Connected TV (CTV) menggeser lanskap Iklan

Disadur dari artikel eMarketer dengan  judul TV is changing marketing budgets and teams

Connected TV (CTV) mengubah lanskap periklanan dengan lebih dari satu cara. Menurut laporan baru dari MNTN dan Digiday, banyak pengiklan tidak hanya memasukkan CTV ke dalam strategi media mereka, namun juga merestrukturisasi organisasi internal mereka untuk mendukung inisiatif ini dengan cara berbeda.

Merujuk pada hasil survei 123 pengiklan merek dan agensi, 35% pengiklan menggunakan pendekatan hibrida, yang mencakup tim brand dan kinerja, untuk mengelola iklan dan strategi CTV mereka. Pendekatan ini menunjukkan keunggulan bawaan CTV sebagai saluran iklan. Seperti TV linier, CTV berguna untuk kampanye pencitraan merk, dan penargetan pemirsa dan kemampuan pengukurannya juga menjadikannya saluran kinerja yang sangat efektif. Bagi tim yang biasa mengevaluasi kinerja dari marketing web, penelusuran berbayar, dan saluran sosial berbayar, hal ini penting untuk mendorong keterlibatan dan konversi konsumen. 

Anggaran bergeser dari TV linier dan Media Sosial ke CTV

Hasil survey juga menunjukkan, 58% mengatakan telah mengalihkan anggaran dari TV linier ke CTV. Hal ini tidak terlalu mengejutkan, karena pemirsa telah melakukan perubahan yang sama, sedikit menonton TV dan lebih banyak streaming televisi, sejak beberapa tahun belakangan ini. Yang mungkin mengejutkan adalah bahwa 41% pengiklan mengatakan bahwa mereka mengalihkan juga anggaran dari saluran media sosial berbayar mereka.

Salah satu penjelasan terkait pergeseran belanja sosial ke CTV adalah perubahan iOS 14 baru-baru ini, yang meminta pengguna untuk ikut serta dalam pelacakan data aplikasi seluler. Media sosial sangat bergantung pada aplikasi seluler untuk mendorong bisnis periklanan mereka, dan perubahan privasi Apple melihat persentase pengguna yang rendah untuk ikut serta dalam pelacakan. Angka keikutsertaan di seluruh dunia hanya 11% sejak mulai berlaku pada April 2021, dan tidak banyak meningkat sejak itu.

Hai ini mempengaruhi pembelanjaan iklan media sosial dan mengubah cara pemasar melihat posisi strategi pemasaran mereka. Setelah saluran direct response yang dapat secara konsisten mendorong konversi, perubahan privasi data telah membatasi efektivitas media sosial dalam memberikan jenis kinerja yang biasa dilakukan pengiklan. Pada gilirannya, mereka mencari opsi lain, dan tampaknya CTV adalah alternatif yang populer.

CTV mewakili alternatif iklan direct response

Karena CTV dapat menargetkan pemirsa tertentu dan mengukur hasil yang terkait langsung dengan promosi, seperti kunjungan situs web maupun konversi, pemasar dapat menggunakannya dengan cara yang sama seperti media sosial berbayar. Terlebih lagi, ada beberapa sinergi kreatif antara kedua saluran—materi iklan video yang ada yang digunakan di media sosial dapat dialihkan untuk berjalan di CTV dengan beberapa penyesuaian untuk memenuhi kualitas dan waktu tayang.

Dengan perubahan anggaran serta tim merk dan kinerja untuk memanfaatkan peluang, CTV terbukti menjadi saluran iklan yang tangguh di industri ini. Dikombinasikan dengan fakta bahwa kondisi ini masih sangat awal dalam pengembangannya, CTV bisa menjadi bagian yang dominan untuk beberapa waktu mendatang.

Telco edge computing (1)

Taken and extracted from STL Partner's article Telco edge computing: What’s the operator strategy?, May 2020

Edge computing is a strategic opportunity for telcos. We examine the driving needs and applications for telco edge computing, describe the market and the options for telcos, discuss their partnerships with hyperscalers and recommend key actions.

Edge computing can help telcos to move up the value chain

The edge computing market and the technologies enabling it are rapidly developing and attracting new players, providing new opportunities to enterprises and service providers. Telco operators are eyeing the market and looking to leverage the technology to move up the value chain and generate more revenue from their networks and services. Edge computing also represents an opportunity for telcos to extend their role beyond offering connectivity services and move into the platform and the application space.

