Menu and home screen ads – the ones that appear on your television screen as you’re deciding what you want to watch – feel like the last bastions of direct ad supply on CTV.
Except, maybe not for long.
Samsung Ads is making its home screen ads available programmatically, the company announced on Wednesday.
Programmatic access will begin rolling out across all global regions in Q3 this year, and will first be available through The Trade Desk and Google DV360, with more partners to follow. On the sell side, the inventory will be available through Magnite’s SpringServe technology.
Samsung isn’t the first TV OS provider to go down this route. The Barcelona-based Titan OS announced similar plans with Equativ in May this year, as did Nexxen via a partnership with TiVo Ads and TCL.
But Samsung’s programmatic home screen ads will be the largest-scale and most accessible inventory pool of its kind available to buyers so far, according to Will Doherty, SVP of inventory development at The Trade Desk.
Why it’s taken so long
OEMs and TV OS providers have been hesitant to open up programmatic access to their home screen ads, for a number of reasons.
First of all, the home screen is typically thought of as a leaned-forward experience for TV-watching audiences rather than a leaned-back one. This makes the ad placements much more valuable, giving the inventory holders more incentive to keep them as direct.
For Samsung, the potential of bringing on more performance-focused mid- and lower-funnel brands is worth moving away from direct orders. However, the home screen ads will definitely be priced more expensively than traditional CTV ad spots.
“That’s prime real estate,” said Youssef Ben-Youssef, Samsung’s head of ads business development. “As soon as you turn on the TV, you see those ad units, and the likelihood that people will engage with them is much, much higher than traditional in-stream video CTV ads.”
That immediacy, however, also makes the problem of brand safety much more dire for a home screen ad. A programmatically placed spot for something like a political campaign, a sports gambling app or a violent TV show might be tolerated when it appears in a typical commercial break, but when it’s the first thing audiences see, it can be a much more jarring encounter.
Rather than give up full control to programmatic pipes, Samsung is relying on an “AI-based solution,” said Ben-Youssef, which should filter out any potentially objectionable creative or elements. There will also be manual audits from Samsung account managers, as well as equally strict brand safety structures in place at both TTD and Google.
The filtration system is also designed to make sure assets are to the right technical specifications as well, given that there’s no agreed-upon industry standard for home screen ads yet. (The IAB is working on developing those standards for its CTV ad portfolio, but, as Ben-Youssef said, “we didn’t want to wait for that.”)
What’s coming next
So far, one of the biggest challenges in getting programmatic home screen ads ready for primetime has been figuring out how best to package that inventory. Figuring out how to do that will also help both Samsung and TTD educate advertisers (and third-party data measurement companies) on how to think about the new offering, said Ben-Youssef.
“Because it’s happening programmatically, they’re going to have a unified view of not only the creative experience but also the measurement experience,” added Doherty. “So, how is one impacting the other? How is the home screen driving better success, better recall awareness, better impact on frequency?”
Once advertisers understand how to buy these new home screen ads, both Ben-Youssef and Doherty figure that the next great frontier for programmatic ad buying won’t be a new form of inventory. It’ll be a greater focus on user experience, which will include developing better and more accurate signals for content discovery and better ad targeting.
“It used to be that if you just added more supply, you made more money,” said Doherty. “Well, that’s not true. There’s now more supply than there is demand. So, it’s about the type of supply that you’re adding and the premium experience that you’re building.”
