Kargo said it has launched a new product that gives advertisers more details about the connected TV campaigns they are buying.

At a time when more advertisers are diving into CTV, Kargo’s new show-level transparency system provides information about what specific shows they’re buying, which episodes are streaming and what scenes in those shows might be contextually helpful to the marketing message, making campaigns more effective.

“CTV to date really has been pretty opaque,” David Naffis, general manager of CTV at Kargo told Broadcasting+Cable. 

“We’re looking to open that up and be very transparent to our clients to give them more power and precision into what they’re delivering against and then be able to make decisions about where they’re performing better and optimizing,” he said.

Better information will also help with brand safety, a big issue for clients, Naffis said.

Currently, most media companies selling inventory through programmatic channels restrict details about the shows that are available to give themselves more control and prevent buyers from cherry-picking the inventory.

Buyers and advertisers “know the publisher, but they often don’t know what channel, what show, what content they’re delivering against,” Naffis said.

Kargo, which works with many large media-buying agencies and advertisers, takes the data the programmers make available programmatically, plus all information about the show — audience size, content rating and even the location of ad breaks —-to infer which show is being offered and which episode will appear. For example if Kargo knows a FAST channel is streaming season three of Three’s Company, Kargo is able to narrow down in which episode an ad will appear in.

If it’s a good fit for the marketer, Kargo makes the buy. If it’s not, Kargo passes. 

“We can target specific shows to target or block, again for brand-safety reasons,” Naffis said. “We’re only delivering into shows we’re able to 100% identify.”

The new system, available only on buys made or managed by Kargo, can help advertisers select where their messages will run, and also report where and when a spot ran and what effect it had.

“One of the reasons that clients come and work with Kargo is so they can leverage products like this and our high-impact units for CTV that they’re not able to get from their direct publisher relationships,” Naffis said.

Adding contextual information can double or triple the performance of a commercial, Naffis said.

Naffis said the product is already out in the field and its first clients have used it. “It’s been really well-received,” he said.

Connected TV viewers prefer streaming programming on free ad-supported streaming television (FAST) channels to paying for subscription services without ads, a survey from LG Ad Solutions found.

According to the survey, 69% of those polled picked FAST over subscription streaming, with 53% of respondents saying they spend two hours or more per week using such channels.

“Consumers are now overwhelmingly open to ad-supported streaming content, signaling a seismic shift in their CTV habits,” LG Ad Solutions chief marketing officer Tony Marlow said. “Far from the era of passive TV consumption, this latest research gives us a peek into a future where CTV thrives as an immersive, personalized platform. It is now a place where people engage with the personalized content they love and where marketers can connect with those audiences through highly relevant messages. It’s a win-win for the entire ecosystem.”

The survey of more than 1,000 U.S. CTV owners also found that 56% of viewers said it takes them more time to find something to stream. Respondents said it takes nearly 12 minutes to decide what to watch, up from 6 minutes in last year’s survey. 

The biggest challenges to finding something to stream are too many choices (38%) and not remembering what platform a particular show is on (37%). 

When watching CTV, 42% of viewers said they prefer interactive ads with features such as QR codes.

"As content continues to proliferate across channels and platforms, making content more discoverable through strategies like leveraging the OEM home screen will be vital to capture consumer eyeballs,“ Marlow said. “In fact, two in five CTV users already rely on the TV home screen for content recommendations, and we expect that to continue to grow.”

LinkedIn, the business-networking site, said it is getting into the connected TV ad business, working with NBCUniversal on one of its new offerings.

LinkedIn has been running in-stream video ads on its site and said the expansion into CTV will help business advertisers get their message in front of the 1 billion LinkedIn members, many of whom are business-to-business decision-makers.

Advertisers can access LinkedIn CTV through the LinkedIn Campaign Manager. The ads stream across publishers including Roku and Samsung Ads, with DoubleVerify measuring brand safety.

“We are thrilled to unveil our new Connected TV offering, uniquely designed to help B2B marketers effectively reach their target audience in the comfort of their households,’ said Sanjay Dubey, VP of engineering, LinkedIn Marketing Solutions.

“This tool is powered by data from our LinkedIn Economic Graph and AI algorithms to empower our customers to connect with the right professional audience through streaming television content," Dubey said. " From our initial tests, customers have reported seeing significant improvement in brand lift, as well as lower funnel outcomes for audiences exposed to CTV campaigns.” 

Another ad product, LinkedIn Premiere, is designed to reach decision-makers watching ads in NBCU’s premium content.

“In today’s television landscape, reaching strategic audiences in a premium environment is key to developing media plans that perform,” Dominick Vangeli, senior VP & general manager of advanced advertising at NBCU, said. “By partnering with LinkedIn, NBCUniversal can give our marketing partners unique access to business decision-makers who are already watching our brand-safe, diverse and culture-defining content. This collaborative solution continues our momentum of building an audience-first media ecosystem to deliver a curated and relevant experience for viewers, as well as an optimal and effective strategy for advertisers.”

LinkedIn said it is working with measurement and research companies including iSpot.tv to estimate advanced audiences and Kantar for brand-lift studies.

“Using iSpot, you’re able to measure your effectiveness in reaching B2B audiences across platforms, like linear and CTV, for the first time,“ LinkedIn said. “By leveraging Kantar, you can get deep, actionable insights about how your campaign leads to a lift in brand awareness, affinity, or resonance among your target B2B audience.”

With a 34% increase in business people viewing events on the site, LinkedIn added, it is testing Live Event ads.

“This new, global format helps you promote your company’s live event before, during and after it takes place, dynamically adjusting based on when it occurs,” LinkedIn said.

LinkedIn said its Campaign Manager enables users to choose an objective, determine a target audience, set a budget and schedule, launch a campaign and measure its impact in terms of revenue attribution, conversions and brand lift.

Media buyers using Mediaocean’s Prisma platform will be able to plan, execute and reconcile ad campaigns on connected TV directly from programmers who work with Magnite through a new exclusive partnership the two companies have formed.

Magnite’s ClearLine has CTV and digital video inventory from media companies including including A+E Networks, AMC Networks, DirecTV Advertising, Dish Media, Disney Advertising, Fox Digital, LG Ad Solutions, Vizio, and Warner Bros. Discovery.

The arrangement comes as more viewers are streaming programming and marketers are looking for simpler, more effective ways to buy CTV ad inventory to reach them.

“By integrating Magnite’s ClearLine solution into Prisma, we’re creating the most streamlined and automated process to buy streaming inventory directly from sellers,” Ramsey McGrory, chief development officer at Mediaocean, said.

Dish Media said it made an exclusive agreement to sell addressable advertising inventory on streaming service Philo.

The deal adds 1 million households to Dish Media’s addressable footprint beyond satellite provider Dish Network and virtual multichannel programming distributor (vMVPD) Sling TV, offering advertisers greater target market reach.

“We realize advertisers understand the value of addressable advertising and want to simplify their experience in reaching our audience,” Reed Barker, head of advertising at Philo, said. “Partnering with Dish Media,allows us to connect with advertisers through channels they value and are already investing in.”

Dish Media was an early mover in addressable advertising. With addressable campaigns, advertisers look to reach as much of their target audience without having to make deals with multiple media vendors.

Dish said there is only a 3% overlap between the audiences it already reaches and Philo’s viewership.

“We are particularly proud to be the partner of choice for Philo,” said David Antonelli, VP, media sales at Dish Media. “It serves as a testament to the strength of our relationships, our leadership in innovation and the power of our monetization engine. Our willingness to drive mutually beneficial partnerships in an increasingly fragmented landscape has allowed us to now scale our addressable footprint by more than 1 million households, offering advertisers the opportunity to connect with Philo’s diverse and engaged audience.”

Over the past decade, digital advertising has undergone a remarkable transformation, fundamentally altering how brands engage with their audiences. This change has been primarily driven by the advent of self-service advertising platforms, with giants like Google and Facebook leading the way. 

These platforms have democratized advertising, enabling businesses of all sizes to target audiences with unprecedented accuracy and measure the return on their advertising spend in an incredibly precise way. Now, as we enter 2024, a similar revolution is unfolding in the realm of connected TV (CTV), raising the question: Will this be the year when the TV industry reaches 100,000 advertisers for self-service TV advertising campaigns?

Rise of Self-Service Advertising

Self-service advertising platforms emerged as game-changers for digital marketing, beginning with paid search pioneer GoTo.com in 1998. These platforms offered a level of accessibility and precision that traditional advertising methods couldn't match. Any business — small or large — could set up a campaign in minutes and reach valuable audiences without the hefty budgets typically associated with traditional media buys. Metrics and analytics provided clear insights into ad performance against driving outcomes, ensuring that advertisers could understand and demonstrate the effectiveness and return on investment of their ad spend. This level of control and insight is now extending into the CTV space.

CTV has seen explosive growth over the past several years, with more households choosing streaming services over traditional cable TV. The shift has created a new avenue for advertisers to reach audiences where they are increasingly spending their time.

2024: A Turning Point?

As we progress into 2024, several factors suggest that this could be a pivotal year for self-service CTV advertising. Among them:

Advances in Measurement and Targeting: CTV platforms are rapidly developing their measurement and targeting capabilities. Advertisers can now leverage detailed viewer data to tailor their messages more effectively than traditional TV advertising allows. This precision, akin to what digital advertisers are accustomed to, makes CTV an increasingly attractive option.

Structural Changes in Digital Advertising: The digital ad landscape is undergoing significant shifts, especially this year’s planned phase-out of third-party tracking cookies. With increasing concerns over privacy and data usage, platforms are making changes that impact the effectiveness of traditional digital ads. These changes are pushing advertisers to explore new avenues, with CTV standing out as a promising alternative.