However, operators will be faced with tough competition from other market players such as cloud providers, who are moving rapidly to define and own the biggest share of the edge market. Plus, industrial solution providers, such as Bosch and Siemens, are similarly investing in their own edge services. Telcos are also dealing with technical and business challenges as they venture into the new market and trying to position themselves and identifying their strategies accordingly.

Telcos that fail to develop a strategic approach to the edge could risk losing their share of the growing market as non-telco first movers continue to develop the technology and dictate the market dynamics. This report looks into what telcos should consider regarding their edge strategies and what roles they can play in the market.

We focus on:

1. Edge terminology and structure, explaining common terms used within the edge computing context, where the edge resides, and the role of edge computing in 5G.
2. An overview of the edge computing market, describing different types of stakeholders, current telecoms operators’ deployments and plans, competition from hyperscale cloud providers and the current investment and consolidation trends.
3. Telcos challenges in addressing the edge opportunity: technical, organisational and commercial challenges given the market.
4. Potential use cases and business models for operators, also exploring possible scenarios of how the market is going to develop and operators’ likely positioning.
5. A set of recommendations for operators that are building their strategy for the edge.

What is edge computing and where exactly is the edge?

Edge computing brings cloud services and capabilities including computing, storage and networking physically closer to the end-user by locating them on more widely distributed compute infrastructure, typically at smaller sites.

One could argue that edge computing has existed for some time – local infrastructure has been used for compute and storage, be it end-devices, gateways or on-premises data centres. However, edge computing, or edge cloud, refers to bringing the flexibility and openness of cloud-native infrastructure to that local infrastructure.

In contrast to hyperscale cloud computing where all the data is sent to central locations to be processed and stored, edge computing local processing aims to reduce time and save bandwidth needed to send and receive data between the applications and cloud, which improves the performance of the network and the applications. This does not mean that edge computing is an alternative to cloud computing. It is rather an evolutionary step that complements the current cloud computing infrastructure and offers more flexibility in executing and delivering applications.

Edge computing offers mobile operators several opportunities such as:

• Differentiating service offerings using edge capabilities
• Providing new applications and solutions using edge capabilities
• Enabling customers and partners to leverage the distributed computing network in application development
• Improving network performance and achieving efficiencies / cost savings

As edge computing technologies and definitions are still evolving, different terms are sometimes used interchangeably or have been associated with a certain type of stakeholder. For example, mobile edge computing is often used within the mobile network context and has evolved into multi-access edge computing (MEC) – adopted by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) – to include fixed and converged network edge computing scenarios. Fog computing is also often compared to edge computing; the former includes running intelligence on the end-device and is more IoT focused.

These are some of the key terms that need to be identified when discussing edge computing:

• Network edge refers to edge compute locations that are at sites or points of presence (PoPs) owned by a telecoms operator, for example at a central office in the mobile network or at an ISP’s node.
• Telco edge cloud is mainly defined as distributed compute managed by a telco.  This includes running workloads on customer premises equipment (CPE) at customers’ sites as well as locations within the operator network such as base stations, central offices and other aggregation points on access and/or core network. One of the reasons for caching and processing data closer to the customer data centres is that it allows both the operators and their customers to enjoy the benefit of reduced backhaul traffic and costs.
• On-premise edge computing refers to the computing resources that are residing at the customer side, e.g. in a gateway on-site, an on-premises data centre, etc. As a result, customers retain their sensitive data on-premise and enjoy other flexibility and elasticity benefits brought by edge computing.
• Edge cloud is used to describe the virtualised infrastructure available at the edge. It creates a distributed version of the cloud with some flexibility and scalability at the edge. This flexibility allows it to have the capacity to handle sudden surges in workloads from unplanned activities, unlike static on-premise servers.

 Figure 1 shows the differences between these terms.

Network infrastructure and how the edge relates to 5G

Discussions on edge computing strategies and market are often linked to 5G. Both technologies have overlapping goals of improving performance and throughput and reducing latency for applications such as AR/VR, autonomous vehicles and IoT. 5G improves speed by increasing spectral efficacy, it offers the potential of much higher speeds than 4G. Edge computing, on the other hand, reduces latency by shortening the time required for data processing by allocating resources closer to the application. When combined, edge and 5G can help to achieve round-trip latency below 10 milliseconds.

While 5G deployment is yet to accelerate and reach ubiquitous coverage, the edge can be utilised in some places to reduce latency where needed. There are two reasons why the edge will be part of 5G:

• First, it has been included in the 5G standards (3GPP Release 15) to enable ultra-low latency which will not be achieved by only improvements in the radio interface.
• Second, operators are in general taking a slow and gradual approach to 5G deployment which means that 5G coverage alone will not provide a big incentive for developers to drive the application market. Edge can be used to fill the network gaps to stimulate the application market growth.

