2024 was quite an explosive year in CTV land.
Global ad spend on connected TV is expected to surpass $30 billion in 2024, according to eMarketer. That’s a 22.4% increase from $24.6 billion last year.
And the quicker CTV advertising grows, the hotter the competition over ad dollars becomes. Streamers spent 2024 fighting tooth and nail for CTV ad dollars, including by beefing up their programmatic and measurement suites to court as many advertisers as humanly possible.
Meanwhile, programmatic middlemen are consolidating to get a bigger slice of the CTV pie. Many of the major acquisitions that happened this year – and there were a lot – revolved around CTV.
All things considered, it would probably be fair to call 2024 the year that CTV went programmatic and became a digital performance channel.
Mergers and acquisitions galore
With more and more advertisers investing in streaming, it’s no wonder that CTV led a long string of mergers and acquisitions this year.
In April, Cadent acquired performance marketing platform AdTheorent, and in June, contextual ad platform Seedtag bought the SSP Beachfront for closer ties to TV publishers. In August, Outbrain bought Teads for similar reasons.
Ad tech M&A didn’t slow in the fall. In October, Connatix bought JW Player for video monetization, and Samba TV snapped up Semasio, a contextual targeting platform. In November, Mediaocean bought Innovid, a video ad server and measurement platform, and Viant bought IRIS.TV, a CTV data platform. Walmart also finalized its acquisition of Vizio, which it first announced in February.
The common thread in all of these mergers and acquisitions is a desire to appeal to the growing number of performance advertisers interested in streaming. Those advertisers have made it clear they need scale, programmatic access and trustworthy measurement to invest more of their budgets into CTV.
Those buy-side demands also explain what the major streamers have been up to this year.
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Chasing the stream dream
Just about all the major streaming apps have spent the past year vigorously competing for enough advertisers and subscribers to make their streaming businesses more profitable.
Netflix, for example, is finally gaining its footing in the advertising world two years after first launching its ad-supported membership plan. It currently boasts 70 million monthly active users on its ad tier, up from 23 million in January. Now that ad revenue is boosting profit margins, Netflix expects to double its ad revenue in 2025.
As for Disney, it first launched ads on Disney+ in December 2022, only one month after Netflix. Now it says 30% of its global streaming subscriber base is ad-supported. Disney’s combined streaming portfolio (Disney+, Hulu, ESPN) also turned a profit for the first time this year, mostly thanks to ESPN+, which Disney packaged into the Disney+ app earlier this month.
Legacy broadcasters like Disney and NBCUniversal, however, also have to deal with the extra burden of linear TV advertising declines staining quarterly earnings reports. Some media conglomerates are shedding or restructuring their linear properties to make way for streaming.
Just last week, Comcast announced plans to spin off most of its TV networks into a separate, publicly traded company, which will produce yet another streaming service, CNBC+. Also last week, Warner Bros. Discovery split up its linear and streaming operations, perhaps setting the stage for a potential sale of certain legacy networks. Disney hinted last year at selling some of its local affiliates, such as ABC, but soon scrapped those plans, despite having preliminary talks with at least one ABC bidder.
What these programmers all have in common is their desire to remain squarely in CTV land, where their programmatic and measurement offerings will determine their ability to compete for ad dollars with digital natives like Netflix, Prime Video and YouTube.
Programmatic prowess
Advertisers demand programmatic targeting and reliable measurement to justify every dollar spent. And streamers seem to be listening to those demands.
Over the summer, Netflix made inventory available through Magnite, The Trade Desk and Google’s DV360 in addition to its original ad sales partner, Microsoft’s Xandr. Netflix also signed on a list of data and measurement partners, such as shopper data platform NCSolutions in addition to Kantar and Cint.
Perhaps most importantly, Netflix will launch its own in-house ad tech in Q2 next year, and it told buyers the new platform should give them more control and transparency into what they’re buying.
But Netflix isn’t alone. Other streamers are also racing to secure programmatic and data partnerships that will help frame their platforms as performance channels to advertisers and media buyers.
Earlier this year, Disney and Paramount both unveiled unique integrations with Walmart for retailer data that can help buyers do closed-loop attribution for their streaming campaigns. Now that Walmart officially closed its acquisition of Vizio last month, it’s likely the smart TV maker’s data will soon be an ingredient in these attribution recipes. Prime Video, meanwhile, launched shoppable streaming ads ahead of its first-ever upfront this year to link its ecommerce and streaming businesses closer together.
On the programmatic targeting front, NBCUniversal made live sports inventory on Peacock biddable for the first time earlier this year, in time for the Summer Olympics. The broadcaster also partnered with VideoAmp and integrated with Google’s PAIR (Publisher Advertiser Identity Reconciliation) framework to improve targeting and match rates. Disney also launched a new identifier, which it calls BridgeID, to match with third-party IDs.
These programmatic and performance marketing upgrades both heavily influenced how media buyers decided to spend their ad budgets during this year’s upfronts – a sure sign that these trends will continue to persist throughout 2025.
The measurement battle continues
The long and heated battle between Nielsen and alternative video currencies continued to rage throughout 2024.
In March, Comscore won MRC accreditation for both local and national TV ratings. (Nielsen currently only holds accreditation for national.) Also this year, all three Nielsen adversaries won certification from the broadcaster-backed Joint Industry Committee (JIC). The JIC, which wants to create streaming data standards, certified Comscore and VideoAmp as national video currencies in April. ISpot was next in August.
Still, despite the accolades, alt currencies haven’t quite taken off yet in terms of ad spend. Many buyers believe the newer data sets powering alt currencies still need more time to mature, stabilize and undergo more tests, according to an April report from the 4A’s Measurement Committee. These hesitations have spurred discussions and debates over whether alt currencies will amount to more than just Nielsen add-ons.
Meanwhile, Nielsen numbers still account for the vast majority of TV ad transactions. Media buyers have been relying on Nielsen for decades, which has been busy revamping its TV measurement platform by incorporating viewership data from set-top boxes and automatic content recognition in addition to legacy panels. Last month, Nielsen secured MRC approval to combine first-party streaming data with its panel measurement.
Which is not to say Nielsen, which won’t join the JIC, is perfect. It’s had its fair share of drama this year, even beyond open lawsuits against a sizable chunk of its competitors. In October, Paramount and Nielsen failed to renew their contract, with Paramount CEO John Halley citing a cost structure that is “not workable and needs reengineering.” Instead, Paramount will lean on VideoAmp for its TV measurement needs. For now.
Although it remains to be seen how the measurement and currency chaos shakes out next year, one thing is for certain: 2024 laid the groundwork for CTV to remain the epicenter of digital advertising growth next year.
Stay tuned. 📺