Increased Accessibility: The growth of self-service platforms in the CTV space is lowering the entry barrier for smaller advertisers. Similar to what was witnessed with digital advertising, these platforms allow businesses of all sizes to create and manage CTV campaigns with ease, opening up a market that was previously dominated by large advertisers with substantial budgets.

Diversification of Ad Spend: As more advertisers become aware of the benefits of CTV, including its high engagement and growing audience base, there’s a natural shift of ad spend towards this medium. This diversification is crucial in an era where multichannel advertising is becoming more of a necessity than a choice for brands seeking to maximize their reach and impact.

The Future Is the Past

Back in the early days of paid search in 1998, advertisers had to learn an entirely new way to do business. They had to figure out how to choose relevant keywords, write titles and descriptions for each keyword, upload 1000s of keywords, figure out how to bid, and measure ROI at a keyword-by-keyword level. As simple as this all seems now, it was really difficult back then. But as tools emerged and advertisers inched up the learning curve, a thriving roughly $200 billion-plus marketplace evolved, supported by millions of advertisers. The same thing happened in social.

The democratization of TV advertising is in full swing, driven by new tools and technologies that are analogous to the early days of paid search: self-serve TV buying, ROI measurement, auto-campaign optimization tech, etc. But for most of the 9 million paid search and social advertisers, TV is a new channel. As they embrace the new tools — like self-serve platforms — that democratize TV advertising, we are likely to see a huge surge of search and social advertisers adopting outcome-based TV.

Lotame, a global customer data provider, said it has adopted the Unified ID 2.0, the identity technology pioneered by The Trade Desk, which will help it grow its connected TV business.

With cookies becoming less reliable in identifying customers, the industry is looking for other ways to target ads.

“In the face of cookie depreciation, everybody’s worried about decreased monetization for ad supported publisher content,” Eli Heath, head of identity at Lotame told Broadcasting+Cable. “UID is a great option in the market.”

At the same time, ad spending on CTV has been growing and CTV has never been targeted using cookies.

“We had to solve the cookieless problem for CTV because CTV is attractive from a video investment perspective,” Heath said. “Obviously, it’s a catalyst.”

CTV is premium content, almost entirely viewable and addressable.

“If you’re a brand that’s really the place to be and because of the access to programmatic pricing dynamics have really decreased,” he said. “Traditional TV was far too expansive for many brands and you couldn’t be nimble with audience-based targeting.” 

Using UID will make it easier for customers who use Lotame audiences to buy CTV through The Trade Desk, a leading demand-side platform.

“We have a really close relationship with The Trade Desk and a lot of our agency buyers and independent marketers that look to Lotame use The Trade Desk as their primary and preferred buying platform,” Heath said.

Lotame launched its own probabilistic identity system, Panorama ID, in 2020, based on IP addresses and other information gleaned from browser activity. The company plans to offer both Panorama and UID 2.0 to customers. (UID is deterministic, based largely on the email addresses of website and app users.)

“It’s a ‘best of both worlds’ strategy for our buyers,” Heath said. “It’s more complicated and more costly to manage the distribution of all these IDs, but that’s how we hedge our bets against a single ID. A winner hasn’t emerged yet.”

Lotame’s marketplace has customer data ranging from precise age and gender information to shopping behavior. Many clients ask Lotame to use its data to create custom audiences. For example, it can identify women who have bought yoga mats and gone to Sweetgreen in the past 30 days to build a soccer-mom persona, Heath said.

“With third-party cookie deprecation happening this year, every advertiser needs an identity strategy,” Jay Goebel, VP of data partnerships at The Trade Desk, said. “It’s companies like Lotame who are helping to ensure the future of the open internet by adopting Unified ID 2.0 to give advertisers the power to make better data-driven decisions in their media campaigns. 

“The majority of inventory is email authenticated across the CTV landscape, making audiences highly addressable,” Heath added. “By 2025, consumers will spend over two hours per day watching CTV content, more than double the time spent on desktop. This UID2 integration equips our clients with the tools to evolve with consumers and reach them effectively.”

The fallout from the linear TV apocalypse is starting to materialize.

Consumers are frustrated by a fragmented landscape, TV networks and applications are scrambling to add value and advertisers have been stuck between investing in the waning linear TV space and shifting budgets to streaming.

While television goes through growing pains, how can advertisers win? We must understand the past before we jump into the future.

How We Got Here

In the heyday of linear, multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs) — the cable operators — appealed to consumers by expanding content choice. To scale, they offered “programming bundles” — service tiers that included multiple cable networks at a relatively reasonable cost. The MVPDs paid the networks low monthly license fees per subscriber. 

Over time, consumer-advocacy groups demanded the offering of networks on an “a la carte” basis. The MVPDs and programmers, citing complex outcomes (e.g., increased consumer pricing), successfully rebuked these demands and the bundle, it seemed, was here to stay. 

And along came streaming. 

Tech companies and consumers latched onto the promise of “what you want when you want it” content. They promised content control. Netflix and free ad-supported TV (FAST) channels launched, while traditional TV networks built strategies to adapt, netting Disney Plus, Max, et al.

Digital technology seemed to win the streaming wars. U.S. cable subscriptions, which topped  out at 97 million households in 2016 (plus about 20 million satellite subscriptions), have precipitously declined and are expected to bottom out at 43 million. To maintain revenue, content providers and MVPDs must increase subscription pricing for those who remain.

These trends have resulted in a doom loop — the more linear players increase prices, the more subscribers leave cable with those departing subs forced to redirect their entertainment dollars to a la carte studio streaming services — whose prices are going to increase to offset the losses in cable distribution and advertising revenue, as well as cover production costs from the streaming wars. 

So the MVPDs and content providers were right: a la carte does not work for consumers!

Predictably, to maintain or boost subscribers while individual app costs increase, the streaming services are bundling. Showtime is now included with Paramount Plus. Disney Plus, Hulu and ESPN Plus offer package deals. We may even see applications license their exclusive content elsewhere (imagine Ahsoka on Paramount Plus after a six-month run on Disney Plus), reinventing the syndication market.

How We Get Out of Here

While digital technology helped create this doom loop for consumers, linear players and streaming platforms, it creates solutions for advertisers.

Connected TV (CTV) ads, which are delivered on a one-to-one basis via internet protocol and digital technology, provide more comprehensive — and prospectively valuable — audience insights than traditional linear. By marrying first-party data to other interesting, privacy-compliant data sets, advertisers can better define and reach their target audiences. 

For example, let’s say Beyoncé drops a “surprise” album. In the peak days of linear TV, one ad announcing the album could reach millions on, say, a live Seinfeld episode. That’s a lot of prospective buyers. However, via streaming ads on CTV, she could use today’s digital advertising tools to ensure her ad reaches her target audience that has a greater likelihood to purchase.

Measurement, too, offers richer insights into consumer absorption of a campaign, such as incremental lift across all channels in which the user was exposed to the message, or attribution for the album download on a phone, after seeing the ad on CTV.

Importantly, advertisers must consider the CTV ad placements. Quality is not consistent across the thousands of CTV apps and some digital pathways allow for fraud. Advertisers should use the same discretion in selecting CTV partners as they exercised in selecting linear partners, and encourage their technology partners to remove intermediaries who do not add value. 

The right technology platform partners — those with strong data-matching capabilities, quality inventory access and comprehensive advanced reporting — can help bring deduplicated scale across the various CTV platforms and applications. 

While the streaming wars continue, fragmenting consumer eyeballs, marketers can nonetheless use the latest digital advertising tools and win in television’s evolving landscape.

The proving grounds for the recent evolution of cloud-based broadcast operations has been free ad-supported streaming TV (FAST), a linear-TV streaming format that shares many advantages with internet-connected, NextGen TV broadcasting. One of these advantages includes a one-to-one advertising model that enables the targeting of advertisements to specific users and the collection of extensive, real-time data and analytics on how concurrent users are consuming a channel’s content — all without relying on panel-based reporting from market measurement firms.
Today, many cloud-based workflows originally designed for FAST-style streaming are now being considered for traditional over-the-air (OTA) broadcasting. This is applicable not only to those already invested in ATSC 3.0 but to any legacy OTA distributor.

This convergence of FAST and OTA workflows is an exciting development that gives broadcasters an excellent opportunity to experiment with delivering diverse content over the airwaves. “Convergence” is truly the operative word here: As workflows unite for cloud-based and traditional broadcast methods, content production and distribution will become more streamlined as well. Thanks to the maturity of the cloud within the FAST ecosystem, channels that were once exclusive to digital platforms can now be adapted for OTA broadcasting. And soon, the distinctions between cable offerings, OTA content and over-the-top services will become increasingly blurred. As this transformation unfolds, broadcasters will find it easier to build multiple channels, experiment with new offerings, manage content and ads across FAST and OTA channels, and personalize and localize content.

Benefit 1: Building Multiple Channels Is Significantly Easier

Cloud technology has empowered broadcasters to manage channels and incorporate sophisticated elements more easily and affordably. Thanks to the cloud, there’s little need for dedicated hardware in broadcasters’ setups. And when it comes to managing a channel, all related tasks can now be conducted in a Web browser, where content, graphics and advertisements can be built into a channel instantaneously and contribute to a more comprehensive viewer experience.

As cloud-based workflows for FAST have shown, broadcasters don’t need an entire control room’s worth of software and hardware to incorporate sophisticated elements, including graphics. J-bars, L-bars and other similar elements can be easily constructed in HTML, offering greater flexibility and resulting in a visually appealing presentation that matches the sophistication of cable TV programming. Essentially, broadcasters can construct a website over their channel and can automate various elements such as tickers, clocks, stock quotes, sports scores, weather information or any structured data source they have access to. This capability might have been beyond the reach of many TV stations lacking the necessary hardware or software for overlaying such elements onto their channels. However, by envisioning the channel as a website, the transition to NextGen TV-grade viewership becomes much more feasible. And the best part is that it’s straightforward and cost-effective.

