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.
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.
TV ad tech and identity resolution company Blockgraph – jointly owned by Comcast, Charter and Paramount – announced a partnership with FullThrottle, which focuses on household-level data as opposed to user data like third-party cookies, to expand its pool of anonymized advertising IDs.
The growth of connected TV advertising isn’t simmering down anytime soon – but the lack of an industrywide standard for campaign measurement is making it a rocky road. Several executives at AdMonsters’ Ops conference in New York City discussed how interoperability between TV publishers can help solve for some of the standstills stemming from the lack of consensus.
Cookie deprecation is hanging over the media and advertising industry like a storm cloud. New identity solutions built on first-party data are clearly one solution, but publishers and advertisers differ on whether they’re building their own proprietary solution or a shared shelter that will scale – and explained why at AdMonsters’ Ops conference in New York City.
Ampersand released a self-service option for TV marketers to monitor incremental reach across multiple screens. The capability was already available as a managed service, but advertisers have been demanding more control and transparency over the buying process, said Andrew Matero, Ampersand’s VP of platform – and effective incremental reach calls for considering much more than just streaming.
Whenever there’s a sociopolitical or economic crisis, the lowest rung of online marketers finds a way to prey on the vulnerable and disenfranchised. The pending overturn of Roe v. Wade is no different – it’s creating a new class of online audiences that are potential prey, and publishers can stand to take more steps to filter out misleading ads (like donation scams and brand infringement) that harvest and sell users’ personal information.
The IAB Tech Lab announced its Global Privacy Platform (GPP), a framework to standardize the sharing of consent signals so companies can more easily comply with global privacy regulations. “It’s a protocol for streamlining and managing cross-jurisdictional privacy compliance,” said IAB Tech Lab CEO Anthony Katsur – which is why the platform will be ready to incorporate new consent strings within the framework as they emerge.
TikTok’s content relies heavily on influencers and creators. As prime ad real estate for targeting younger “video native” audiences, TikTok is using its market positioning with brands to capitalize on both the creator marketplace and ecommerce through shoppable video trends, said Melissa Yang, TikTok’s head of ecosystem partnerships, speaking at AdExchanger’s Programmatic I/O conference earlier this week.
Real estate franchise Coldwell Banker, like the rest of the housing biz, has been targeting buyers who might be in the market for a new abode. But due to various macroeconomic factors, the company launched a new campaign to shift gears and start talking directly to home sellers – which also means targeting an older audience across channels.
If the NewFronts is where buyers flirt with newer media channels and streaming services, the upfronts, which wrapped up this week, is where things start to get serious, as legacy broadcasters showcase their new content in the hopes that advertisers will put a ring on it – but this year, pretty much all of the major programmers had streaming on the brain.
Under COPPA, businesses can’t target ads based on the data of children under 13 years old. Toy manufacturers like WowWee need other ways to get their products in market via advertising, and after testing a YouTube campaign with contextual ad platform Precise TV, the promising results allude to the potential of contextual in targeting ads effectively without audience data, profiles or cookies.
Pre-pandemic, Great Wolf Lodge devoted the majority of its media strategy to performance-based marketing and programmatic buying. But as the family resort rebuilds after the pandemic, it’s turning back to its upper-funnel roots with an omnichannel, brand-building campaign. Upper-funnel metrics are now front-and-center for the hospitality-focused brand.
AVOD is the same thing as FAST … right? Not so fast. Despite dozens of streamers, programmers and publishers crowding the space, AVOD and FAST are the only two ways to watch ad-supported TV beyond the set-top box, and the core difference between them comes down to content distribution.
