Jeffrey Katzenberg believes Quibi, the short-form mobile video subscription service he’s launching next year, scores with both consumers and brands in terms of the advertising experience on offer.

Speaking to WARC at last week’s Cannes Lions festival, he was emphatic that the project will only be successful if it can deliver a great consumer experience. (For more, read WARC’s report: Quibi’s Jeffrey Katzenberg on creating an ad model to suit both brands and subscribers.)

“To that end, I think we have protected our customers,” he said, as he set out a planned advertising schedule that will see videos of between five and ten minutes carrying one 15-second ad, and anything under five minutes one 10-second ad.

“If you do the math, it means if you’ve watched an hour of content on Quibi, you will watch two and a half minutes of commercials,” he pointed out.

That’s a figure that compares favourably with other video options – 17.5 minutes of ads per hour on broadcast TV, for example, or ten minutes on Hulu – “so I think we’ve hit a home run. It’s a tiny ad load compared to any other proposition that exists out there.”

Advertisers, meanwhile, can enjoy the rare experience of not being grouped together with a bunch of other brands since each ad stands alone.

“They’re never in a pot of five, six [or] eight commercials, which is what happens anywhere else,” said Katzenberg.

Plus the audience itself is targeted and curated. “It’s an audience that has to a very large degree abandoned traditional broadcast cable TV, so [isn’t accessible elsewhere],” he said. “And every single piece of content on Quibi is curated, so it’s brand safe.”

Even with ads, users will still pay for the service – even if it’s just $4.99 a month – although if they really can’t stand the two and a half minutes an hour they can shell out $7.99 to avoid them altogether. Katzenberg expects 75% of subscribers to take the cheaper option.

You can’t produce the premium short-form content Quibi has planned – A-list creators like Steven Spielberg are on board – via ad-funding alone, he added.

Consider that a ten-minute piece of content might cost $1m to make: “You can’t charge enough – the CPM would be $2,000. It’s just not possible to do it.”

Sourced from WARC