CTV publisher Future Today banks on co-viewing to prove the value of household-level targeting against ad impressions served within its children’s streaming app, HappyKids. Future Today can’t track or store personal identifiable information for advertising on children’s content, but it can home in on co-viewing households to drive better business outcomes.
Dramatic shifts in consumer viewing habits during the pandemic have led, predictably, to an intense focus on the corresponding connected TV (CTV) advertising opportunity. CTV ad spend is growing leaps and bounds – and for good reason. But for continuation of that growth to be warranted, there are a number of enhancements that must be brought to bear.
TV advertising is undergoing a tectonic shift from programmed to programmatic. Not unlike on the open web – but unlike on linear – advertisers can use programmatic to get scale across connected TV. There’s demand for biddable CTV because buyers realize they can get more flexibility and transparent signals from publishers.
“On TV & Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video. Today’s column is by Jeff Sue, GM, Americas at Mintegral. Connected TV (CTV) is rapidly emerging as an enticing channel for advertisers looking to increase their campaign reach and tap into new channels of ad inventory. The mobile ad […]
Television has long been one of the most transparent advertising channels. Likewise, programmatic advertising has always offered buyers incredible detail about the audience and context of their ads. Now, advertisers are rightfully frustrated that they have so little transparency into where their ads run when buying television programmatically.
Video creators like Tastemade are blurring the lines between short- and long-form video. Tastemade launched in 2012 to create food-focused video content for social media platforms, but the exploding growth in connected TV viewership triggered a transition for Tastemade to expand into a broader media company that includes streaming channels.
The good news for streaming providers is that consumers are on board with how they deliver content, especially when they can save a few bucks with free ad-supported streaming TV (FAST) and ad-supported video-on-demand (AVOD). However, despite these free or low-cost ad-supported content options, streaming services are still struggling to gain and retain subscribers.
TV advertising is complicated enough without also having to worry about child-focused privacy regulations. But buyers and sellers need to consider the nuances when it comes to reaching and engaging children, including content relevancy and ad messaging strategies that differ depending on age.
Faced with waning subscribers, Netflix has been forced to adapt to brave the streaming competition by rolling out ads. Yet there are still unanswered questions over how Netflix and other AVOD streaming contenders will successfully navigate brand safety for a highly sensitized market, writes Ken Weiner, CTO of GumGum.
Despite transparency woes, programmatic buying on CTV is evolving. M&A is helping spur maturation in the market. Tremor International, for example, is a “much different business” now that it has integrated Amobee’s tech into its stack, said Chance Johnson, the company’s new chief commercial officer. The next step? Getting more data to plug into those programmatic pipes.
Between Amazon blocking beer ads during NFL Thursday Night Football and Meta’s newly introduced restrictions on pharmaceutical advertising, marketers are running into all sorts of unexpected (and perhaps anti-competitive) obstacles. Dan Meehan, Founder and CEO at PadSquad, offers suggestions for marketing around these restrictions.
As long as major live sports airs on broadcast and cable, linear will stay relevant to consumers and thus to advertisers. But the sports industry is now also looking to participate in high-growth areas, including streaming video and connected TV. And major streaming-first platforms are giving broadcast a run for its money, writes Scott Sottile, chief revenue officer at Unruly.
After losing out to Microsoft on the Netflix deal, Alphabet’s Google is still licking its wounds. But just because you lost a battle doesn’t mean the war is over. Google needs to immediately get back into the CTV/OTT fight with all the muscle it can muster, writes Jay Krihak, executive director at Crossmedia.
The giants of linear TV are fully aware of the power of streaming. Yet it’s difficult for linear budgets to shift to streaming the way things currently stand, writes Anthony Katsur, CEO of the IAB Tech Lab. The industry has a simple goal to pursue: to establish interoperability between legacy linear and connected television, which will streamline ad spend across both channels.
Like it did for the web, programmatic is transforming linear TV ad buying. But TV calls for a more nuanced approach. The programmatic technology that automates ad serving on TV will have to be different from the rest of the digital ad ecosystem, said Pooja Midha, EVP of Effectv, the ad sales division of Comcast Cable.