The network edge can be used for applications that need coverage (i.e. accessible anywhere) and can be moved across different edge locations to scale capacity up or down as required. Where an operator decides to establish an edge node depends on:

• Application latency needs. Some applications such as streaming virtual reality or mission critical applications will require locations close enough to its users to enable sub-50 milliseconds latency.
• Current network topology. Based on the operators’ network topology, there will be selected locations that can meet the edge latency requirements for the specific application under consideration in terms of the number of hops and the part of the network it resides in.
• Virtualisation roadmap. The operator needs to consider virtualisation roadmap and where data centre facilities are planned to be built to support future network
• Site and maintenance costs. The cloud computing economies of scale may diminish as the number of sites proliferate at the edge, for example there is a significant difference in maintaining 1-2 large data centres to maintaining 100s across the country
• Site availability. Some operators’ edge compute deployment plans assume the nodes reside in the same facilities as those which host their NFV infrastructure. However, many telcos are still in the process of renovating these locations to turn them into (mini) data centres so aren’t yet ready.
• Site ownership. Sometimes the preferred edge location is within sites that the operators have limited control over, whether that is in the customer premise or within the network. For example, in the US, the cell towers are owned by tower operators such as Crown Castle, American Tower and SBA Communications.

The potential locations for edge nodes can be mapped across the mobile network in four levels as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2: possible locations for edge computing

Telco edge computing (2)

 

Taken and extracted from STL Partner's article Telco edge computing: How to partner with hyperscalers, August 2020

Telcos and hyperscalers want to capture the value at the edge, but they need to work together to deliver of edge computing solutions and generate demand among customers. 

Edge computing is getting real

Hyperscalers such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google are rapidly increasing their presence in the edge computing market by launching dedicated products, establishing partnerships with telcos on 5G edge infrastructure and embedding their platforms into operators’ infrastructure.

Many telecoms operators, who need cloud infrastructure and platform support to run their edge services, have welcomed the partnership opportunity. However, they are yet to develop clear strategies on how to use these partnerships to establish a stronger proposition in the edge market, move up the value chain and play a role beyond hosting infrastructure and delivering connectivity. Operators that miss out on the partnership opportunity or fail to fully utilise it to develop and differentiate their capabilities and resources could risk either being reduced to connectivity providers with a limited role in the edge market and/or being late to the game.

Edge computing or multi-access edge computing (MEC) enables processing data closer to the end user or device, on physical compute infrastructure that is positioned on the spectrum between the device and the internet or hyperscale cloud.

Telco edge computing is mainly defined as a distributed compute managed by a telco operator. This includes running workloads on customer premises as well as locations within the operator network. One of the reasons for caching and processing data closer to the customer data centres is that it allows both the operators and their customers to enjoy the benefit of reduced backhaul traffic and costs. Depending on where the computing resources reside, edge computing can be broadly divided into:

• Network edge which includes sites or points of presence (PoPs) owned by a telecoms operator such as base stations, central offices and other aggregation points on the access and/or core network.
• On-premise edge where the computing resources reside at the customer side, e.g. in a gateway on-site, an on-premises data centre, etc. As a result, customers retain their sensitive data on-premise and enjoy other flexibility and elasticity benefits brought by edge computing.

The edge computing opportunity for operators and hyperscalers

Many operators are looking at edge computing as a good opportunity to leverage their existing assets and resources to innovate and move up the value chain. They aim to expand their services and revenue beyond connectivity and enter the platform and application space. By deploying computing resources at the network edge, operators can offer infrastructure-as-a-service and alternative application and solutions for enterprises. Also, edge computing as a distributed compute structure and an extension of the cloud supports the operators’ own journey into virtualising the network and running internal operations more efficiently.

Cloud hyperscalers, especially the biggest three – Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google – are at the forefront of the edge computing market. In the recent few years, they have made efforts to spread their influence outside of their public clouds and have moved the data acquisition point closer to physical devices. These include efforts in integrating their stack into IoT devices and network gateways as well as supporting private and hybrid cloud deployments. Recently, hyperscalers took another step to get closer to customers at the edge by launching platforms dedicated to telecom networks and enabling integration with 5G networks. The latest of these products include Wavelength from AWS, Azure Edge Zones from Microsoft and Anthos for Telecom from Google Cloud. 

