The Rules Of Header Bidding Don’t Apply To CTV. Here’s Why

In the Connected TV (CTV) landscape, it can be tempting to fall back on display advertising’s strategies and nomenclature. But CTV is entirely its own thing. Doggedly following display practices can cost you time and money.

A good example of this is header bidding, a term that’s found its way to CTV even though CTV has no headers. For this reason, as the practice applies to CTV, we prefer to call it unified decisioning.

Like header bidding, unified decisioning can increase seller yield by enabling programmatic and traditional, direct-sold deals to compete on the same playing field. But making it work in CTV has its nuances.

More SSPs are not always better

First off, avoid onboarding too many SSPs without a clear reason. While bringing on five, 10 or more SSPs is relatively common in the world of display header bidding (and of increasingly debatable value there), doing so in CTV can come with some serious pitfalls:

Commoditizing inventory access can impact pricing: Each incremental call to an SSP drives duplication in the bid stream, inflating the perceived volume of inventory available for purchase. When DSPs are presented with ad opportunities from the same media owner at different price points, it can erode CPMs, often leading buyers toward the lowest cost access point.

But when a seller operates through a single or concentrated architecture of trusted partners, DSPs see a more accurate and transparent inventory representation while reducing the prospect of market confusion related to pricing.

More points of failure: In a heavily deal-driven environment such as CTV, each incremental SSP partner adds significantly more technical variables. More variables mean more things can go wrong, and more systems you need to train your team to navigate when they do. This is especially challenging in CTV, where the stakes are notably higher around user experience.
DSPs increasingly dislike redundancy: Adding a bunch of duplicative paths to your inventory flies in the face of the industry’s supply path optimization (SPO) efforts. More than ever, DSPs are cracking down on bid duplication and the incremental costs carried with it.
Sustainability is gaining prominence: Each duplicative path you add to your unified decisioning configuration increases the industry’s carbon footprint. Not only is this a serious environmental consideration, but in a world where buyers increasingly make decisions based on sustainability, it’s also bad for business.

Ask SSPs the hard questions

Before onboarding an SSP, ask the potential partner to outline the unique, incremental value it will bring, and perform the necessary due diligence and reference checks on those claims.

For instance, ask how it will help drive truly incremental demand with specific use cases, maintain price integrity alongside your broader relationships with advertisers and support critical efforts to protect user privacy.

For many major media companies, this means managing open auction activity differently than programmatic guaranteed (PG), private marketplaces (PMPs) and data-enhanced inventory by tailoring and carefully managing the approach across different transaction models. The right partners can provide deep guidance and the necessary tools to execute on this effectively.

Set aside the display playbook

Header bidding can teach us a lot, but CTV requires a bespoke approach, one that values unified decisioning, takes a nuanced view of costs and benefits when onboarding incremental partners and embraces proactive tactics to minimize conflicts and navigate challenges unique to the streaming ecosystem.