Benefit 2: Experimentation Incurs Fewer Costs and Less Risk

Moving broadcasting operations to the cloud significantly reduces upfront costs, providing broadcasters with the flexibility to experiment with, launch and manage multiple channels at a time — even pop-up channels. Traditionally, broadcasters would invest hundreds of thousands of dollars upfront in building a traditional broadcast facility. Moving operations to the cloud often entails adopting a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, which largely shifts accounting practices from capital expenditures to operational expenditures. As a result, establishing multiple channels in the cloud is far more cost-effective. There isn’t a massive initial expenditure; instead, broadcasters can spread the cost over the duration of a contract with a SaaS provider. This approach allows broadcasters to be more experimental and lowers the barrier to launching multiple channels, empowering them to introduce new offerings with minimal investment and very few operational demands.

If broadcasters want to test a channel in a specific market, there’s no need for extensive deliberation due to high costs for equipment, and it doesn’t require a significant financial commitment to get it off the ground. This cloud approach enables experimentation and trying out various ideas without significant upfront planning and costs.

Additionally, the threshold for launching pop-up channels around single live events is currently quite low, given the ease of the process. If broadcasters have the inbound signal, they can efficiently broadcast these events in a cost-effective manner, initiating and terminating these channels without requiring a significant financial investment or extensive internal deliberation. If broadcasters want to establish a channel dedicated exclusively to local high school football, they can launch that channel in the cloud within a few days, run it for a limited time during the football season, and even distribute the feed to other interested platforms. Similarly, thematic channels related to various occasions or special promotions don’t necessitate a substantial investment, allowing for more creativity and experimentation. Whether it’s a Halloween channel, Christmas channel or one dedicated to an awards show or sports event that’s only needed for a few days or weeks, the cloud offers a creative and cost-efficient advantage.

Benefit 3: Ads and Content From FAST Can Be Copied to OTA

In the cloud, broadcasters can also create FAST and OTA versions of their channels and potentially increasing their revenue streams. One of the key divisions between FAST and OTA broadcasting is in the advertising environment. FAST operates in a one-to-one advertising model, where a marker triggers a call to an ad server, leading to a real-time auction for that specific user’s attention. In contrast, OTA is a one-to-many model where broadcasters need to program broadcast advertising deliberately, scheduling different videos between ad markers. But whether displaying a slate in FAST or playing an actual ad in OTA, the process of scheduling remains quite similar.  Taken further, broadcasters can also create a variation of a specific channel for both FAST and OTA, especially on digital subnets. 

By working with a prominent cloud SaaS partner, broadcasters with separate FAST and OTA versions of their channels — complete with different ad environments — can easily connect to an external ad server for broadcast. Here, the server will inform the SaaS partner about which ads to include and when. From there, the SaaS partner can converge the workflows, distributing the FAST version to established platforms using an IP-based stream and, for OTA, distribute the other version to stations via an HLS, SRT, or Zixi stream. Both channels require a specific IP version of their stream, so for the cloud SaaS provider, it’s just another digital endpoint, making the process both seamless and automated. By running the channel as either FAST or OTA depending on its intended market, content would discover a whole new revenue stream for broadcasters, significantly increasing immediate ROI.

Benefit 4: Content Becomes Far More Personal and Localized

Finally, cloud technology allows broadcasters to transform their operations into a cost-efficient and more customized 24/7 linear cable-style service. Thanks to the cloud’s ease of building a channel, opportunities for experimentation and convergent workflows between FAST and OTA, broadcasters can create an entirely new business model. In other words, they can effectively enhance the value of the scheduled content between live local newscasts, which typically serve as the cornerstone of local TV. And in doing so, they can not only avoid spending money on licensing content but also provide greater value to their customers.

Instead of investing in licensing national shows to fill the gaps between newscasts or overnight, broadcasters can use cloud-based content that offers more value to their audience and costs almost nothing. This approach allows them to maintain a local focus, which adds value for viewers. A weather channel might want different graphics layers for various parts of the country, which can be accomplished in the cloud. Similarly, a national news channel may want to incorporate localized segments, where a significant portion of the hour-long national news broadcast is filled intermittently with brief two-minute segments tailored to specific regions. By leveraging the cloud, it’s quite cost-effective to create these subfeed variants. There’s no need for numerous playout engines to support these channels, making these previously expensive considerations more viable and practical when done in the cloud.

Hesitations towards implementing the cloud as the primary playout system will vary among different broadcasters, even those that have already adopted offsite production. However, thanks to the boom in FAST over the last few years, cloud workflows have evolved significantly — far past the point of supporting digital subchannels to fully building and distributing network-affiliated primary OTA channels. The barrier to entry is low, even for those who have not transitioned to NextGen TV. By participating in the cloud-based convergence of FAST and OTA workflows, broadcasters can significantly change their internal operations, discover far more lucrative revenue streams and remain the beloved cornerstone of their local viewers.

Looking to bring order to the Wild West of streaming TV for advertisers, measurement company iSpot.tv said it is rolling out a new set of dedicated streaming metrics.

The metrics focus on commercials streaming on connected TVs. In addition to telling advertisers not only whether their commercials ran where they were expected to and their deduplicated reach, they provide syndicated competitive information about how competitors are spending their streaming ad dollars.

iSpot’s previous Unified Measurement metrics included streaming, but treated them as an add-on to advertisers linear spending.

“Streaming is growing so quickly that it’s no longer just incremental to linear,“ iSpot.tv CEO Sean Muller told Broadcasting+Cable. ”It’s its own massive channel that’s very hard for advertisers to measure. 

“We’ve been working diligently through the metrics that matter in a streaming first world because we think in the future, it’s all going to be streaming-led,” Muller said.

iSpot streaming metrics include the percentage of impressions that hit the intended audience target, deduplicated audience identification, co-viewing and on-screen verification that ads were delivered to TVs.  

“What we’ve got here is metrics that could be traded on,“ Muller said. “These are all things that you could structure a deal around.

“Our goal right now is to get the industry to understand the measurement side of streaming and really have metrics that they can trust and apply evenly across all publishers,” he continued. “The same metrics are available for linear as well and we believe this will form the foundation for future currencies in a cross-platform streaming world.”

Several iSpot clients beta-tested the new metrics, which are now live and in wide release.

Muller said that the tide is turning and that while streaming ad impressions were once incremental to broadcast, many advertisers are now taking a streaming-first approach, which pushed iSpot to create specific metrics for streaming.

“It’s what the market is demanding,” he said. 

iSpot collects its streaming data from several sources, including ACR data from smart TV screens, an exclusive deal for panel data with TVision, direct integrations with 400 streaming publishers and an arrangement with The Trade Desk on all of the impressions it executes.

“We are sitting on a ton of streaming data,” Muller said.

The first releases will break out streaming by platform and publisher.

iSpot plans to release more data and market trends about streaming throughout 2024, he said.

After a difficult year for traditional advertising, top ad-tech executives see some changes coming in 2024.

Growing in importance are connected TV as a channel for advertisers, the need for accountable data and a continuing shift to automation.

Here are some predictions as 2024 gets underway.

“In 2024, we’ll see a renewed focus on premium video — what it is and what factors buyers and sellers should consider when engaging in video transactions,” said Mark McKee, general manager of FreeWheel, Comcast’s ad tech company. “This issue is timely as premium video continues to grow and as content proliferates across platforms and screens. In today’s complex and fast-moving media landscape, buyers want (and deserve to know) that the ad inventory they’re purchasing is high-quality and brand-safe. Holding premium video to a higher standard is a win-win for the industry, as such efforts will help drive a more enhanced viewer experience.”

At the same time, for buyers, linear and digital video are converging.

“Innovation-wise, one of 2023’s top moments was the launch of AMC Networks’ programmatic addressable capability,” said Larry Allen, VP and GM, data and addressable enablement at Comcast Advertising. “With this breakthrough, we can expect to see a major increase in addressable ad inventory being made available programmatically in 2024. This, tied with a stronger push and emphasis on authenticated identity, will help pave the way for even more accurate audience targeting and measurement innovation across the TV ad ecosystem,“

Kevin Krim, CEO of EDO, said that the quality of TV content will be more important than how it’s watched.

Fifteen years ago, ‘What is TV?’ was a straightforward question with a straightforward answer: If a piece of content appeared on your TV screen, it was ‘TV’ — whether it was a TV program or a TV ad, and no matter how you saw it. Simple. But over the past decade and a half, this answer has become far more complex, and the lines between ‘TV’ and ‘digital video’ far more blurred,” Krim said.

“2023 saw a major shift in how EDO’s clients planned and budgeted for ‘TV,’ more often than not including YouTube in their TV budgets after years of including it in social video budgets,” he said.

“In 2024, this trend will only accelerate, as advertisers, networks, agencies and streaming platforms come to define ‘TV’ as ‘high-quality video content’ — regardless of where, when, and how we access it,” said Krim.

As TV shifts towards digital, programmatic TV advertising has taken a leap forward. That will press buyers and advertisers to finally start asking hard questions about the data they are using, Krim said.

“Programmatic will continue its convergent TV invasion in 2024, as advertisers chase the allure of combining the highly engaging, premium environment of TV with the precise targeting they use to buy programmatic banner ads,” he said.

“This programmatic trend will force all of us to finally confront a gaping hole in the fundamentals of the audience-targeting ecosystem: the accuracy of the data. According to a recent study from Truthset, nearly half the data used in digital audience targeting is flat-out wrong. And plenty of so-called ‘premium’ programmatic TV ad buys wind up being trafficked on low-quality websites instead of the prestige TV app experience buyers expected. As media costs increase in an election + Olympics year, these quality issues will get a bright, hot spotlight on them,” said Krim.

The upshot? 2024 will be the year that advertisers really start investigating the data they invested in to make their programmatic TV buying strategies sing, according to Krim.

