Alyssa Boyle ( alyssa@adexchanger.com ) covers the TV ecosystem from linear to video and connected TV. She also writes about measurement and data privacy. Her journalistic passions stem from a background in language and translation. She received her B.A. in linguistics and Korean studies from Binghamton University in 2020. When she isn’t writing, she’s probably deep in a history novel or busy performing stand-up comedy.
Contextual targeting laid the foundations of TV advertising – particularly by ensuring that ads were stitched into content marketers considered “brand safe.” With the advent of CTV, buyers put context on the back-burner in favor of more granular, first-party audience targeting. Now, the pendulum is swinging back again. Why? Two words: signal loss.
Arlo’s first order of business as a standalone company was to pour money into performance marketing to drum up sales, which is what it did for nearly three years. But there was a problem: A lack of brand familiarity. So Arlo launched its first-ever brand campaign on TV, including linear and streaming, with digital and social also in the mix.
Warner Bros. Discovery lost 1% in total Q2 revenue, closing out the quarter with $9.8 billion, $2 billion behind expectations. So it plans to do some belt-tightening of its streaming services. Specifically, it’s HBO Max productions that are getting the cut.
Paramount is just one of many broadcasters juggling its linear (and declining) TV cash cow with a budding DTC streaming biz. Paramount’s total revenue grew 19% year-over-year in Q2 to a total of $7.7 billion. But the growth was primarily attributed to streaming – particularly Paramount+.
Streaming is attracting more and more of TV ad spend. And yet, measurement still hasn’t caught up. But traditional panel-based measurement is far from the only culprit – issues with ad fraud, viewability and audience identification are more prevalent on streaming. That’s why TV measurement needs to be a fusion solution, says Jon Watts, managing director of the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM).
DoubleVerify’s Q2 revenue grew 43% year-over-year to $109.8 million. CEO Mark Zagorski says the company’s growth is due to both its revenue diversification into new types of advertising and its market position in the verification space, both of which make DoubleVerify “largely agnostic to shifts in ad spend and CPM volatility.”
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is the most mature and comprehensive health data protection law in the US. (It passed in 1996.) But does this patient data protection law apply to data-driven advertising and online data collection? The answer is yes and no.
Roku’s total Q2 revenue was $764 million, up 18% year-over-year, but was relatively flat compared with last quarter, when revenue clocked in at $734 million. CFO Steve Louden was probably referring to that plateau when he warned of a TV ad spend hiatus. US advertisers are pulling back in reaction to inflation and supply chain shortages.
Microsoft’s selection as Netflix’s ad sales partner of choice single-handedly set the stage for Netflix’s last quarterly earnings report. But Microsoft hardly brought up the deal at all when it closed out its 2022 fiscal year on Tuesday. It attributes a good chunk of its current growth to its cloud business.
Tremor International has been on a journey to rebuild its biz with assets on both the buy and sell sides of digital media. And with its acquisition of Amobee announced earlier this week, Tremor is now making inroads into linear inventory. Tremor International CEO Ofer Druker spoke with AdExchanger about the company’s plans for its most recent acquisition.
For decades, political advertisers have spent big to promote their candidates on linear television in the weeks leading up to an election. Now that streaming and connected TV are catching up to linear in terms of scale, political advertisers are making budget reallocations that favor CTV across all content types, including sports.
The current web of disconnected clean rooms is like rows and rows of magnets facing the same way, so nothing actually happens. InfoSum announced a new software, Platform Sigma, to try and give its clients a better way to share depersonalized data with each other and their data vendors of choice – which could also help solve for measurement.
Television does drive sales lift, although the impact usually isn’t immediate. Broadcasters have been trying to change that for a long time. Until recently, however, the reality of shoppable TV has lagged far behind the idea. Publishers are busy exploring interactive TV ad formats, from QR codes to clickable overlays – but are advertisers buying in?
Netflix’s biggest hope for its imminent ad tier is increasing revenue not from ads themselves, but by attracting new sign-ups with a cheaper subscription option. It chose Microsoft as its ad sales partner for flexibility in building out the tech, and it hopes new plans for password sharing enforcement will help keep up subscriber monetization, too.
Most marketers agree that digital and social are performance channels, whereas they’re less convinced that performance marketing works on CTV because it’s a less interactive, lean-back experience. But CTV is a lot more like digital than many marketers think, said Jason Fairchild, CEO of TV performance marketing platform tvScientific. “CTV is like digital in that you don’t have to guess at what works – you know.”