From competition to coopetition

Both hyperscalers and telcos are among the top contenders to lead the edge market. However, each stakeholder lacks a significant piece of the stack which the other has. This is the cloud platform for operators and the physical locations for hyperscalers. Initially, operators and hyperscalers were seen as competitors racing to enter the market through different approaches. This has resulted in the emergence of new types of stakeholders including independent mini data centre providers such as Vapor IO and EdgeConnex, and platform start-ups such as MobiledgeX and Ori Industries.

However, operators acknowledge that even if they do own the edge clouds, these still need to be supported by hyperscaler clouds to create a distributed cloud. To fuel the edge market and build its momentum, operators will, in the most part, work with the cloud providers. Partnerships between operators and hyperscalers are starting to take place and shape the market, impacting edge computing short- and long-term strategies for operators as well as hyperscalers and other players in the market.

Major telco-hyperscalers edge partnerships

What does it mean for telcos?

Going to market alone is not an attractive option for either operators or hyperscalers at the moment, given the high investment requirement without a guaranteed return. The partnerships between two of the biggest forces in the market will provide the necessary push for the use cases to be developed and enterprise adoption to be accelerated. However, as markets grow and change, so do the stakeholders’ strategies and relationships between them.

Since the emergence of cloud computing and the development of the digital technologies market, operators have been faced with tough competition from the internet players, including hyperscalers who have managed to remain agile while building a sustained appetite for innovation and market disruption. Edge computing is not an exception and they are moving rapidly to define and own the biggest share of the edge market.

Telcos that fail to develop a strategic approach to the edge could risk losing their share of the growing market as non-telco first movers continue to develop the technology and dictate the market dynamics. This report looks into what telcos should consider regarding their edge strategies and what roles they can play in the market while partnering with hyperscalers in edge computing.

Indonesia Digital

Pada era digital seperti sekarang ini, masyarakat didorong untuk menyelesaikan kegiatan atau tugas sehari-hari secara digital/online. Pada tahun 90 an internet masih dianggap barang mewah, tetapi di tahun 2019 sudah sangat mudah bagi masyarakat untuk mendapatkan akses internet dengan kecepatan yang memadai. Saat ini, masyarakat di kota-kota besar sangat bergantung kepada ketersediaan internet karena sebagian besar dari aktivitas yang dilakukan membutuhkan internet. Hal ini terus didorong dengan berkembangnya produk dan layanan digital yang mempermudah kehidupan masyarakat baik secara usaha maupun kehidupan sehari-hari. 

Menurut Google dan Bain & Company pada e-Conomy SEA 2019 Report, ekonomi internet Indonesia pada tahun 2019 berada pada tingkat USD 40 miliar, dan ditargetkan mencapai USD 130 miliar pada tahun 2025 atau diperkirakan akan tumbuh lebih dari 3 kali lipat. Dengan tren penggunaan internet yang terus meningkat, prospek penyediaan produk dan layanan digital dapat terus berkembang untuk dapat memberikan kemudahan kepada masyarakat. 

Berdasarkan Kementrian Koperasi dan Usaha Kecil Menengah, jumlah pengusaha bisnis di Indonesia meningkat dari hanya 1,67% menjadi 3,10% dari total penduduk Indonesia, dimana seluruh bisnis tersebut membutuhkan public awareness untuk mendapatkan pelanggan baru dan juga meningkatkan penggunaan produk atau layanan yang ditawarkan pada bisnis. 

Periklanan menjadi salah satu cara utama bagi para bisnis mendapatkan public awareness, menurut Nielsen, penetrasi media internet dan OOH secara berturut-turut menempati peringkat kedua dan ketiga, menggantikan posisi koran dan radio. Selain itu, adanya kombinasi dengan digital advertising dimana iklan dapat menargetkan pelanggan dengan kriteria tertentu sehingga kegiatan marketing para pelaku bisnis dapat lebih efisien. Dengan demikian, ke depannya mayoritas perusahaan akan beralih memasarkan produknya melalui periklanan digital untuk membantu menerapkan strategi digital yang komprehensif untuk membantu mereka meningkatkan pertumbuhan pendapatan.

Di Indonesia, industri media dan hiburan kini didominasi oleh platform digital terutama platform video-streaming dan gaming. Berdasarkan Nielsen, platform streaming untuk mengakses konten video, portal TV online, internet TV berlangganan menjadi platform “favorit” bagi pengguna layanan internet. Seiring dengan perubahan perilaku masyarakat yang semakin meningkat dalam menggunakan internet, maka kebutuhan layanan komunikasi data dalam sisi jangkauan maupun kecepatan semakin meningkat. Penetrasi jaringan broadband yang masih rendah serta masuknya era teknologi 5G, mendorong pembangunan infrastruktur  teknologi komunikasi saat ini.