Advertisers love new ad formats, especially on connected TV. Just look at how many platforms announced their own during the IAB NewFronts and TV upfronts last month.
The appeal is obvious. CTV-specific formats show up in places where viewers are less primed to ignore them and often feature interactive elements that can help measure user engagement.
But it’s possible to have too much of a good thing.
For one, there’s no standardization for new CTV ad formats, which creates friction and inefficiency when advertisers are trying to run ads across streaming platforms, said Jill Wittkopp, the IAB Tech Lab’s VP of product, speaking at the Tech Lab Summit in New York City on Wednesday.
That’s why the Tech Lab announced its new “Ad Format Hero” initiative late last year, which is an effort to standardize both the technology and terminology associated with emerging CTV ad formats. The plan is for this to eventually coalesce into official guidance, called the CTV Ad Portfolio, by the end of the year.
In the meantime, though, the Ad Format Hero task force sifted through over 100 different submissions of real ad formats from more than 40 different companies and placed them into eight distinct categories that will be featured in the final CTV Ad Portfolio.
These new categories include:
- pause ads
- menu and home screen ads
- screensaver ads
- overlay ads (which, true to their name, appear over content)
- in-scene insertion ads (which are supposed to look like part of the content)
- content squeeze-back ads (which appear around the content as a frame)
- ad squeeze-back ads (which appear around static ad creative)
- a catch-all category of immersive or extendable ads
Format and function
According a recent industry survey conducted by the Tech Lab, the results of which were shared at the summit, some ad formats are already more popular than others.
The buy side, for example, has “more enthusiasm for less interruptive formats,” Raymond Holton, senior director of the Tech Lab’s advanced TV division, told attendees. Meanwhile, folks on the sell side were (unsurprisingly!) more interested in formats that boost how many new kinds of ad inventory can be made available to buyers.
There was a clear winner across the board, however: pause ads.
The majority of publishers believe pause ads will scale most effectively with the advent of standardization, while the majority of buyers believe that format will be the easiest to implement, Raymond said. Moreover, both buy-side and sell-side respondents agree that pause ads will likely lead to the greatest increase in ad spend compared to other formats.
Most surprisingly – not because it doesn’t make sense, but because it was unanimous –everyone seems to think pause ads provide the best user experience. That’s just their gut feeling, though. So far, Raymond told me, he hasn’t seen any internal consumer surveys or other quantitative data as evidence that users really do find the pause ads experience to be better than other formats.
Pause and effect
If you’ll permit a brief tangent, the reason I bring up what actual users might think of pause ads is because talking about this particular ad format always reminds me of an ad tech story that I first discovered from a non-ad-industry source.
In August of last year, Marketing Brew reported on a patent Roku filed that would allow it to insert pause ads into content played on any HDMI-connected device, not just streaming platforms. (If this sounds familiar, it’s because AdExchanger mentioned it in our daily roundup newsletter back then.)
A lot of the people I follow online were very pissed off about the possibility that this technology would become real, but none more so than the artists. That’s because it’s common to source reference photos by pausing something you’re watching – if you’re trying to capture a specific pose or draw detailed fan art of a particular character, for example. Inserting ads in that part of the experience can make that practice much more difficult, if not downright impossible.
But this issue aside, standardizing these ad formats will hopefully keep them from being too annoying and disruptive to the viewing experience.
After all, “CTV is as valuable as it is because of the quality of the user experience,” said Raymond. And if advertisers and publishers are going to rely on these emerging ad formats, he added, “we need to do that in a way that ensures that the end user experience doesn’t degrade.”
With that in mind, I have a humble suggestion for the Ad Format Hero task force. Maybe the guidance should include a brief standardized delay before a pause ad pops up so people who want to have enough time to grab a screenshot for artistic and/or meme-making purposes? Just something to consider for the CTV Ad Portfolio later this year.
Questions? Thoughts? Let me know what you think of the newsletter at victoria@adexchanger.com
