After a dip in the second quarter as spending paused in the early days of the pandemic, advanced TV ad impressions rebounded as 2020 went on, according to a report from Google.

Advanced ad impressions fell 18% in the second quarter, despite a 14% increase in viewing. By the third quarter, advanced TV ad impressions were up 40% from the second quarter lows and continued to increase in the fourth quarter.

Google said that 2020 marks a shift of TV ad impressions from the web to in-app viewing, with more people watching advanced TV content on streaming apps as they adopt connected TV devices. 

Also Read: FreeWheel Report Charts Rise in CTV, Programmatic

Ads were being purchased through programmatic transactions at a faster rate. In the fourth quarter, programmatic impressions grew by more than 70%.

Ad impressions in content served live to audiences increased 85% in the fourth quarter.

“Advanced TV continues to gain momentum with CTV leading the way with the largest share of ad impressions globally,” the Google report said.

Also Read: CTV Ads Make Viewers More Likely To Buy, Survey Finds

“For the first time ever, in-app viewership outperformed the web as consumers adopted new emerging OTT apps and CTV devices to watch content. While traditional reservations still lead advanced TV inventory sales, programmatic is advanced TV’s fastest growing deal type,” the report said. “And while live events decreased in 2020, they were on the upswing again by Q4—live impressions grew much faster than VOD in 2020, with CTV as the preferred device as people kept up with the excitement on their big screens.”

Edge Networks Inc., an ATSC 3.0-focused company headed by veteran wireless technologist Todd Achilles, plans to launch a virtual pay TV service targeted to secondary and tertiary markets without ample choice for cost-efficient high-speed internet.

The privately funded Edge Networks, which received permission last July from the FCC to establish two ATSC 3.0 stations in the Boise market, plans to launch the pay TV service this summer in Boise.

Evoca will offer more than 80 channels, including the major broadcast networks, as well as “major” news, sports and entertainment HD channels found in other major virtual pay TV bundles, Achilles told Multichannel News. The bundle will include some 4K programming. Access to major SVOD services will also be integrated.

The service will feature a proprietary settop box and over-the-air antenna, and will be priced at less than $50. Achilles, a former Hewlett Packard and T-Mobile executive, said many major details are still being hammered out. “But the service will have no hidden fees or surcharges, or this, that and the other,” he said.

“This is not a pure streaming service; we’re not clogging the internet with a bunch of redundant streams,” Achilles said, noting that Evoca will be based on ATSC 3.0‘s multicast capabilities.

ATSC 3.0, he noted, will provide “a great big pipe” to shuttle HVEC-encoded video over the air to homes in places like Boise, which often have limited choices for broadband access, and find themselves limited by usage caps that aren’t friendly to HD or 4K video streaming. Other rural markets don’t have access to broadband — or the ability to stream video — at all.

Evoca will still require an internet connection to work, but it will only require a “single-digit” megabits-per-second download speed to sufficient, Achilles said.

Aiming to eventually deploy its service nationally, Edge Networks will approach each market individually, providing a wireless internet solution, for example, to hard-to reach rural places.

Hindsight may be 20/20, but with data and in-depth knowledge, we can make some pretty solid predictions about the future of Advanced TV in the coming year.

Let’s start with the obvious and follow the money. Advanced TV ad spend will continue to grow as more audiences shift from linear TV to over-the-top and connected TV — and advertisers will adjust their media spend accordingly. Whereas TV ad spend has peaked, digital video is growing at a fast clip. According to eMarketer, U.S. digital video ad spend will grow by 82% from 2018 to 2022, compared to a decline of 2.5% for U.S. TV ad spend over the same time period. But what’s the story behind the numbers?

For advertisers, the growing Advanced TV market will continue to reap benefits in terms of new tools, capabilities and strategies. Custom creative, precision targeting, advanced measurement and attribution solutions will all improve in the coming year as advertisers become more familiar with Advanced TV. In fact, advertisers will unlock new use cases for the medium in 2020. Brands will increasingly support lower-funnel ad campaigns that link Advanced TV advertising to business metrics such as lifts in sales, foot traffic, website visits and signups. As a result, advertisers will now embrace Advanced TV as a full-funnel medium.

