Opinion

Despite the benefits of addressable TV, advertisers haven’t been taking advantage as much as one might imagine.

Advanced TV presents a robust set of opportunities for data-driven advertising and measurement. But does that mean ATV will supplant linear in buyers’ marketing strategies? Well, it’s more complicated than that – and buyers need to understand how to successfully manage and optimize across both linear and streaming.

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.

The advertising and ad technology industries undergo a major landscape shift every five years or so, and we’re in the middle of a seismic change with third-party signal loss. As with every exploration and monetization of a new frontier, the next era of digital advertising requires a recommitment to shoulder-to-shoulder collaboration, writes Bob Walczak, CEO of MadTech Advisors.

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.

Podcaster adoption of dynamic ad insertion (DAI) increased from less than 50% in 2019 to a whopping 84% in 2021. But for podcasters to get the most value out of DAI, they need an open environment. Using DAI within a walled garden makes it harder to get the full benefit of great innovation, writes Jon Stephenson, Founder and CEO of SoundStack.

Brand safety’s detrimental impact on diverse, equitable and inclusive media goals is a question of automation gone wrong, ham-fisted implementation and industry leaders choosing the easy route, writes Charles Cantu, CEO and founder at Reset Digital. In this column, he reviews how brand safety’s DEI problem has developed and recommends steps advertisers, agencies and brand safety organizations can take to overcome it.

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.

In a recent terrorism advisory bulletin, the Department of Homeland Security increased levels of concern for potential violence against LGBTQ, Jewish and migrant communities. It’s now more important than ever for brands to have strong ethics and flex their ad dollar muscles. They must demand that social media platforms do all they can to rein in hate speech and insinuations of violence on their platforms, writes Michael Benedek, CEO of Datonics.

Right now, I’m shopping online for a very important purchase: I’m trying to find the right remedy for my allergies. Your best chance of getting my click isn’t serving me an ad for the socks I bought earlier today or the car my demographics suggest I might buy. The smart move is to serve me an ad that helps me choose something that will take care of my allergies.

“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 […]

Brand marketers are still hesitant to lean into a mobile-first approach, particularly in programmatic. But with the mobile app economy predicted to grow to $156 billion by 2023, why the uncertainty? Today, the digital advertising industry has the opportunity to transform the mobile app channel by acknowledging, understanding and tackling marketers’ concerns, writes Steve Roach, head of mobile app sales at Index Exchange.

How well do you know your audience?

I’m not just talking about their age, location, gender or purchase history. I’m talking about the subtle details that really tell you who they are as people. Details that provide a clear understanding of how to communicate with them beyond superficial insights.

The post-cookie marketplace must be reimagined for active customer data collection in which both the customer and brand are incentivized to create a more direct and reciprocal relationship in which both reap the benefits. Matt Chmiel, strategy director at Siberia, recommends four steps that will help brands make the journey from passive to active data collection.

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.

The Competition and Transparency in Digital Advertising Act, the American Data Privacy and Protection Act and efforts to change Google’s and Apple’s mobile advertising practices would force companies to adopt new practices and technologies to understand and act on consumer identity. Mathieu Roche, co-founder and CEO at ID5, dives into each initiative and its implications.

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.

OOH advertising spend is nearly back to prepandemic highs as of Q2 2022. This rapid rebound and growth are creating an inflection point for the category – one that’s driving a renaissance for OOH and digital OOH ad experiences going into 2023.

FTC v Kochava is a landmark battle in the long war over data privacy regulations. But regardless of how this particular case turns out, the digital marketing industry needs clearer standards for the collection, exchange and use of consumer data, writes Carolina Abenante, co-founder of NYIAX.

Brands are feeling the pressure to cut costs as the global economy remains uncertain. Some are even appealing to agencies to extend payment terms to get a handle on their finances. But it’s time for payment terms to be pruned to reasonable lengths to restore brand-agency relations and ensure supply chains don’t become overburdened with debts, writes Hasan Arik, Founder and CPO, Redmill Solutions.

We’re going back to the basics in 2023. After a few years of big spending on brand campaigns and doing test drives of emerging channels, inflation and recessionary pressures mean pumping the brakes on superfluous spending and the nice-to-haves. Here are the key trends I see driving digital marketing in 2023.

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.

Back in 2018, Tim Cook said, “The truth is, we could make a ton of money if we monetized our customer—if our customer was our product.” Fast-forward to 2022, and, to deliver the most relevant Apple Search Ads, the company uses “information a customer includes in their Apple ID account” for ad targeting purposes. If that isn’t monetizing your customers, what is, writes Uriah Av-Ron, partner and founder at Oasis Public Relations.

SKAdNetwork (SKAN) 4.0 was released last month and there’s a lot to be optimistic about. But there’s also complexity to unpack. While Apple has focused on bringing more measurement into their framework, it could further fragment the advertising ecosystem, too. Katie Madding, chief product officer at Adjust, offers five key changes to be aware of.

SSPs had traditionally been among the first in the ad tech ecosystem to build profitable businesses. But their future in the programmatic tech stack is uncertain because they’ve evolved from publisher-centric technologies to demand aggregation businesses, often competing with their biggest customers: buy-side platforms or DSPs.

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.

Following Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, the heads of privacy, security and compliance all abruptly left the company. The legal department is scrambling to pick up the pieces, asking engineers to “self-certify compliance.” The door is open for massive privacy breaches, writes Vuk Janosevic, co-founder and CEO of Blindnet.

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.

Why is it considered a brand safety issue for advertisers to buy against news content when it’s clearly not an issue for national brands to advertise against violent, albeit fictional, content elsewhere, including on CTV?

Reminders of our own mortality trigger dramatic behavioral change. Terror management theory dictates that any death reminder will initiate a spectrum of behaviors designed to protect and uplift our sense of self. And these adaptations include changes in purchasing behavior, too, writes Swaroop Reddy, CIO at Omnicom Precision Marketing Group.