With so much interest around the delayed deprecation of third-party cookies, it’s easy to forget that the TV industry is building a scaled and addressable advertising ecosystem – without third-party cookies.
Connected TV (CTV) will account for more than one-fifth of total programmatic video ad spending for the first time by the end of 2022, according to eMarketer. It’s the primary driver of digital video growth, which is expected to surpass linear TV by 2024.
But there’s something many brands haven’t yet realized. CTV is primarily an app-based environment. The majority of original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) that make the world’s leading TV devices use operating systems (OSs) that are bespoke to streaming. And none of them restrict the passing of device IDs.
Though there are still local privacy regulations and other consent requirements to which CTV has to adhere, the channel is poised to provide a higher level of ad targeting than brands may expect.
The promise of CTV targeting
It’s no surprise that CTV was a major topic of discussion at this year’s Cannes Lions Festival, particularly with regard to data, targeting and measurement. So what does the future hold for ad targeting on CTV?
My colleague and Publica VP of Strategy Paul Gubbins posed that very question on LinkedIn:
It is an advertiser’s ability to target with higher levels of accuracy that is bringing so much investment to ad-lite, AVOD and FAST services. Without avenues for DSPs to target viewers and households, the promise of CTV could never really grow into the data-rich, scaled and addressable TV ecosystem that it is quickly becoming.
Programmatic technology and data are now enabling advertisers to truly understand what percentage of their TV ad budget is delivering ROI. It is this level of granularity that is starting to attract not only traditional TV advertisers to CTV but those historically absent from TV ad buys.
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As for CTV measurement and data, both are required to support a growing and diverse programmatic ecosystem. Moving forward, CTV will likely be measured via a hybrid approach, harnessing both panel- and impression-based sciences that capture the best of traditional TV and digital methods.
There is now more privacy-compliant data in CTV than ever before, be it from automatic content recognition (ACR) or other first- and third-party sources available to the growing number of advertisers looking to engage with streaming audiences.
As the ad tech industry pivots toward contextualization for programmatic targeting, bringing linear-TV-level insights to CTV is essential.
Streaming publishers are often unable to share content parameters in the bidstream due to business terms or the Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA). But contextual segments allow publishers to set up private deals with programmatics buyers for certain types of content and provide post-delivery reporting with app, channel and show-level transparency decoupled from personal identifiers.
CTV’s unique path
The CTV advertising ecosystem is not facing the same identity headwinds as the digital and mobile ecosystem. Like the 51% of voters in the above poll, I believe the methods used today to target streaming audiences and households will continue to be a combination of IP, device ID and probabilistic IDs.
But video-level contextual insights are also increasingly going to be at the forefront of any privacy-compliant programmatic targeting strategy in ad-supported streaming environments.