Advertisers will also leverage Advanced TV as an increasingly viable option for regional and local engagement. According to a recent survey, half of local ad buyers allocated budget toward Advanced TV this year, and we expect this to continually increase due to the location-based targeting options available through Advanced TV.

Seas of Change

Of course, 2020 will also see rapid changes on the consumer side of the television business — thanks to an explosion in streaming options. As The New York Times recently pointed out, there are 271 online video services available in the U.S. Meanwhile, new quality streaming services like Disney+, Apple TV+ and Peacock will rival traditional broadcasters and established streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon and YouTube TV. On one hand, consumers have never had so many choices. On the other hand, the mounting costs of various OTT subscriptions will make it harder to justify cable and, in all likelihood, further contribute to cord-cutting. But as a recent eMarketer study points out, the future of television won’t be about pitting a subscription model against an ad-supported one — it’ll see robust growth for both models.

Naturally, this mixed model environment will also present challenges for advertisers. One obvious challenge is that audiences will continue to fragment. As fragmentation accelerates, Advanced TV will play an increasingly important role for advertisers looking to locate hard-to-reach audiences. An IAB report revealed that delivering hard-to-reach audiences is the No. 1 reason advertisers are turning to Advanced TV, ahead of campaign optimization and increased ad relevance. So, while Advanced TV might have been optional in previous years, it’ll be imperative for advertisers going forward. Because even if the objective is simply to address the gaps in linear buying, advertisers will need to dig into Advanced TV tactics such as using actual 1:1 linear TV viewership data to qualify audiences as well as automatic content recognition (ACR) and retargeting to drive incremental reach.

At the same time, advertisers also have to overcome a different fragmentation challenge. Because there are so many platforms that aren’t talking to each other, advertisers continue to struggle to measure true reach and understand effectiveness. This isn’t likely to go away in 2020. In fact, it’s akin to the challenges we saw early on in digital and mobile. Hopefully, advertisers will use the pain points of 2020 to push for greater standardization across the platforms.

Fraud Is a Stumbling Block

Another challenge on the horizon is fraud. Earlier this year, AdLedger, a nonprofit consortium that uses blockchain and cryptography to fight fraud, found that 18% of ad requests for OTT inventory are fraudulent. AdLedger executive director Christiana Cacciapuoti told The Drum, “The mechanisms for buying OTT are very different than the mechanisms you would use to buy linear, and they much more closely mirror digital than linear. A lot of the same fraud schemes are present in OTT that there are in digital, but with a slightly different twist to accommodate for the differences in platform.”

Advertisers should combat fraud in the Advanced TV space in the same way they fight digital fraud. A good place to start is to talk with your partners in order to learn about what they’re doing to combat fraud. Equally important, advertisers should look for partners and verification firms that let them look under the hood of their tech. Because if the tech isn’t purpose-built for the TV environment, it won’t be effective.

Despite the challenges of fraud and fragmentation, 2020 promises to be a successful year for Advanced TV. The question is no longer whether or not advertisers will use Advanced TV, but how will they use it. One day, we may look back on 2020 as the year Advanced TV came into its own and if that’s the case, it’ll be because advertisers leaned into the opportunities of Advanced TV and asked good questions about new capabilities, tools and strategies.

“Today, data needs to be extremely specific and clean — vetted, collected and shared in a privacy-conscious and ethical manner.” —Allison Metcalfe, LiveRamp

The TV industry has been struggling to bridge the gap between traditional linear TV and digital channels. On one hand, traditional linear TV has grappled with cross-device viewership, loss of perceived value compared to digital slow-to-measure campaign reporting, and an ongoing battle against the immediacy of digital. There’s also the growing number of cord-cutters that threaten its very existence.

On the other hand, there is digital, a leading medium for content consumption, but not devoid of its own challenges — fraud, transparency and flawed last-click attribution among them. To say the industry is at a crossroads would be an understatement. Brands often react prematurely by de-prioritizing television, or they try to simply swap dollars and strategies between TV and digital, which underscores the massive convergence between the two.