“This, in turn, will drive the DSPs [demand side platforms] and SSPs [sell side platforms] to confront another notable gap — most platforms only optimize for audience targets and cost minimization, while leaders like Google are optimizing for outcomes,“ Krim said. “Modern marketers will win by taking a more holistic view of performance, rather than simply assessing their ability to ‘reach’ smaller and smaller audiences of dubious quality.” 

In the same vein, Matt McLeggon, senior VP, advanced solutions at Magnite, said that although programmatic has started to show potential in representing what a model for a fully converged television ecosystem could look like, “unfortunately, a scarcity of audience and contextual signals in legacy environments has proven to be a significant headwind to efficient monetization.”

McLeggon said “supply-side audience activation, already a growing trend in programmatic, offers us a near-term solution. In 2024, media owners and MVPDs [multichannel video programming distributors] will drive programmatic addressable forward by leaning into the practice of activating against rich subscriber and consumer data within their own supply platforms. This approach gives programmatic buyers the targeting refinement they are accustomed to in CTV while avoiding the technical and commercial headaches that would come with passing the usual identifiers into the bid stream that goes out to DSPs.”

Mike Seiman, CEO and founder of Digital Remedy, said digital would take center stage in TV advertising with linear TV becoming a role player.

“While advertisers will continue to invest in linear TV, the expectations of the medium and what its role and purpose are in the broader ad ecosystem will largely evolve,“ Seiman said. “That’s because increasingly, digital TV is no longer ancillary for brands or consumers. The medium inherently provides advertisers better ways to hold spend accountable to ROI in ways that linear simply can’t, which will impact spending allocations in a much bigger way in 2024.”

At the same time, streaming TV will come under more careful scrutiny, according to Seiman.

“As streaming competition rises, and CTV budgets surge, the quality of streaming ad inventory will come under the microscope,” he said.

“Clearly, not all CTV inventory is equal when it comes to content quality, audience, engagement and attention,“ Seiman said. ”Thus, brands are going to start to insist on more transparency in inventory and a push toward pricing that is reflective of quality. As a result, long-tail inventory and online video, while still playing an important role for brands, will be viewed as ‘less premium’ compared to top-flight CTV.”

Dan Slivjanovski, chief marketing officer of DoubleVerify, said that better measurement is coming to tame the Wild West of connected TV.

“Since its inception, CTV advertising has faced limitations due to the unique nature of the environment,“ he said. “According to DV data, for example, one-third of CTV impressions serve in environments that play ads and fire impressions long after the TV is turned off, making viewability an important CTV metric.”

Slivjanovski said the open measurement system will be more widely adopted in 2024, ameliorating the problem.

“Open measurement unlocks full cross-screen viewability measurement using the same underlying expectations and specifications across CTV, mobile and desktop environments; tells exactly how many ads serve partially off-screen or to TVs that are turned off; and provides audio and AVOC measurement, the ability to transact on viewable impressions in CTV, which is already a common billable metric on desktop and mobile and measurement and reporting based on customized viewability standards,” Slivjanovski said.

At the same time, attention metrics are going to become more important in CTV.

“To prove that an ad campaign produced a return on investment, advertisers need to measure its performance on every platform,” Slivjanovski said. “But this has been challenging on CTV due to the lack of available KPIs [key performance indicators] to measure performance and optimize outcomes. As a proxy, most CTV advertisers currently optimize campaigns based on cost. However, this presents a challenge when most advertisers are already purchasing inventory at the lowest prices when buying directly from publishers or private marketplaces (PMPs). For this reason, advertisers have been especially overdue for a solution to better gauge impact on this channel.”

DV research shows that only 30% of CTV ads garner two or more seconds of eyes-on-screen viewing.

“With the increased demand and general advancement of CTV viewability measurement technology, the development of granular attention measurement for CTV continues to be an industry priority,” Slivjanovski said. “DV predicts CTV attention measurement will become more widely available and see increased adoption in 2024.” 

Dan Mouradian, VP, global client solutions at Innovid, is less sold on attention.

“While conversations around attention metrics continue, whether or not a consumer has ‘paid attention’ to an ad does not define campaign effectiveness — and in an environment that has seen significant investment, such metrics shouldn’t be the main focus when measuring performance in CTV. In the new year, we can expect to see advertisers not only come to the realization that there are other ways to measure campaigns, but that there are better methods like interactive ads that actually give insight to outcomes without question,” Mouradian said.

His Innovid colleague, Laura Foster, VP, product marketing, sees ad servers evolving.

“The modern ad server is like an iPhone — users depend on their smartphone in the same way that advertisers depend on their data-driven ad servers,“ she said. “But in order for an ad server to survive in today’s competitive market, it must remain independent — making the best decisions on behalf of the customer while ensuring transparency and trust as a neutral third party.

“We’ve already seen the importance of independence, with Amazon planning to shutter its ad server at the end of next year. In 2024, ad servers will be seen as more than counting clicks and impressions: they are a critical pathway to transforming everyday advertising into direct value.”

Tony Marlow, chief marketing officer at LG Ads Solutions, sees advertisers cutting the cord and moving dollars to CTV.

“In 2024, we anticipate a significant and continued shift of advertising dollars from linear TV to connected TV,” he said. “This change is part of the ‘big shift’ observed over the past few years, driven by consumers spending more time viewing CTV content “Notably, the rise in popularity of free, ad-supported streaming services offers advertisers a prime opportunity to engage with consumers in their increasingly preferred medium. Moreover, the introduction of ad-supported streaming options on major platforms like Netflix and Disney Plus expanded the available inventory. This transition is expected to accelerate in 2024.”

Marlow added that CTV will become a groundbreaking battleground for political advertising in 2024.

“With CTV's ability to target specific demographics, locations, and interests, political campaigns will leverage CTV’s addressability to tailor their messages more precisely than ever before,” Marlow said. “This strategic move not only reflects the changing landscape of media consumption but also acknowledges that younger, tech-savvy voters are more likely to be influenced through digital streaming services. Consequently, CTV advertising will play a pivotal role in shaping political narratives, offering an unprecedented level of engagement and message customization in the realm of electoral politics.”

Michael Scott, VP of sales and ad operations at Samsung Ads, sees FAST channels giving AVOD a run for its money in 2024.

“Many free ad-supported TV (FAST) platforms were originally launched to give viewers more choice in an increasingly expensive subscription-driven streaming ecosystem,” Scott said. “Now, in 2024, we can see that the choice is a clear preference as legacy subscription players rethink their strategy around premium offerings.”

Every major news network now offers FAST content and live sports is moving toward FAST.

“These platforms are now becoming serious contenders for content exclusives and debuts, further challenging AVOD’s dominance,” Scott said.

Scott added that Samsung Ads expects shoppable ads to get more attention. A recent Samsung study found that shoppable ads have great brand recall and that 50% of viewers who recalled seeing one interacted with a shoppable ad,

“When consumers see a product on TV, they want to be able to quickly learn more or purchase that product and increase the ease of access along their path to purchase,” Scott said.

Hunter Terry, head of CTV at Lotame, expects FAST channels to get stronger, helping independent streamers.

“As more giant players like Netflix and Disney gain traction with their ad-supported offerings, smaller video programmers — such as Tastemade — will look for ways to gain more share through partnerships and scale. In fact, CTV is starting to gravitate towards a concentrated group of winners who command the majority of spending. Given those circumstances, we may see many independent content players abandon standalone CTV apps, and consider handing sales over to platforms like Roku or Amazon or various FAST networks,” Terry said.

“Because of that, more ad dollars are likely to be funneled toward the platforms, rather than the independent publishers,“ Terry said. ”As in the gold rush, there may be more money to make selling tools than mining for actual gold.”

Yahoo chief revenue officer Elizabeth Herbst-Brady predicted that creative would surge in its importance to advertising performance.

”In 2024, creative will play a bigger role in programmatic success,” Herbst-Brady said. “This is especially true as the industry grapples with challenges in identity resolution. While we must continue to solidify foundations around identity and quality inventory, creative will drive performance, engagement and brand awareness.

“Creative will be top of mind for all advertisers, but particularly so for CTV advertisers with the convergence of generative AI, the necessity of managing the cost of creative development and addressability of CTV,” she said.

“Advertisers will be emboldened by AI to develop an array of creative variations for their campaigns and to deliver personalization like never before,” Herbst-Brady continued. “This allows them to engage audiences across geographical areas, languages and viewing environments — without incurring sky-high production costs. But it also reduces ad fatigue, by varying the creative viewers see in their own specific households.”

Similarly, Iris TV CEO and co-founder Field Garthwaite said he believes the right mindset plus the right creative equals better campaign performance.

”Video-level data enables brands to better identify consumers, ensure they’re reaching the right audiences and better place ads within the context of the content they’re engaging with,“ Garthwaite said. ”Research shows that consumers pay 4 times more attention to ads that are relevant to the content they are watching. 

“AI and machine learning offer promising avenues for ad creative development and targeted messaging,” he added. “However, the challenge lies in ensuring ads align with audience mindsets. As the advertising landscape evolves, reaching consumers in the right mindset becomes as critical as crafting quality creative. Misalignments can result in negative brand perceptions, impacting political campaigns as well. 

“In fact, according to the AVCA [Alliance for Video-Level Contextual Advertising], more than half of consumers were less interested in the brand and products found in contextually misaligned ads,“ Garthwaite said. “For brands that are looking to better increase campaign performance in 2024, it's crucial to not only leverage video-level data but emotional and AI-driven data to deliver the right ad, in the right context and right mindset of the consumer."

A curious thing has evolved in the world of digital consumption. On one side, there’s the rapidly growing world of YouTube, a platform that has carved its niche with consumers globally. On the other side, connected TV (CTV) — anticipated to be the better successor to linear TV — is chugging along slowly. What gives?

