On TV & Video

It’s anyone’s guess how CTV advertising will eventually look. But, today, there are no rigid standards, writes Operative’s Mike Pollard.

The TV market’s vanishing impression problem is even more concerning than the numbers indicate. But maybe a little impression scarcity is a good thing.

Multiple factors such as buy-side practices, the CTV industry structure and shortcomings in ad tech contribute to CTV’s ad frequency problem. Yet there are several ways to overcome these limitations.

More than two decades after they ran, Cerveza Cristal’s Star Wars ads are a perfect and unintentional cautionary tale for ad tech vendors pushing CTV ad products like virtual product placements and shoppable content overlays.

Data has not only become the new oil for marketers; it is also the oxygen breathing life into TV advertising with new branding and performance opportunities.

Here are four common errors that can curtail the success of any influencer campaign – and advice for getting it right.

Aiming for one thing and being measured against another is absurd. But this is how the multibillion-dollar TV industry has operated for decades.

Excluding the long tail of CTV is a hangover from a linear age when audiences clustered around a small subset of wildly popular shows. The idea of “premium” is subjective in a climate packed with vast amounts of content catering to diverse and passionate audiences.

The shift in ad spend from linear TV to CTV isn’t correlated to audience time spent. It’s because CTV offers entirely new possibilities to advertisers. 

The streaming revolution isn’t only taking place on the big screen in the living room. There are opportunities to reach audiences on a multitude of devices, and the possibilities can be daunting.

TV and audio incrementality have traditionally been difficult to measure, but technological shifts have produced a strong playbook for testing incrementality across these mediums.

Viewers might want to watch trashy shows from time to time, but they certainly don’t want to watch trashy ads. For the solution to what ails CTV, the industry could turn to another rapidly growing marketing favorite: retail media. 

CTV is poised to become the third “big scale” performance advertising channel, but is effective CTV attribution actually possible?

Like their cookie cousins, IP addresses face an uncertain future. Yet the industry seems stumped for an alternative to its chosen CTV default.

CTV is entirely its own thing. Doggedly following display practices can cost you time and money.

YouTube is now a rival to TV networks. Yet many networks still post their content to the platform via friendly licensing agreements. In the current war for viewer attention, this is a potentially crippling move.

The second round of ad fraud (and worse) alleged by Adalytics on the part of Google/YouTube provides yet another definitive example of the problem with mega walled gardens.

In the context of TV advertising, clean rooms offer privacy-compliant software that enables advertisers and publishers to match user-level data without actually sharing any personal information or raw data with one another. 

Google’s protestations about TrueView’s media quality aside, two questions remain: Why is any of this happening, and why is change unlikely in the short term?

YouTube is very much in the hot seat. However, let’s zoom out and consider all of the different media companies and platforms that are doling out “grab bags” of video inventory.

These strikes will impact content generation for the foreseeable future. Media buyers need to think about how that will impact their jobs.

Discrepancies across the various attempts to quantify the issue with YouTube TrueView have just raised more questions about measurement failures.

In a wildly exciting and inventive sector, YouTube is merely meeting the status quo – with scope for so much more.

It’s only fitting that YouTube, which has long coveted TV’s ad dollars and advertisers, should find out what it feels like to be treated as if it were TV.

Video and CTV bring challenges and opportunities for notice and choice. And doubts persist about whether the industry can self-regulate on the issue.

More advertisers, especially marketers, who have been slow to embrace AVOD, will increasingly gravitate to primarily AVOD services, writes Greg Smith, Aniview’s GM for North America.

Among streaming ad providers, there is a temptation to make streaming ad ROI look better than it really is (and definitely better than linear).

Premium video means just about anything that shows up in front of a consumer. Isn’t it time for a better definition?

We’re close to the onset of true cross-media measurement – with the understanding that all video impressions are not created equal. That seems obvious, but one key player in the ecosystem, YouTube, disagrees.

After a 19-month suspension, MRC’s decision this week to reinstate Nielsen’s national TV audience-measurement service couldn’t have come at a better time. However, it’s important to note, that accreditation only applies to national TV services and there are still several other Nielsen products without accreditation.