Beyond the Ad Break: The Science of Storytelling

08/10/2025

In our latest blog Tim Pearson reflects on a UK advertising anniversary and considers how far the industry has come from a simple, mass-market advert to the highly targeted and data-driven decisioning through which today's services are monetized.

70 years ago, black and white TV sets crackled with a new form of video as part of the launch of the first commercial TV channel in the UK. Gibbs SR toothpaste told a story through video of why their product was the best for tinglingly good' dental hygiene. This was back in 1955 and while not many people had a TV back then, the advert did have a favorable effect on sales' according to its creator.

TV advertising has since evolved dramatically across the many forms of content and distribution networks we have today. Through TVOD, SVOD, AVOD, FAST and connected TV platforms, the opportunities to capture eyeballs are endless. While things have come on a long way since the heyday of UK TV advertising in the 1980s - who can forget the Heineken Beer Adverts, the Milk Tray Man or the romantic cliff-hangers of the Nestle Gold Blend series, the fundamental principle remains the same. Advertising is a form of personalized storytelling designed to resonate with key audiences and drive product sales.

Personalized Experiences, Monetized

It was interesting then at the recent IBC show in Amsterdam, to explore this theme further with visitors to the NAGRAVISION booth who were focused on driving consumer engagement in their respective organizations. While advertising was an important consideration, highly personalized experiences now enjoy equal prominence.

Personalized experiences have long been talked about in terms of providing recommended content to drive consumption of long-tail content and convert subscribers to new content but this year, the conversations have moved on considerably. The problem with simply recommending content is just that - you're hoping the consumer is going to engage and if you over promote, it can have an adverse reaction.

Content discovery in its broadest form is powering a personalized experience. But as operators face a multifaceted challenge: expanding content libraries, shrinking consumer attention spans, and the need to balance algorithmic personalization with strategic editorial intent, content discovery should not be left solely to algorithms but should reflect creative and strategic goals. Built to enable relationships between users and stories, between platforms and audiences, and between data and decision-making, the key is making sure every recommendation is not just statistically likely but strategically meaningful.

To achieve this, operators require a platform that responds directly to these challenges, that prioritizes content discovery to help operators engage and allows operators to monetize and retain their audiences more effectively.

Personalization with Purpose

A lot of the conversations at IBC focused on how to monetize personalized experiences - a key point addressed by OpenTV ENTera, the multi-award-winning digital experience platform from NAGRAVISION that made its debut at this year's show. OpenTV ENTera differentiates itself through a fundamentally different approach to content discovery. Rather than treating personalization as a purely algorithmic task, OpenTV ENTera understands it as a collaborative process that blends machine learning, business logic, and human creativity.

Empowering operators to move beyond generic personalization into a new era of strategic content discovery that promotes the right content to the right user at the right time is not just a technical function but a deliberate business strategy. NAGRAVISION, through OpenTV ENTera aims to provide operators with the tools to create, test, and optimize user experiences that are both contextually relevant and commercially effective.

Data-Driven Decisioning

Creating a personalized experience for today's consumer involves the processing of a bewildering amount of data. This can include clickstream data, metadata tagging, playback events, and entitlement structures, all which feed into continuously updating user profiles. Here, AI has a clear role to play and with the OpenTV ENTera AI-powered segmentation engine, powered by XroadMedia, behavioral trends can be identified and consumption patterns analysed at scale. The resultant audience segments are dynamic, can adapt to changes in user behavior and enable more effective targeting at a time where there is increased competition for viewer attention and loyalty.

Monetizing the Experience

Back to the advertising we started this blog with. While advertising has always looked to address individuals through simple storytelling, AI-based personalization is now a far more targeted and scientific way of driving consumer engagement, which in turn drives loyalty.

But advertising too is becoming more targeted and more personalized. One of the showcases on the AWS booth at IBC featured targeted in-video advertising where specific brands or products could be introduced directly into the video feed to offer a different type of personalized experience. With a combination of in-video advertising and personalized content experiences, the way in which streaming services, across all their touchpoints are monetized continues to evolve.

Looking back to the Gibbs SR toothpaste ad, the premise of targeting audiences with specific products hasn't changed. But the advancements in how this is achieved together with the understanding of consumer behaviour most definitely have - with tinglingly good' outcomes for operators and consumers alike.

Get in Touch

If you missed IBC and would like to catch-up with the latest NAGRAVISION solutions and innovations or would like to learn more about the multi-award winning OpenTV ENTera, get in touch - we'd love to c

LINK:	https://nagra.vision/newsroom/blog/beyond-the-ad-break-the-science-of-...
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Beyond the Ad Break: The Science of Storytelling

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