A report by WARC Media a couple of months back shined a light on this slower-than-expected growth. While Generation Z fully embraces streaming, spending almost the same amount of time as on linear TV, the CTV market overall is fragmented. The potential of connected TV is vast, and the projections are certainly bullish. However, when stacked against YouTube, which is predicted to have 17.4% more ad revenue year-over-year in 2023, the comparison is a stark reminder of the different trajectories of these platforms.

YouTube has become a behemoth not just for the sheer volume of content it hosts, but also for the granularity with which advertisers can target audiences. YouTube has had years to understand, refine and perfect its advertising algorithms, and it shows. 

YouTube Shorts, and the bite-sized video content it provides for younger, shorter attention spans, is another advantage that CTV providers haven’t been able to match. If marketers have learned anything from the past 25 years of advertising on interactive platforms, it’s that the attention marketplace rewards shorter bites. The younger audiences and premium demographics so many marketers want to reach spend more time on TikTok than on Netflix, Prime Video and all other CTV platforms combined. As most parents of teens can attest, it’s rare for a teenager to sit through a 90-minute movie without simultaneously scrolling through social channels.

At any given time, roughly 50,000 campaign flights are active on YouTube. Most of them are paid for by credit card. YouTube simplifies the ad-buying process more effectively than any other platform. It aggregates a nearly infinite amount of video content while enabling marketers, even those as small as local supermarkets, to target messaging as narrowly as they’d like. If other CTV platforms want to build this sort of ease into their platforms for marketers, they might already be a decade behind. 

It’s Still Early Days

The CTV landscape is still in its infancy. Just 20 years ago, Netflix’s primary business was sending out DVDs in red envelopes — a practice it finally shuttered in September. What may seem archaic is actually pretty recent. 

Overall, the clarity with which brands can engage on platforms like YouTube is missing on CTV platforms. It's not just about scale, though that's certainly a factor. It's also about the nuance of delivery. When advertising on CTV, brands reach households, but what about individuals? Can the advertiser be sure which viewer is on the other side of that screen? 

The evolution from linear to CTV might not be the revolution many expected. But in advertising, where content appears matters most. While CTV promises mass reach, YouTube actually provides it while also offering context. For brands to navigate this landscape, they need to recognize the inherent strengths and limitations of the platforms. It’s not enough to know where the audience is. Advertisers need to know exactly who they are. 

Whether CTV can catch up to YouTube remains to be seen. Understanding and relevance will drive the future. 

Behind surging revenue and consumer attention for Alphabet’s YouTube is a shift in the physical location where much of the service’s viewing now takes place. Increasingly, the catch-all video repository is getting serious traction not from PCs and mobile phones, but from its presence on TV sets. And for that, YouTube has the pay TV industry at least partly to thank. 

As of 2023 TV sets fed by cable set-top boxes and connected TV devices are said to account for more than one-third of total viewing of YouTube in the U.S., with that number steadily rising as viewing over alternative screens — mobile devices and desktop or laptop PCs — shrinks. Industry watcher eMarketer believes U.S. YouTube viewing over computers will slip to slightly under 13% of viewing time by 2024 compared with more than 16% in 2020. Mobile viewing, in turn, is projected to fall to 48.5% from 53.1% in 2020. 

In contrast, the TV screen is where the growth is happening: 

• TV has gone from 30.5% of U.S. YouTube viewing time in 2020 to 38.1% this year, and a projected 39.2% next year, per eMarketer;
• According to YouTube, viewers globally watch more than 700 million hours of YouTube content on a TV daily;
•  On the advertising side, TV-set viewing accounted for 30% of total YouTube ad spending in the 2023 third quarter, a big jump from 20% a year earlier, per digital advertising management firm Tinuiti.

It all adds up to surging economics. In the 2023 third quarter, YouTube set a record: $7.85 billion in advertising revenue, putting the do-it-all video service on pace for more than $30 billion in annualized ad money. For comparison, YouTube’s third-quarter ad revenue, up 12.5% from the prior-year period, was more than the ad revenue generated in their respective latest fiscal quarters by Fox ($1 billion) Comcast’s NBCUniversal ($1.9 billion) or Disney’s ESPN collective ($3.3 billion).

Living-Room Presence

The numbers reflect how important the pivot to the living room has been for a service whose original purpose was almost entirely based on streaming to PCs. For YouTube and its corporate cousin Google, the TV set has been a powerful propellant, giving the video service real estate parity on the television screen alongside legacy television brands like ABC, ESPN, MTV and Fox News Channel. For millions of TV watchers, tuning into YouTube is now little different from summoning ESPN or Fox News to the screen, with one big exception: YouTube engrosses viewers in a more personalized, interactive experience compared with a linear television network. “Eyeballs are moving away from linear TV, and we are helping brands move beyond (the) traditional,” Google senior VP Phillip Schindler noted in a recent quarterly earnings review. “Obviously … connected TV is an important part of this strategy.” 

It's the pay television industry itself that played a big role in making it so. Pay TV providers like Dish Network, Comcast, Cox Communications, Charter Communications and others represent an important distribution avenue for YouTube, and a vital part of the broader “connected TV” ecosystem that has transformed YouTube’s viewing patterns. 

YouTube introduced its app for TV screens in 2012, six years after Google acquired YouTube for $1.6 billion and described the service as a way “for people to watch and share original videos through a Web experience.” Today there are three ways to watch the service on a TV set:

• Through a connected TV platform like Roku, Chromecast or Amazon’s Fire TV;
• By casting YouTube from a mobile device to a TV set;
• Through a multichannel TV distributor such as Dish or Comcast.

It’s the third leg of that stool that helped YouTube gain its living room presence early on during the transition from PCs to TV sets. Although much of the attention has gone to connected TV platforms like Roku or Apple TV boxes, tens of millions of viewers are able to summon YouTube to the TV screen over a cable television or satellite television connection. For YouTube, the road to the living room has been paved by some of the same companies YouTube now competes with for attention, eyeballs and advertising money. (YouTube TV, the virtual pay TV service, also competes for cable customers, and partners with some operators, including WideOpenWest and Frontier Communications, as the video option for broadband subscribers.)

How this unlikely juxtaposition came to be relates to some of the early uncertainty and intrigue among multichannel video providers about exactly how to treat the unknown but rising force that was web-based video during its early ascension. 

A prevailing presumption was that even as the television landscape began to be populated with lots of digital-first programmers, the legacy MVPD pipe would carry on as the primary conduit over which all sorts of “television” would flow. Thus began a grab-bag of initiatives to try to seize the high ground in the digital video revolution. In September 2015, for example, Verizon launched an ill-fated streaming service (optimized mostly for mobile viewing) called go90. That same month, Comcast launched a short-lived video service, Watchable, which aggregated “best of” programming from a new breed of digital-first programmers like Machinima (video gaming), Tastemade (cooking), and BuzzFeed (news and commentary). 

Craig Parks, a digital media veteran who now heads content operations at the social media service Peppermint, led the content acquisition effort for Watchable. Parks figures he listened to close to 1,500 pitches from programmers eager to make the leap from the sprawl of Internet video to a place on the TV menu not far from the likes of HBO. 

Except: One service Watchable didn’t offer was YouTube. Parks and his team were wary of opening the doors to YouTube, out of concern they might be introducing to Comcast’s Xfinity menu not just another niche program provider but a potentially competing platform for television entirely. “YouTube is a platform and search engine; we were a curated content site,” Parks recalled recently via an email. “To that end, we didn't see YouTube as a potential partner, but as competition.” As a consequence, YouTube remained off the original Watchable menu. 

Instead, at the time, only one major U.S. pay TV provider had arranged to bring YouTube directly into the channel lineup: Verizon Communications’ Fios TV. 

The wireline pay TV service, then with more than 3 million subscribers, broke the ice with an April 2010 arrangement to make YouTube available over TV sets used by Fios TV and Internet customers. The effort was somewhat cumbersome, requiring that customers first download specialized software, but it resulted in YouTube being available on the TV set using the same digital DVRs and remote controls that summoned familiar cable channels to the screen. In a press release, Verizon quoted an independent researcher, Steven Hawley of tvstrategies, who commented: “Rather than blurring the line between TV and the Internet, Verizon has moved the line to embrace them both, and has raised the bar against its competition.” 

Maybe so, but with Verizon’s help, an important “first” had been realized. The Trojan Horse had breached the perimeter. YouTube was on TV. 

At least it was in part of the country. Other MVPDs remained wary of what bringing the novel video service to the channel lineup might mean. It wasn’t until 2016 that Dish TV became the next major provider to pave the way for YouTube, adding the service to its advanced DVR boxes on Dish’s channel 371. Where Fios TV was confined to the northeastern U.S., Dish TV had a national footprint and, at the time, roughly 13 million customers. It was the first time YouTube could be watched on a big-screen TV, via a MVPD, anywhere in the U.S. 

After that, industry attitudes changed. A little more than a year later, Comcast followed with the integration of YouTube into the company’s X1 digital video platform, which at the time was present in more than 11 million homes, or about half of Comcast’s total video subscriber base. Comcast not only added access to the YouTube app via voice command, but intermingled specific YouTube program titles into users’ browsing requests, where they appeared alongside more traditional fare. Cox Communications followed, introducing YouTube as a part of its Contour digital video service. By 2021, as both Charter Communications and Altice USA integrated YouTube into video services and devices targeting Internet households, YouTube had deeply infiltrated the U.S. MVPD marketplace. The capstone was the April 2023 arrangement with DirecTV that put YouTube on the same video menu that offered access to mainstay TV channels like CBS or CNN. 

