Around four months ago, Serge Matta, president of global ad sales at LG Ad Solutions, had a meeting with a large QSR advertiser, and he offered the CMO a guarantee.
“We said, ‘You only pay us based on incremental visits to your store as defined and measured by your independent third-party measurement provider,’” Matta shared during a session at LUMA’s Digital Media Summit earlier this week, in what felt a little like group therapy for CTV ad tech platforms.
Sounds like a slam dunk, right?
Not so much. The QSR advertiser wasn’t convinced. “Well, how do I know I can trust them?” he asked.
“They’re your measurement partner!” Matta recalled thinking, still incredulous in his retelling.
“That’s when I gave up,” he said.
Legacy barriers
Matta’s tale highlights a frustration that plenty of CTV sellers share. They’ve spent years positioning connected TV as a vehicle for driving outcomes, not just reach and frequency – but getting advertisers to believe it is another matter.
“We’re not there yet,” Matta said. “The promise is there, we’re pitching it, we have it, but we need advertisers to come on board.”
So why the hesitation?
Ad industry vet – and self-described “recovering marketer” – Lou Paskalis piped up from the audience to venture a theory. It’s partially a perception thing.
Although there’s been an “inexorable pull down the funnel” toward performance, he said, marketers still tend to see TV as upper-funnel “hero media,” he said.
Advertisers also often don’t have the right creative for CTV, and making the creative is too expensive. “There are legacy barriers to taking full advantage,” Paskalis said, “and [CTV is] just not seen as being as performative as programmatic.”
Proof isn’t the problem
But whatever it is that’s holding buyers back, it’s not a lack of measurement options.
Philip Inghelbrecht, CEO and co-founder of CTV ad platform Tatari, said that around 10 years ago when he started the company, people would look at him cross-eyed when he tried to talk about incrementality.
But today, there are lots of different independent third-party measurement companies that offer incrementality through a variety of models. It’s a good thing, Inghelbrecht said.
Yet, be that as it may, even the offer of a guarantee backed by independent measurement couldn’t close the deal for Matta. And sometimes the skepticism is warranted. There’s no denying that attribution is kind of a mess.
Every channel, from display to social, tries to take credit for the same conversion, said Scott Young, co-founder and chief product officer of streaming ad insertion platform Transmit.Live.
To be fair, CTV is no different in that regard, although it does bring something to the table that other channels don’t.
“You’re getting a higher rate of attention,” Young said. “Yes, you might be paying more for it, but you need exposure and attention in order to actually convert.”
Not-so-fun-size frustration
But it’s also worth pointing out that this whole debate can sound rather academic to the people who control the budgets, Vinny Rinaldi, VP of client strategy and growth at The Trade Desk, reminded the room.
“Not many brands think about all the things that we talk about on a daily basis,” Rinaldi said, and he knows of what he speaks. Before joining TTD over the summer, Rinaldi spent most of his career on the brand and agency side, including multiple long stints at Hershey’s in media, marketing and strategy roles.
Marketers care about things like timing, seasonality and sales, not the ad tech plumbing underneath. And that, he argued, is why it makes sense for the DSP, not the publisher, to have the final say on when and where ads run across CTV and everywhere else.
At Hershey’s, for example, October was like its Super Bowl, but most candy sales wouldn’t happen until the last three or four days of the month in the countdown to Halloween. When he’d buy direct from publishers, however, most of the impressions would run in the first week of October, well before shoppers were thinking about Halloween candy, because the publishers were focused on monetizing their own inventory, not his business problems.
There would only be a trickle of impressions remaining by the end of the month.
If pressed, Rinaldi said, “[the publishers] would be like, ‘Well, we delivered in full, what do you mean?”
“But I wanted 95% of my spend to be the last week of October,” he said, “because it would have driven a lot more revenue for my company, not somebody else’s.”
Earning trust, it turns out, takes more than just a third-party measurement partner.
