a weekly production, developed for primetime in the genre of romantic comedy, with a brilliant cast - and an excellent platform for powerful brand communications. 

Is it possible to achieve a good result with a smaller budget?

It is all about attracting the attention of the right audience at the right time. The talents in bTV’s sales team are brilliant in making every campaign as successful and cost-efficient as possible, regardless of the budget. We have a very rich variety of channels and platforms in our portfolio that provide numberless opportunities for effective ad positioning. The various platforms of bTV Media Group are the place where state of the art airing technologies, superior news competence and world class storytelling enhance the marketing communications of our partners. Just a single spot on bTV can be seen simultaneously by 10-12 times more people than the capacity of Camp Nou – and that is more than a million viewers. Impactful, targetable context is created not only for the main channel. The top quality content acquired from the major studios Warner Bros, Universal, 20th Century Fox, Paramount, combined with strong original shows, create a cost-effective and efficient ad environment in our thematic channels bTV Action, bTV Cinema, bTV Comedy and bTV Lady, especially when combined with a suitable positioning in radio and digital.

The success of an advertising campaign in any channel of course depends also on the creative concept and the quality of production of the advertising form, and bTV Media Group is a trusted advisor to our partners in every step of the way. An advertiser can easily start with special brand integration or alternative advertising forms which don’t even require huge budgets and the production of a sophisticated TV spot. 

What is the role of new technologies in brand positioning?

The role of technology is equally important for both the media content and the brand communications in our channels. bTV Media Group is the pioneer on the local market in this respect – since quite a while we broadcast bTV and our thematic channels in HD quality. We launched the bTV news and radio streaming apps right after apps became popular, and for even more spectacular viewers experience long ago we introduced augmented reality within the studios and even in a real world environment. We are using 3D mapping and 360-degree video in our news and entertainment content. These capabilities are available also for our advertisers as part of really impactful ad forms, as for example were during the most emotional local sports events we organized with Berbatov and Stoichkov, and also during the final of The Voice. Such events have a huge social impact, as they are witnessed together, discussed with peers and shared on social media.  

Of course, technology advancements themselves are not the ultimate solution. They should be blended with powerful stories, trusted content and top talent, and this powerful combination is what guarantees bTV Media Group’s success both in terms of viewership and usage, and in terms of advertising campaigns performance and effectiveness. 

How serious a competitor is internet as a channel for advertising, and how are TVs defending their interest?

We are no longer speaking of competition between TV and internet because the global trend is about quality video. It is the content, and not the channel, that drives the media market all over the world, and also in Bulgaria. However, TV will long retain its strongest position in terms of consumption and impact, especially in our part of the world. And most importantly for the communication industry – it attracts the greatest audience attention. This is the currency all the advertisers need in order to get to peoples’ minds.

bTV for example continues to be a major source of quality entertainment, delivering positive emotions and exciting experiences, with huge social impact. bTV News and current affairs shows are the ultimate information source, the most trusted and meaningful choice of the audience for analyses, comments or just to follow the events that shape our world. But this result requires also significant investment in content, talent and technology development.

We see that also in digital it is the high quality video content that reigns supreme, with the VOD platforms delivering the highest viewablity and the most active attention.

We are still the only media group in Bulgaria offering video programmatic to its partners. For maximum performance of the campaigns of our advertisers we've created a full set of tools for executing direct video and display programmatic deals. As of March 1 we are effectively serving both the premium and programmatic campaigns via Double Click for Publisher (DFP) - for display and video advertising. This enables us to offer an absolutely automated process that improves campaign performance. We are already employing a state of the art DMP (Data Management Platform) to offer the purchasing of segmented audiences to our partners.

Overall, with regard to content delivery, S-VOD, A-VOD are certainly important growth areas, and with regard to advertising, providing addressable TV, programmatic marketing and data-driven targeting are clearly our high priorities. 

Is the fierce competition between the TV channels helping or obstructing the development of the market?

Competition is always key for a healthy business environment. But competition itself is driven by the expectations of the diverse audiences. Today they have unlimited access to fantastic content from all over the world, and they defer their expectations also to what is offered on the local market. We at bTV Media Group constantly keep very high standards for content quality and technological innovations. In this way we ensure a spectacular experience for our audience. The high quality content will still lead with regard to the number of people and total time spent.