CTV

CES this year was a petri dish of news and gossip (and hopefully not COVID) among the CTV ad industry.

VideoAmp may have established itself as one of the top alternative currency contenders in 2023, but the pressure to win market share is causing cracks in its shiny facade.

Netflix shared another update on viewer numbers for its ad-supported tier, which currently stands at 23 million global montly active users, and announced plans to introduce pause ads in the next few months.

At CES in Las Vegas on Wednesday, Disney announced the availability of combined Disney+ and Hulu ad campaigns for brands in the US during its fourth annual (and first in-person) Tech and Data Showcase.

NBCUniversal is kicking off the new year with a programmatic progress report during CES in Las Vegas this week.

MediaWallah made a new identity verification product to help standardize labels and definitions for CTV inventory because the ad industry still struggles to classify what counts as CTV and what doesn’t.

Since advertisers now treat connected TV more like a digital performance channel, expect programmatic CTV demand to keep ramping up – including in the open exchange.

Ad planning and activation platform FullThrottle unveiled a new product called SafeMatch to make it easier for advertisers to connect outcomes to streaming TV ads.

Nexxen announced an integration with out-of-home ad tech platform Taiv to extend its CTV ad campaigns to TV screens in restaurants and sports bars. Guess what’s old is new again when it comes to marketers using TV as a way to reach as many people as possible.

AdExchanger asked a handful of agencies and advertisers to (anonymously) name which they consider to be the top TV currency contenders going into 2024.

TV programmers and agencies say they’re ready to transact their ad buys using a measurement provider other than Nielsen. But panel-based currency is proving more difficult to dethrone than anticipated.

The Media Rating Council has the same goals of promoting fair media measurement as it did when it formed in the ’60s. But it has had to polish its methodology to keep pace with change in the TV measurement space, says Ron Pinelli, the organization’s SVP of digital research and standards.

TV ad measurement is still a mess of data fragmentation and marketer frustration, but identity can help bring some order to the chaos.

Intent IQ, Strategus and PubMatic are partnering to help advertisers retarget iOS device owners after they’ve seen an ad on a smart TV because, while mobile retargeting is an integral ingredient to the CTV performance formula, signal loss makes it hard to get right.

Broadcasters and brands love the idea of applying digital targeting to CTV ad campaigns. But there are still roadblocks stopping CTV advertisers from fully embracing programmatic, including price and transparency (or the lack thereof).

23andMe’s holiday campaign is its first real foray into CTV, which the company plans to make a key channel in its post-cookie marketing mix.

Roku announced a new partnership with Unity to help gaming and mobile app developers add CTV to their user acquisition campaigns by giving them performance marketing attribution for streaming.

YouTube is making a behind-the-scenes effort to allow more advertisers to buy ads on YouTube Shorts – and only on Shorts.

On Thursday, OpenX announced a twofold initiative called TV+, which reserves the CTV label for what the company deems premium inventory while booting resellers from the supply pool.

Transparency is making its way into CTV bid requests, including supply source, content genre and, increasingly, show-level transparency. According to Rob Hazan, senior director of streaming TV product at Index Exchange, the right amount of transparency could make the open exchange a viable place for CTV ad budgets.

Disney+ added nearly 7 million subscribers last quarter, and, of those, about 2 million new sign-ups were for the streamer’s year-old ad-supported tier. Currently, Disney+ with ads has 5.2 million subscribers.

Warner Bros. Discovery continues to lose subscribers to a lack of original content (for which it blames the Hollywood actors’ strike). But streaming advertising revenue, which is up 29% YOY, represents a glimmer of hope.

FreeWheel unveiled a sell-side product called Audience Manager to help CTV programmers tie granular audience segments to their inventory at the speed of programmatic advertising.

Paramount is regaining some footing after a less-than-impressive Q2, thanks to a boost in streaming ad revenue and fresh subscriber growth.

HP is using The Trade Desk’s UID2 product to improve targeting for CTV buys in a way that passes the privacy sniff test.

TVision and Playground XYZ announced a partnership to measure attention on YouTube’s CTV app and fill in some data blanks for advertisers.

Roku is starting to bounce back from a slump in ad sales growth thanks to new ad inventory, more programmatic availability and improving economic conditions.

Amazon is expanding Fire TV home screen inventory to more marketers and launching a new ad unit within search results on Fire TVs.

Netflix revealed that its ad-supported offering now reaches 15 million monthly active users globally, and shared more details about new and upcoming ad formats.

Paramount unveiled a new ad product called Conduit, a direct integration layer between SSPs and EyeQ, Paramount’s CTV ad selling platform that aggregates Paramount+ and Pluto TV inventory.