Connecting With CTV

Beyond the impact of YouTube’s arrangements with Fios TV and Dish, another reason rose up for MVPDs to consider adding YouTube: It was showing up on the TV screen anyway, courtesy of the rising category of “connected TV” devices ranging from Blu-ray Disc players and game consoles to newcomers on the multichannel TV scene like Roku and Apple TV, which made YouTube available as one of many apps that could be clicked and selected. YouTube’s owner Alphabet also stoked the movement by introducing add-on devices of its own, including the Chromecast line of devices manufactured by corporate cousin Google. 

Leichtman Research Group estimated that in 2017, connected TV devices were present in about 41% of U.S. homes and growing fast. Now, with Verizon, Dish TV, Comcast and a parade of connected TV platforms offering YouTube, the pressure was building. If the Roku streaming box in the bedroom offered up YouTube, why shouldn’t the cable receiver in the living room? 

Prominent cable companies decided that it should. By building YouTube access into their cable channel menus and newer streaming video platforms like Altice’s Optimum Stream, MVPDs were calculating that a “join ’em rather than beat ’em” strategy was the right approach for playing a role in a shifting video environment.

In the meantime, YouTube had begun to shape-shift its content persona. In 2010, when Verizon added YouTube to Fios TV, the YouTube service was still viewed mostly as a jumble of short-form video — everything from user-contributed shorts to music snippets to how-to videos. 

Since then, the service has broadened its boundaries considerably, becoming a go-to home for sports highlights, full-length concerts, Saturday Night Live clips, documentaries, a new TikTok alternative known as “Shorts,” and an almost limitless range of programming ranging from the amateur to the mainstream. 

In making YouTube easily available over living-room devices and menus, MVPDs played at least some role in propelling YouTube to its place of prominence in the video economy at large. There is little doubt that some share of YouTube’s advertising revenue comes from ad budgets that otherwise might have gone to the cable industry’s born-and-bred programmers: the likes of ESPN and USA Network.

There’s a secondary impact on the cable advertising ecosystem, too. YouTube isn’t just a competitor for national ad budgets. It’s an increasingly important player in the market for highly localized TV advertising — a category that once belonged almost entirely to cable companies. By incorporating geofencing techniques that can pinpoint the geographies and neighborhoods over which TV commercials appear, YouTube has encroached on this same territory. The streaming-video giant has even gone so far as to set up alliances around the country with local video production businesses that help retail clients like bicycle shops and banks produce commercials. This, too, was once a province of the cable industry, with local cable advertising operations setting up shop to produce commercials for these same clients. 

When they began opening up access to online video services like Machinima or BuzzFeed, cable companies generally could remain confident that only a smallish portion of their own offerings might be threatened. Services like these appealed to relatively thin audience niches. Most TV viewing still accrued to mainstay channels like ESPN, USA Network or FX.

YouTube, though, is different. A service that began life by aggregating cheap, user-generated videos had morphed into something else. The sprawling video service was beginning to look more much like a cable TV collective in its own right: an entryway into almost every conceivable type of video content. Today, viewers who launch YouTube on the TV set are whisked into a world unto itself, a video universe that commands a disproportionate share of viewing time. What’s more, YouTube’s own sister service, the “virtual” MVPD called YouTube TV, is emerging as a go-to replacement for cable TV at large. A handful of wireline MVPDs now openly invite customers to select YouTube TV as an alternative to old-school cable channel lineups. 

As for the original YouTube service, it continues to rise. In September, Nielsen pegged YouTube as the most-watched video service in the domestic streaming category, accounting for 9% of total streaming time. (Netflix, at No. 2, clocked in at 7.8%). One reason for the feat is that YouTube, rather than being confined to computers and phones, now shows up on the biggest screen in the home, where its viewership is growing fast — and where MVPDs themselves have helped it find its footing. “This industry basically chased the Silicon Valley dream all the way to its death,” Peppermint’s Parks said. “Self-inflicted.” 

In a year in which streaming made big gains, TVision has put out a report looking at the connected TV highlights and trends of 2023.

The biggest show on CTV was Apple TV Plus’s Ted Lasso, according to TVision’s Power Score rankings. 

No. 2 was Amazon Freevee’s Jury Duty and No. 3 was Disney Plus’s Star Wars: The Mandalorian (Season 3). 

The top show on Netflix was The Night Agent, which was fourth in the rankings.

Among movies on CTV, Top Gun: Maverick soared to the top for Paramount Plus.  Top Gun was followed by three films on Netflix: You People, The Out Laws and Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery.

TVision said that the average American household watches content from about seven apps, but noted that more than 25% of households view video on more than 10 apps.

Netflix was the leader in household reach with 69.5%, followed by YouTube. Amazon Prime Video overtook Hulu for the third spot and Max jumped over Disney Plus for fifth place.

Broadcast and cable continue to dominate sports viewing, but CTV is gaining.

Beyond drawing viewers, sports also generate attention for commercials, making ieven more important to linear networks, according to TVision.

Sports events on linear generated an attention index of 102.2 compared to an index of 96.2 for non-sports programming on linear. Content on CTV generated a 99.6% attention index.

Guess who boosted attention for NFL games, TV’s biggest draw? Power couple Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. Before Swift started showing up at Kansas City Chiefs games to watch her boyfriend, female viewers generated an 86.6% attention index. Since Taylormania set in, the attention index rose to 88.3. 

The Swift effect was more pronounced for games involving Kelce, which jumped to a 91 index from 85.6.

Sports is also a powerhouse when it comes to co-viewing. The co-viewing rate for sports on linear networks was 59.7%, compared to 54% for non-sports events on linear. Content on CTV generates a 58.5% co-viewing rate.

Speaking of ads, TVision found that viewers are spending more time with ad-supported versions of subscription streaming services.

“This suggests that ad-supported tiers are increasing in popularity and streaming viewers are becoming more receptive to CTV advertising,” TVision said in its report. “In turn, this creates more opportunity for advertisers to reach hard-to-find CTV viewers.”

Viewers of ad-free versions of subscription streaming services tend to pay more attention than ad-supported ones. But Peacock, Paramount Plus and Discovery Plus were exceptions.

“This may be because of the ad-break format they have deployed, viewer expectations for ads with this content, or other factors,” the TVision report said.

As on traditional TV, there’s a big advantage to being in the first position within ad pod on CTV. Commercial in the first position had a 49.4% share of the attention generated by CTV ad pods. The Second ad garnered 24.9% and the third pod got 25.73%. 

“Many apps let viewers know how many ads to expect and exactly when to expect the programming to begin again,“ TVision said. “Viewers catch the first several seconds of the first ad before giving their attention elsewhere. The small bump in attention for the last ad in the pod could be attributable to viewers getting ready to reengage with content.”

I see you, marketers. I do. “Attention metrics” are all over the place these days, and you are likely fielding a ton of questions about whether or not they matter to your brand. I’m also positive you are getting dozens of emails with links to articles about them. I see you. 

While conversations around attention metrics might grab your (ahem) attention, whether or not a consumer has “paid attention” to your ad does not define your campaign’s effectiveness. What’s more, in an environment that has seen significant investment such metrics shouldn’t be your main focus when measuring performance in connected TV (CTV). 

The latest article I read about these metrics references a few of the ways attention is being measured and some of the sentiment around the data collection methodology, including biometric, emotional and cognitive data. If you put privacy concerns and general “ick” factors aside, these panels are small and unreliable, so devoting ad spend to them would be a gamble to say the least. 

The same article I linked to above talks about dwell, scroll speed, cursor locations and completion rates. For CTV, all of those data signals, except for completion rates, are completely irrelevant. Why? There’s no mouse, no trackwheel, no trackpad. 

In large part, viewability is only measurable in VPAID tags, which are not supported in CTV. Additionally, there is a lot of fragmentation in CTV, which leads to a scenario known as ghost boxing — or streaming over one HDMI input with autoplay enabled while the user is viewing video via a different HDMI input. So what’s a savvy marketer to do?

Make Your Ads Work for You, Not Just Your Target Audience: Interactive ads provide viewers with opportunities to engage. If viewers are engaging with their remotes in your creative, you can be assured they are paying attention. This engagement can be created as an opportunity for a consumer to learn more about a product/service, and convert. They also open up measurement opportunities for creatives. And, worth noting, these formats provide more accurate measurement and less controversial creepiness. 

As an example, some formats calculate a metric that is recorded as time earned. Other formats can calculate remote inputs, such as moving through a carousel overlay, giving you interaction data on the creative. 

Another potential solution would be derived metrics, or combining multiple measurable metrics such as volume, completion or percentage completion, along with ACR data, to “score” attention. 

No Mouse, No Click — Think About the Scan and Response: Scan rates and response rates to online outcomes are measurable in CTV, which is why you see a growing number of QR codes on your screen. Think about what a QR code requires viewers to do: pull up their camera app, scan it and click on the link. The action is not accidental, it’s intentional follow-through on the consumer’s part. It’s attention and engagement — and it has the potential to drive some serious success. Take Planters’ Super Bowl LVII commercial, for example, which featured a comedy roast of Mr. Peanut along with a QR code for viewers to scan to watch the full-length roast. The QR code drove a conversion rate of 70% — meaning 70% of viewers saw the QR code, scanned it, and took some form of action. Consumers have made it clear that the CTV experience is no longer a passive medium. Take action on the formats that will invite them to do the same.

Too VAST & Too Furious: Video Ad Serving Template 4.0 was released by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) in January 2016 (and updated regularly since then). This matters because VAST 4.0 natively supports the inclusion of viewability and verification partners. If marketers are viewing attention metrics as a proxy for viewability, then this feels like creating a problem after we already know the solution. In my view, part of the rise of attention can be attributed to the fact that viewability isn’t readily available for CTV and the industry is creating new metrics to replace existing ones. If marketers believe that viewable means seen, then the industry should be pushing for the wider adoption of VAST 4.0. 