The growth of streaming has pushed TV into the realm of digital media, enabling data-driven, audience-based advertising and near-real-time impression-level decisioning. This new era of TV advertising requires a new era of measurement that delivers the granularity and speed advertisers need to maximize campaign performance.
Today, Latinos make up nearly 20% of the current U.S. population. They’re also the future of America. Almost 30% of all kids are Latino. But despite U.S. Latino consumer power coming in at around $1.7 trillion annually, only 6% of the overall industry investment goes toward this market.
Programmatic advertising can be notoriously complex. But in the streaming category in particular, there is ample opportunity to improve transparency, revenue and user experience — namely, supply-path optimization and better data technology, writes Troy Bubley, co-founder and president of diDNA.
The benefits of technology are seemingly endless. Yet despite the many doors that smart TVs will open in the years ahead, they won’t – by themselves – provide the media industry with an accurate view of who’s using them, writes Jonathan Wells, SVP of data science at Nielsen.
On the mobile web, outstream is in, and instream is out. With its latest guidelines, the IAB Tech Lab has effectively ended instream, declaring outstream the primary path for web video inventory. This shift will mean incredible things for the advertising ecosystem, writes Eric Hochberger, CEO of Mediavine – namely, a transparent buying and selling experience for video inventory that should help supply and demand.
Connected TV marries a century-old piece of technology (television) with the capabilities of the internet. This presents an interesting challenge when we think about where CTV belongs in a marketing funnel, writes Andrew Mullins, director of programmatic at Realtime Agency.
Transparency is the keystone that will bring together the best of linear advertising with the best of programmatic. Brands should be able to get more transparency on programmatic CTV, but, just as importantly, publishers should get something in return for sharing this information, writes Nicole Scaglione, global VP of OTT and CTV at PubMatic.
To plan, target and measure media buys on TV, advertisers need to resolve identity at the household level, which calls for full media transparency, said Kelly Metz, managing director of linear and advanced TV activation at Omnicom Media Group. Kelly Metz will be speaking about the future of TV measurement at AdExchanger’s Programmatic I/O conference on October 17-18 in New York City. Click here to register.
CTV is at a crossroads, writes Mark Walker, CEO of Direct Digital Holdings. We’re already seeing streaming become the dominant way TV is delivered, which opens up CTV ads to a wealth of possibilities. With that, the industry will face an existential question: What is the role of TV advertising now that it is connected?
For years, video completion rate (VCR) has been a top metric for digital marketers. But as a standalone measurement metric, VCR doesn’t cut it anymore, writes Katie Cladis, VP of product at Digital Remedy. While it can illuminate aspects of advertising’s performance, it just shouldn’t be at the very center of a modern video ad campaign.
Ad tech companies are being reincarnated as streaming services. But over-the-top (OTT) technology is a very different animal from digital. Programmers need to understand that there’s no easy button for monetizing their inventory, especially if they want to attract ad dollars from advertisers looking for specific multicultural audiences, says Isabel Rafferty Zavala, CEO of Canela Media.
As TV viewership behavior has evolved, both buyers and sellers were increasingly forced to deal with digital inventory (CTV). Impressions are the standard metric in the CTV environment, which means there’s been a surge in support and comfort around impressions as a currency, writes Brie Pinnow, co-founder of Blinc. And this trend will only continue.
Just because the media world has gone fully digital doesn’t mean we need to impose early digital models and constraints on every opportunity, said Philip Inghelbrecht, CEO of Tatari. More CTV inventory will roll into programmatic pipes in coming years, he writes, but the notion that it’ll achieve programmatic domination is faulty — CTV inventory is still very different from digital.
With a bear market upon us and the chance of a recession as high as 44%, marketers are bracing for budget cuts. Typically, marketers pull back on branding when money gets tight, retreating to superficial, measurable safe havens like search and social. But one channel that is likely to endure the recession is CTV, writes Gijsbert Pols, PhD, director of CTV and new channels at Adjust.
CTV scales. But does it perform? Matthew Koontz started his career at Arnold Worldwide before moving on to lead ad product teams at Hulu, Snapchat, Microsoft and Xandr (before the two merged) and WideOrbit. Koontz joined tvScientific in June, and he spoke with AdExchanger about why CTV is a “sweet spot” for performance marketers.
