“On TV & Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video.
CTV scales. But does it perform?
Matthew Koontz started his career at Arnold Worldwide running campaigns for Vonage before moving on to lead ad product teams at Hulu, Snapchat, Microsoft and Xandr (before the two merged) and WideOrbit, which serves over-the-air broadcast ads.
Koontz joined tvScientific, a CTV ad serving and measurement platform, in June.
“I got a front row seat to the strengths and weaknesses of different media channels for performance marketers,” Koontz said, “and those lessons from the past can help solve problems specifically for performance marketers in the context of CTV.”
From a strategic and technical perspective, CTV is a “sweet spot” for performance marketers, he said.
Koontz spoke with AdExchanger.
AdExchanger: What’s on your agenda as tvScientific’s first head of product?
MATTHEW KOONTZ: The plan is to expand on our attribution technology, not to turn the ship in other directions.
Our tech is a traditional campaign management experience today. We have plenty of capabilities CTV buyers want, like incrementality and creative A/B split testing, but they’re not as optimized as they could be because they’re not packaged as a single offering.
Ideally, we want to make all our tools available as a self-service offering.
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It’s a way of productizing the test-and-learn phase for CTV. Digital buyers that are new to the channel like a little attention at the beginning to make sure they’re not burning cash, but once that initial caution subsides, they prefer to run campaigns and make in-flight optimizations themselves.
Was there a culture shock when you moved into television?
The culture shock hit when I joined WideOrbit [in 2014].
Coming from a digital background, it was brutally difficult to measure and optimize campaigns because of the latency in the flow of data across the buy and sell sides. There was a lot of waiting for Nielsen to give an opinion – and it is an opinion, because there’s no way to actually know how many people saw an over-the-air ad.
It was a product problem and an opportunity to modernize legacy linear models, which, at WideOrbit, meant trading inventory on the OpenRTB spec and developing ad-insertion technology made for broadcast TV.
What is the biggest obstacle for performance marketers on connected TV?
Attribution latency.
Mature, digital-native marketers expect outcome data to be available in their media planning and buying tools so they can make changes in real time for optimization. But the major TV networks still largely work under the legacy business model of insertion orders, and most legacy DSPs don’t have in-flight measurement and attribution capabilities built into their user interfaces. That’s one of the key things that will have to change about CTV buying.
Why are performance-focused advertisers taking a chance on CTV?
Because CTV offers signals and audience data for targeting that’s akin to digital.
More broadly, we’re finding that performance marketers who add CTV to their media buys are getting better results on other channels in terms of outcomes. Our clients saw an increase in search volume and cost per click when they added CTV to their media mix.
A bunch of our clients are starting to see experimentation opportunities in the campaigns they’re running on social media platforms, such as Facebook. Buyers can test results by content genre, network and, in some cases, even by title on CTV, which leads to really granular measurement when buyers layer audience and creative testing on top of that.
Does that mean CTV doesn’t perform as a standalone channel as well as it does as part of a media mix?
Not necessarily, no. The threshold of business impact from CTV is compelling enough for buyers, but it’s more impactful as a complement to other channels.
What’s the next step in bringing CTV campaigns further down the funnel?
Interactive ad formats, like pause ads, binge ads and shoppable ads.
Do you expect these types of formats from Netflix’s forthcoming ad tier?
Yes. There’ll be a lot of tricky microeconomic nuances to how Netflix grows its ads business without cannibalizing its core paid subscriber base. But Netflix is an innovator, so I expect they’ll try exploring different ad experiences and formats.
What about linear TV? Does it have potential as a performance channel?
That’s technically impossible. The technology behind linear and digital, including streaming, is too different – unless you believe in a world in which automatic content recognition data becomes ubiquitously available across all devices.
That’s not to say linear TV doesn’t drive business impacts. There’s a lot of value in impressions that can reach a very local audience, and there are different tiers of linear TV, too. Audience targeting on linear addressable is more akin to digital compared with, say, over-the-air broadcast.
TvScientific does run campaigns on linear addressable inventory, and the tech works just fine.
QR codes are another opportunity to bring digital-like measurement to linear addressable.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