Another point of view is that “attention” metrics are being promoted by those who want to highlight the poor attention scores of banner ads and other online advertising. This is forcing an apples-to-oranges comparison, given that CTV ads appear on the largest screen, at the highest resolution, over the full screen and with the highest frame rate of full-motion sight and sound — something a banner ad or other online ad could almost never accomplish natively. 

Attention metrics are most useful when comparing between mediums rather than within them, especially for CTV. An online banner ad that covers a small amount of on-screen real estate and can be scrolled past with no conscious observation by the viewer has an entirely different payload than a CTV ad that fills a larger screen for 30 seconds. Assuming that almost all CTV gets 3,000 attention points (30 seconds times 100% of the screen), it’s not overly valuable to track within CTV. Then, compare the impact of that impression with low-quality, likely invisible and fast-scrolling online banner ads that retail at a far lower CPM, and banner adds will never compete. 

Take a Data-Driven Approach: Combining exposure/impression data with ACR or HDMI viewership data or device-setting feeds (such as volume) will give you a larger panel to build greater confidence in the measurement of something “squishy” like attention. 

So, marketers, I get it. In a market focused on performance and outcomes within a favored-yet-fragmented ecosystem, times are certainly precarious. It’s easy to fall into the jargon-filled conversations surrounding attention as the answer to viewability. But thankfully, with the proper processes in place, there are a myriad of opportunities to measure the effectiveness of your campaigns — and they will actually drive more engagement and success overall.

No matter what you’re going to watch, you’re going to want some chocolate.

So it makes sense that Hershey, a longtime television advertiser that has already shifted most of its video budget to streaming and connected TV, was willing to try putting ads directly on the home screen of LG smart TV sets.

”We are a fairly significantly large category,” Vinny Rinaldi, head of media and analytics at Hershey, told Broadcasting+Cable. “Penetration on candy, mints and gum is 98% and chocolate makes up 75% of that. So really for us, we want to speak to everyone with a mouth and/or stomach.”

Rinaldi said he doesn’t like to differentiate between linear and streaming video. To him, what matters is that Hershey’s shows up on TV sets.

“The reality is it’s still the biggest screen in the home and we want to be on that, as a chocolate brand, across our portfolio of products because it resonated the most and has the greatest impact to our business,” he said.

Hershey has been working with Kargo, an ad-tech company that started in mobile and has shifted into connected TV, for about seven years. An early interactive campaign let users smush a virtual s’more on their smartphones.

S’mores are a big deal at Hershey, because it’s a big family moment, just like when families sit down to watch a movie together.

“We want to own the campfire. You can’t do s’more without chocolate, period. End of story,” Rinaldi said. “And why wouldn’t we want to be the only chocolate brand you choose to put between two graham crackers and find that moment?”

Working with Hershey media agency Horizon, ads pushing Hershey’s S’mores started running on LG home screens, which means viewers saw the ad when they turned on their TVs, even before they picked what they wanted to watch.

“This was a seamless execution to show up on the big screen in a very high-impact environment,” Rinaldi said.

LG offered several home-screen executions. In one, the Hershey’s S’mores ad took up a slice of the home screen. Another execution, in which the ad was a part of the carousel of programming choices, was the most effective, according to Rinaldi.

“All of them had a good audience reaction, but I love the carousel unit the most because it almost feels like you're taking over the whole screen,” he said. “People's screens in their homes are getting bigger and bigger as well, so the more landscape that we can take up on a single screen, the better for us.”

Testing new approaches is important in an evolving TV advertising environment, Rinaldi said.

“I am a firm believer that a portion of our budget should always be geared towards new tactics,“ he said. “They are going to fail and they’re going to be successful, and I think that’s OK. The more we can learn from it and pivot and optimize, the better for the long haul we’re going to be as a brand.”

LG, with 33 million TV sets in more than 10 million homes provided enough scale for a meaningful test, Rinaldi said.

This campaign proved successful. Hershey’s research found a recall rate of 77%. People who saw the ads said the ads made them think of moments of goodness like family fun and creating warmth.

In the chocolate category, sales happen overnight, but recall and building the brand is important.

The campaign also produced sales. “This was a revenue-driving tactic without a doubt,” Rinaldi said. “We likely will be doing this again.”

Rinaldi declined to say how much the on-the-glass ads cost, but said they weren’t as expensive as 30-second spots, particularly on CTV.

“This is a place where you can get a multiplier effect on the money you’re spending on this,” he said. 

Doing a similar campaign with other set makers might be tricky. The other set makers aren’t as geared towards selling special units as part of a larger buy as LG has been, according to Rinaldi.

Hershey will continue to look for high-impact video executions. 

“Every screen is becoming much more connected and the ability to control a household across multiple units is going to be really important,” Rinaldi said. “And our  brand may not react the same as others, but chocolate and candy look really nice on an 85-inch screen in the middle of a house.”

By now, the smart TV revolution is well underway and advertisers across the board have recognized that viewer behavior has changed dramatically.

Some of these changes have manifested as challenges to advertisers. One change is the fact that many viewers are streaming TV in premium, ad-free environments. Another is that even among viewers using platforms with ads, they often jump between services, resulting in a fragmented landscape that makes targeting and frequency difficult to achieve. 

But other changes have emerged as solutions to these challenges, top among them is the ascension of the smart TV home screen as the center of the streaming TV experience. 

Savvy advertisers recognize that the home screen is the one place where they can reach all viewers regardless of content or platform choice. The question many are asking today is, how? 

It’s a valid question, but the answers won’t be found looking at what’s worked in the past. Instead, advertisers need to really think differently and pivot their strategy, budgets and content choices to today’s CTV environment. 

Opportunity

First, let’s examine just how different the smart TV home screen is as an advertising vehicle. The home screen offers a different kind of reach, engagement and measurement potential than what TV ad buyers typically expect from a traditional 15-second or 30-second video ad. That means home-screen ad opportunities need to be evaluated differently. 

Let’s start with reach. Many home screen visitors are hard-to-reach viewers who go right to an ad-free environment that brands miss with standard CTV or linear ad buys. The home screen is the only place where brands can reach these viewers as they begin their streaming journey. 

Then there’s engagement. The home screen is, by design, a lean-in experience. It’s the new channel surfing, an active process where viewers are at their most engaged and focused on the screen itself. That’s much different than the passive lean-back posture taken once they start streaming. 

And finally, we have measurement, the ability for the home screen provider to more granularly measure not only reach and awareness but also lower-funnel key performance indicators (KPIs) like sales and even store visits for a level of custom reporting that can better validate and optimize campaigns. 

Taken together, the home screen offers the scale of linear with the efficiency of digital with no wasted impressions. But just because the home screen is on the TV doesn’t mean we should treat it like a traditional TV ad. 

Content and Creative

Ask any brand how they’d like to advertise on the smart TV home screen and the first answer you’ll get is a streaming video ad similar to the kind you’d see between show programming breaks. 

But one must be very careful about how ads work in the home screen environment. Video ads in programming are interruptive by nature. They have to be. Watching TV is a lean-back experience. You need interruptive ads to get attention. You need frequency to ensure the message gets across.

But the home screen is different. Viewers on the home screen are far more engaged. It’s a lean-in experience. That requires a different kind of advertising. Interrupting the content discovery experience with a video ad is not the best experience, and could very easily backfire. 

For media companies advertising programming it’s pretty straightforward — feature a title in one of many featured or curated programming themes and let the viewer click to watch. But for general-market brands, it takes a bit more creativity.  

This creates an unprecedented opportunity to build brand affinity by helping viewers find what they want, presenting it in a way that creates a better user experience, and in some cases even contributing to the creation of the content at the start. These solutions build not only awareness, but goodwill when brands are seen as aiding the discovery experience and not hindering it.

Brands can sponsor a specific program, or a collection of content, or even create their own branded content experience offered to viewers strategically alongside well-timed calendar milestones.

These opportunities place brands alongside not just one publisher’s content, but all the content people are seeking out or possibly looking for in a highly immersive environment. Sure you can place a CTV video ad in a cooking show, or even in multiple cooking shows airing at different times of the week on different channels. But now you can sponsor an entire curated discovery row dedicated to cooking and food. 

What’s more, it’s a way for brands to participate in and have a voice around TV tentpole events that they otherwise may be unable to penetrate with ads directly for either budgetary or other concerns. 

Artificial Walls

But — there’s always a “but” — the infrastructure of the ad-buying system has to catch up to these modern realities and formats. Ad buying is still very much based on format, on different types of media. You have TV media buyers, digital media buyers, print media buyers and so on. 

The TV home screen resides on a TV. The community buying CTV video inventory is looking at the home screen inventory through the same lens — gross ratings points (GRPs), 15- to 30-second videos, etc. It’s a paradigm they can’t get out of due to outdated strategies, outdated budgets or a little of both. (The same can be said for Wall Street analysts.)

The home screen opportunity is not your typical connected TV buy. It’s not even display. It’s a new medium that the infrastructure hasn’t adapted to yet. Most people get it, they’re just literally not empowered to buy it. 

The TV buying team has a TV buying budget to do one specific thing: buy video ads. Display ad teams have their budget for website ads. That’s largely because this is a new format disrupting a status quo that hasn’t changed much in decades. Of course the industry needs time to readjust. 

But this period of adjustment also presents an opportunity for the early adopters to snatch a huge slice of the “share of voice” pie, and do so at the same cost as advertising in a crowded linear market. As they succeed, these artificial walls impeding the adoption of home screen advertising will fall.

Ultimately, advertising content and budget follow the consumer. They go where viewers go. But sometimes, they get there a little late. 

Today, TV viewers are going in many different directions, but they’re all starting from the same place — the smart TV home screen. Advertising technology, budgets and strategies need to catch up to meet viewers where they now live. 

TV has changed. It’s not going back. So TV advertising has to change with it. 

Connected TV viewing is up 21% per household, with ad-supported services picking up the be bulk of new viewing, according to a new report from Comscore.