Just three months after Netflix surprised the world with the news that it plans to launch an ad-supported tier, the streaming leader has settled on its third-party vendor of choice: Microsoft. But why Microsoft? It wasn’t considered a serious programmatic contender until it acquired Xandr from AT&T (and that deal only closed last month). Still, something made Microsoft stand out from the crowd.
Advanced TV platform Cadent announced a partnership with data provider Tunnl with an eye on what’s known as issue advocacy segments, which are different from general political ad segments. Issue advocacy campaigns go beyond political affiliation and aim to reach people based on the “hot button” issues that voters are concerned with, such as climate change or reproductive rights.
El Pollo Loco began as a small restaurant chain in the 1970s, first in Mexico and later in Southern California. The brand only started leaning into digital ad channels in 2019, and today, it spends half its media budget on digital – a huge portion of which is reserved for TikTok. Last month, El Pollo Loco launched its latest campaign, “Abuela Approved” – its first TikTok-only campaign.
One of the most popular technical solutions to streamline campaign flights on connected TV is server-side ad insertion (SSAI). SSAI is technology that stitches together ads within a video stream before the stream loads on a user’s device. Most of the demand is coming from the explosive growth of CTV, but it can be used in any connected or over-the-top (OTT) video environments, including social.
Did you know Chicken Soup for the Soul now earns its keep primarily from manufacturing food, pet food and … streaming video? That also means Chicken Soup is partaking in the grail quest for cross-device CTV measurement solutions. Its streamer Crackle Plus renewed its partnership with iSpot to enable improved incremental reach through programmatic direct deals.
Ad-supported video on demand is growing relentlessly. But fact is, TV audiences still consume live linear content – they just want to be able to watch it on their own terms, said Matt Hill, head of Fire device monetization at Amazon. Live TV made up 21% of the 154 million hours people spent watching content on a Fire TV device in February alone.
Max Joseph, the filmmaker and producer of “Catfish,” an MTV reality show that exposes people who lie about themselves online, is helping Israel-based monetization platform Perion promote its cookieless targeting product, called SORT, with a satirical short film that highlights the perils of data collection on the internet and the great lengths one would have to go to in order to avoid it completely.
Pirate’s Booty has long traded on its high level of brand awareness despite not doing much paid advertising at all. Pirate’s Booty only got serious about marketing in 2018, when the brand was acquired by Hershey, and largely skipped over linear TV entirely to reach co-viewing parent and child audiences on connected TV (CTV) and digital channels.
Although advanced, addressable and convergent TV might sound like synonyms, they are distinct concepts. Think of advanced TV as the umbrella term for anything that is not traditional, over-the-air broadcast TV, with specific techniques including addressable and convergent TV, data-driven linear and OTT. To make the most of TV’s advancements (get it?), it’s important to understand the nuances.
Aflac launched its first-ever campaign on TikTok, dubbed #DuckVibes, to engage younger consumers with what it considers a mid-funnel-focused strategy. The new campaign, which will run throughout the summer, uses catchy music, lyrics and visuals involving the eponymous Aflac duck to encourage “duets,” a split-screen feature TikTokers use to retroactively “respond to” other creators’ videos.
Comcast-owned FreeWheel announced new identity integrations to bring the buy and sell sides of the TV ecosystem together. Its platform now supports ID solutions from Blockgraph, LiveRamp, TransUnion, Experian, Merkle and OpenAP, which can be overlaid with publishers’ and advertisers’ first- and third-party data sets for more accurate cross-screen targeting and measurement.
Everyone is getting into streaming. Even ad networks are launching their own streaming networks. In May, Columbia-based company Adsmovil, which started life in 2012 as a mobile ad network helping US brands connect with Hispanic audiences, announced plans to launch an ad-supported streaming service called Nuestra.tv.
NBCUniversal shared the results of its cross-platform measurement currency tests with iSpot, which became the programmer’s first certified measurement partner in January. NBCU certified eight more partners in March – but anyone expecting a comparison of how those partners perform against each other is still waiting. NBCU’s currency pilot test with iSpot included 67 advertisers representing 158 brands and compared reach and frequency measurements against linear and over-the-top (OTT) buys.
Back in 1997, when the oldest Gen Zers were born, Liz Smith joined a Silicon Valley startup called Yahoo! What started off as a group of misfits on the internet turned into a “Frankenstein’s monster” of sorts, said Smith, who left Yahoo! for film school and captures the effects of technological submersion on the next generation in her latest movie, I Am Gen Z.
Connected TV may be the media industry’s shiniest new toy, but it’s not squeaky clean – it’s rife with ad fraud, and high CPMs only make the channel a better target for con artists. Several industry execs discussed why the industry’s best shot is to increase transparency as much as possible across the bid stream at IAB Tech Lab’s Transcend summit.
