Industry Preview is a special, limited-run audio series, featuring interviews with key leaders in marketing, media and technology who share their predictions and key priorities for 2021. This podcast is sponsored by Engine Media Exchange.
CTV advertising made huge inroads in 2020, a trend that will accelerate in 2021. One reason is a big consumer shift to streaming, but CTV has other advantages too.
In this episode of Industry Preview, Engine Media Exchange CEO Michael Zacharski details the factors propelling adoption of CTV by brands and agency buyers. He points out CTV is relatively unencumbered by the headwinds of privacy and consent that are buffeting the digital advertising space.
“CTV environments have an element of authentication built into them,” Zacharski says in this episode. “Whether they’re authenticating with their cable provider, with email or creating an account, that’s built into the solution – unlike the open web. You’re already operating in a cookieless environment.”
Of course, the open web still accounts for colossal advertising investments, and the cookie will need to be replaced with a successor technology for those dollars to keep flowing. The industry-wide effort to invent that replacement has come to resemble a horse race, with a field of contenders jockeying to develop cookieless solutions that each hopes will be among the lucky few to mature into industry standards.
“We’re still in a place where there isn’t one clear solution,” Zacharski says. “Although time is compressing, we as an industry are working quickly to come up with the right solutions.”
Zacharski is optimistic the process will yield fruit.
“There’s still a spirit of innovation in ad tech,” he says. “When we have to move [quickly] with initiatives like Ads.txt, Sellers.json, GDPR or even TCF, when there’s a mission at hand, we as an industry have that spirit still within us.”
