When Senior Editor Alyssa Boyle started at AdExchanger more than three years ago, advertisers were complaining about the lack of transparency in CTV ad buying.
And they’re still complaining about it, because the situation remains much the same.
Over the past few months, multiple buyers confided their frustrations to Alyssa. Brands want to buy ads in what they consider to be premium placements, for example, but some programmers allegedly sell “mystery deal IDs” that bundle inventory and obfuscate where ads are running.
With our special guest, Chris Kane, CEO and founder of Jounce Media, we discuss why this is happening and what can be done to fix the CTV transparency stalemate.
One action that buyers can take is to vote with their wallet, but the catch is they actually have to do it and not just talk about it.
“Transparency is a headache for buyers … but is it enough of a headache that buyers are going to move their money?” Kane asks. “If it is, then the industry changes; if it’s not, then the industry stays the same.”
In the second half of the episode, we journey deep into the weeds to untangle what’s become a fabulously confusing issue for programmatic buyers: the chronic mislabeling of instream video.
It’s been two years since the IAB Tech Lab redefined what should count as instream video inventory as reflected in a new video placement field in the OpenRTB spec. This replaces an older and now-deprecated video placement field.
But not everyone is using the new spec. Google’s SSP, for example, is passing the old signal and the new one, when the latter is available, which makes it unclear what signal DV360 is basing its bidding decisions on.
It’s not particularly difficult for DSPs to migrate to the new signal, but it’s also “not an obviously good short-term choice,” Kane says, because the moment they do it, they’ll start having to pay higher prices for video classified as instream.
“In that very short term, all you do is interfere with campaign delivery, which is the worst thing you could do as a DSP,” he says. “Market forces are not going to sort this out – in a weird way, DSPs are kind of rewarded for dragging their feet on this migration.”
