The rise of Netflix has given ad-funded media and ad buyers alike the collywobbles.

Analysis from nScreenMedia suggests U.S. Netflix viewers, by substituting free viewing for subscription video-on-demand, are missing 2 billion ad views every day, totaling missing ad sales estimated at between $3 billion and $6 billion annually.

So what’s an ad buyer to do? The woman in charge of helping one major ad agency plan the future destination for billions of dollars says the industry wants to get better understanding.

Maggie Zhang, SVP on-linear video research and insights at Amplifi, the media investment arm of Dentsu Aegis Network, had this video interview with Beet.TV

In it, Zhang says: “In order to understand the audience shift from linear platforms to OTT-connected TV platforms, we need to drive further understanding of the audiences that are viewing ad-supported content on OTT platforms as well as the impact of SVOD, which is ad-free subscription-based OTT services, and the subscribers and also understand the impact of linear TV ratings as a result of the increasing amount of SVOD subscription.

“We have done a lot of analysis and internal research on these audiences and the impact on linear ratings. We are having more in-depth analysis of OTT ad-supported viewers as well as SVOD viewers on the OTT platforms. And potentially, the insight will be able to drive and inform at lot of our cross-platform video investment decisions.”

Earlier, eMarketer had forecast US TV ad spending would this year dip below the $70bn mark as audience viewing behavior shifts more and more toward OTT options, with the number of OTT viewers growing 2.7% to reach 198.6 million.

This video is part the Beet.TV preview series ‘The Road to CES 2019.” The series is presented by dataxu.  For more videos, please visit this page