That’s where advanced TV comes in.

The era of advanced TV means that TV and digital are no longer mutually exclusive. Further, advanced TV is seemingly the best of both worlds. In theory, better data and technology will enable TV to not only regain its rightful position in the marketing ecosystem, but it should actually help the medium grow.

Solving for the Data Equation

In 2017, transparency became table stakes; That is, it was universally demanded by consumers. As a result, brand reputation emerged as a key concern for advertisers and marketers hoping to foster long-term trust and loyalty. Advertisers now need to be able to understand the sourcing and methodology of a target segment to ensure that it is compliant with relevant laws and best practices; and they need to put up proverbial “guardrails” with regard to data quality, which is no easy feat, given the proliferation of third-party data flooding the marketplace. There is no single-source currency, and many data sets are anonymous or come from digital, which means they must be modeled prior to use for targeting or measurement in TV, which is subject to different governmental regulations and consumer expectations.

Today, data needs to be extremely specific and clean — vetted, collected and shared in a privacy-conscious and ethical manner. Access to clean, proven data is the first challenge that the industry is working to address as TV advertising evolves.

Digital and TV: Working Together

The second challenge is clearly outlining the similarities and differences that exist between the TV and digital ecosystems. By doing this, brands and marketers will be able to solve current growing pains related to tracking viewership and cross-screen strategies. Informed with these critical considerations, marketers can begin to quickly and effectively implement identity solutions to make smarter targeting decisions that deliver measurable impact. And although change can be uncomfortable, multichannel video programming distributors, programmers, agencies and brands can all agree on one thing: the fundamental need to follow viewers wherever they consume content. Industry stakeholders — even competitors — are also united by the desire to be “customer obsessed.”

Taking a step back, when advertising budgets are reallocated, TV is typically first on the chopping block. That is because marketers believe they can reinvest those dollars into digital for a greater return-on-ad-spend (ROAS), whether that’s reach, impressions, etc. By the end of last year, headlines screamed about digital finally surpassing TV for the first time. To put this in context: there are tens of thousands of digital advertisers, and a significant amount of impressions are still fraudulent. By point of contrast, the TV ecosystem is underwritten by a few hundred national advertisers, and while there are issues such as skipability and declining viewership, there is no fraud.

The true value of bringing data and technology to TV is better targeting and measurement. Thus, there will be growth within the TV ecosystem itself. It’s about using the best of digital to the benefit of the TV market.

Issues With Fragmentation

The last hurdle to clear is fragmentation, which has proven particularly cumbersome following the rise of cable. It continues to be problematic today as connected/over-the-top (OTT) solutions amplify the issue.

Inevitably, certain players want to create their own Customer Data Platforms, and in the process we risk a future with high walled gardens in addressable TV, akin to what we have in digital.

Some of the discomfort in today’s data-driven TV ecosystem stems from the fact that key players have led measurement standardization to date. Many assume that a shift in measurement and the implementation of more identity solutions in addressable TV metrics needs to be all encompassing.

Resolving the Identity “Crisis”

Layering identity resolution in advanced TV empowers marketers to target individuals or households, in much deeper, relevant and more nuanced ways for a holistic view across the ecosystem.

Connected TV is a cookie-less environment with no device ID, and linear TV is often only able to target at the household level. That’s where people-based measurement fits into the picture.

People-based marketing in the TV ecosystem gives marketers the power to track and tie consistent, anonymous IDs across an entire marketing campaign. For example, a target segment can be built for a digital campaign on desktop and mobile, and then analyzed to show the lift digital had on TV, and the loop that TV advertising closed for digital.

It will be imperative that marketers apply learnings across both channels in order to understand the inherent opportunity and how that will impact ROAS.

Meeting in the Middle

The reality is that change will be steady, and that the market will ultimately reach a state of equilibrium. In the meantime, we need to allow and account for market maturation, and give data-driven TV strategies time to gain adoption, while proactively seeking new technologies and solutions that allow TV to evolve on its own.

Allison Metcalfe is general manager of TV for LiveRamp, an identity resolution provider specializing in people-based marketing.