This article is sponsored by Xandr.
In about a year, more than 56 million US households will be cord cutters or cord nevers, making CTV and OTT a must-have medium for advertisers to tell their stories at scale. Coupling this with programmatic’s ease of transacting and flexibility, CTV and OTT programmatic ad spend is on track to almost double in two years to more than $6B in 2021.
Given its rapid growth, CTV and OTT have brought to light unique challenges for both buyers and sellers that have yet to be solved. Premium video is already fraught with technical complexity and sellers are exploring innovations that optimize their CTV and OTT business while still meeting requirements of buyers and viewers. So, the question remains: How can we ensure a bright future for premium video?
Most forward-thinking ad platforms agree that open, transparent and interoperable solutions provide the best long-term offense for all parties in the ecosystem. These types of solutions will bring the ecosystem together, fostering innovation and ultimately driving more spend instead of encouraging further fragmentation of premium video, removing choices in technologies and driving away advertisers.
For example, at Xandr and Magnite, we have committed to investing in CTV and OTT solutions built on top of Prebid’s open-source technology, rather than creating self-serving proprietary systems. To back this up, we are both gearing up to make big contributions to Prebid’s new CTV-OTT task force and have agreed to mutually integrate in each other’s Prebid solutions.
In order to continue growing the CTV and OTT opportunity, collaboration like this is critical. It allows the industry to not only solve for the unique needs of CTT and OTT video but also to ensure future flexibility to work with different technologies and maintain a healthy ecosystem by providing the following:
- Flexibility: By building solutions on open source technology and focusing on solving for immediate interoperability, ad platforms can provide the flexibility for publishers to take advantage of a unified auction no matter which partners they choose to work.
- Yield Optimization: Enabling TV programmers and distributors to unify auctions in CTV and OTT creates a level playing field across multiple demand sources to help drive the highest possible yield. A mutual integration across technologies ensures healthy competition among bidders and ultimately drives the best value for publisher inventory.
- Unique Features: CTV and OTT have specific requirements for sellers and buyers, such as support for ad pods, competitive separation and frequency capping. By working collaboratively with industry leaders, the advanced advertising ecosystem can ensure greater efficacy of features that enhance the CTV and OTT ad experience and benefit viewers, publishers and advertisers.
Prebid’s focus is to enable a fair, transparent and unified auction. Its suite of tools, solutions and partners facilitate this by ensuring technology is open for all to use. At the same time, the Prebid community behind it provides a vehicle for collaboration amongst technology partners, publishers and buyers. To ensure the success of premium video and the advancement of programmatic CTV and OTT, an open source mindset and interoperable solutions will be key.