Total CTV hours viewed rose to 11.5 billion in 2023 from 9.6 billion in 2022, according to the measurement company’s seventh annual State of Streaming report.

Comscore said that 75% of the growth in new streaming were going to streaming provider outside of the leaders — Netflix, YouTube, Amazon Prime Video, Hulu, HBO Max (now Max) and Disney Plus — while consumption of free ad-supported streaming television (FAST) channels and targeted programming accelerates.

Streaming of ad-supported streaming services is up 17% over the past two years, while non-ad supported streaming services are up 9%.

Over the last 15 months, audiences for The Roku Channel are up 27%; Pluto TV is up 28%; Tubi is up 48%; and Freevee is up 55%, Comscore said.

Hispanic households increased their consumption of FAST content by 81% over the past year.

As if May, Comscore said that 60% of CTV using households have either cut the cord or never had a subscription to payTV. That’s up from 37% in 2019.

Smart TVs were the dominant device for viewing, with usage in 74.5% of homes that stream content. Usage of streaming boxes and stickers dropped to 64% of homes from 64.5% a year ago and gaming consoles were employed in 43.5% of homes, up from 38.6%.

"While the top US streaming services are keeping up with the demand for subscriptions, new growth can be observed in FAST streaming platforms like Roku, Pluto and Tubi which are increasingly consolidating their position in the household mix," said James Muldrow, VP, product management, Comscore. "At the same time, cable/satellite subscribers remain some of the most engaged users in the streaming landscape. With three cable/satellite providers in the Top 10 ranking of video services based on hours watched per household, these findings highlight the success of these providers in offering advertisers consistently engaged streaming audiences."

Advertisers spent $1 billion buying advertising on connected TV in June, a significant milestone, according to Vivvix, Kantar’s ad tracking unit, in its first-half report.

“This milestone validates the projections on CTV’s ascendency from experimental to a ‘table stakes’ medium,” Andrew Feigenson, CEO of Vivvix, said. “It’s where viewers are increasingly spending their time, and in order to be competitive, brands must play ball on those fields, and understand what competitors are doing on these platforms. The data really informs brands where the white space is within the video journey as well. We noticed, for example, a dearth of pet brands advertising on Disney Plus in June. That signals a real opportunity.”

CTV hitting the billion-dollar mark puts an exclamation point on the growth of digital Advertising. Vivvix says digital formats generate 70% of ad spending and video is the fastest growing format.

Ad-supported video on demand (AVOD) grew 79% year-over-year in 2022 and totaled 5% of all online video. 

The grow in spending on digital and connected TV advertising comes as traditional linear TV loses viewing to streaming and cord-cutting.

“Being able to take a broader view of the video landscape helps advertisers see the strategy their competitors are using across various channels,” Feigenson said. 

"The shift of ad dollars between new and emerging platforms can make it difficult for advertisers to connect the dots, so it’s important for brands to have access to a wider lens. We are confident that more brands will continue to allocate more of their advertising budgets to CTV and other digital media, which will affect traditional TV advertising,” he said.

The Vivvix data include spending on streaming platforms including Hulu, Peacock, Paramount Plus, Pluto TV, Discovery Plus, Max, Tubi, Roku and, starting in May, Disney Plus.

Also growing, according to Vivvix is YouTube, which garnered $1.4 billion in ad spend in June.

Vivvix said it anticipates that advertiser investment on YouTube will continue to grow, especially as nonlinear properties continue to capture more viewership. 

Opening a connected television (CTV) interface presents a unique challenge for someone who is looking to turn on their TV for a lazy session of viewing. With several visual boxes on-screen, all with varying logos or screengrabs showcasing what can be consumed, taking the first steps to viewing content over CTV is a lot like opening the menu at The Cheesecake Factory — more choices than one person can fully process.

The litany of streaming platforms, channels and applications available across the CTV ecosystem is growing every day and with good reason. Insider Intelligence forecasts that CTV households will hit 115.1 million by next year — more than doubling traditional pay TV households. The transition from traditional TV viewing to streaming over internet-connected television has arrived.

All of this underscores that the time for streamers and publishers to get their content in front of viewers is now. But, there’s a challenge that lies at the core of this mandate, and every other new frontier with services jockeying for their share of the market: discoverability.

Streaming Choice Overload

Just as many consumers express extreme overwhelm when sitting down to select a meal from The Cheesecake Factory’s famously expansive menu, the approaching ubiquity of CTV interfaces often leads to choice overload — a specific type of indecision born out of having too many choices. 

CTV comes with an incredible number of options among advertising-based video on demand (AVOD), subscription-based video on demand (SVOD), and free ad-supported streaming TV (FAST) channels. Hulu, Disney Plus, Samsung TV Plus, Pluto TV, The Roku Channel, and Peacock are just a handful of the streaming apps available, and we’re seeing more FAST channels — from names like Amazon and Comcast — launch every day.

For the average consumer, these choices are more or less indistinguishable from one another. Making a decision about which platform to subscribe to or which app to download and test often has to do with which options are presented on-screen most prominently. Otherwise, viewers who know exactly what they want to watch and where to watch it will choose their streaming option accordingly — though this is less often the case than a user who turns on the TV without a specific agenda hoping to be pleasantly surprised. And, even if one is familiar with their CTV interface, being creatures of habit, there’s often little room to connect with users who might consider a new streaming service — free or not.

This challenge of discoverability is not unique. The job of a marketer is to cut through the noise to find new customers who are likely to purchase a product again and again. Similarly for content distributors, finding viewers likely to enjoy their specific library of content, enticing them to download or open the corresponding app and encouraging them to return to watch content on a regular basis is the million-dollar question the streaming ecosystem has in front of it.

Not-so-distant industry history provides a glimpse of how this might play out. Performance-based marketing solutions revolutionized customer acquisition for the web and mobile apps. From this point forward, the same approach to data-driven targeting and measurement has the potential to effectively transform streaming advertising.

Understanding Content Is Key

A first requirement of getting in front of the right viewers is for the technology to truly learn and understand your content. Are you a FAST channel focused on live sports, a publisher centered around local news, a streamer with a myriad of programming across genres or in some other niche? Once the technology knows your content, it can then pave a better path to finding — with compounding effectiveness — the user profiles most likely to download and engage with your content library. Like any performance marketing effort, the goal becomes to acquire new viewers at such an effective rate that the cost of spending on advertising becomes revenue positive.

Solving the discoverability challenge clearly stands as the next frontier in assisting viewers to find their way through the comprehensive CTV menu. Imagine a future state where content distributors advertising their streaming services and content can swiftly find and actively promote to the most high-value viewers. The increasingly positive outcomes, both in terms of volume and efficiency, would begin to speak for themselves.

Integral Ad Science launched a new product, Total Media Quality for Connected TV Brand Safety and Suitability, working with Iris.TV.

The product provides measurement of brand suitability at the video level, enabling marketers to understand the appropriateness of CTV programming.

Total Media Quality incorporates IAS’s multimedia classification technology, which classifies video on a frame-by-frame basis, creating results that are three times more accurate than relying on metadata, the companies. Said.

Combining IAS’s classification technology with Iris.TV’s Iris_ID, marketers can quickly and accurately act on their CTV investments. Through its integration with hundreds of publishers' content management systems (CMS) and the IRIS_ID, Iris.TV enables publishers to securely provide IAS with access to normalized data for contextual CTV segmentation in real-time.

IAS client Horizon Media agrees that this technology may be the answer to maximizing the value of marketers’ ad spend on CTV. Jason Lee, executive VP of brand safety and consumer advocacy at Horizon Media, said

“Given the growth of CTV, it is important that the marketplace evolve to offer solutions that provide consistent and granular measurement within these environments,” said Jason Lee, executive VP of brand safety and consumer advocacy at Horizon Media, an IAS client. “The reporting solution by IAS, in partnership with Iris.TV aims to do just that, as frame-by-frame content identification and reporting allows advertisers to be more confident of the exact video content within which their ads are delivered.”

TV advertising is in the midst of a total transformation, driven by the prevalence of online streaming services that have led to a shift in consumer behavior and a new era of content consumption. Importantly, these streaming services are delivered by internet-connected TVs (CTVs), which provide for the first time the ability for TV content and advertising to be measured in a closed-loop system that enables the measurement of business outcomes that are associated with ad exposure, just like digital advertising. And as if this wasn't enough change for the TV industry, enter artificial intelligence (AI), which will accelerate the pace and scope of the TV industry’s transformation.  

For many decades, the TV industry has been relatively stable, with around $70 billion in revenue driven mostly by 500 or so major national advertisers making large ad buys based on “reach and frequency” and designed to drive awareness against target consumer demographics. The recent shift towards streaming services like Hulu, Roku and Peacock, coupled with the rise of connected TVs, has made TV just as measurable as online search and social advertising. New self-serve TV platforms have democratized access to TV, enabling millions of search and social performance advertisers to move into TV as a growth-driving medium. This shift is underway and will have a radical impact on the TV ecosystem.

AI will change the game yet again. With the help of AI, advertisers will be able to create TV-ready video ads by simply providing text inputs. AI algorithms will enable marketers to refine the ad and create multiple versions of the same ad with element-level differences, from major changes like an actor’s gender, color scheme or messaging, to more subtle alterations like frame rate, aspect ratio, types of clothing worn, volume, etc. Advertisers will be able to test multiple versions of ads on TV-buying platforms that provide feedback on exposure-to-outcome, to determine which combinations of creative elements drive the best performance (where performance equals outcomes like sales or return on advertising spend, or ROAS).

Moreover, TV buying and optimization platforms will use AI to optimize ads for outcomes, leveraging all versions of ad creatives in combination with an endless set of non-creative variables (such as context, audience profiles, daypart, frequency, etc.) to drive optimal results.  

Ultimately, creative development platforms will merge with TV buying and optimization platforms, enabling marketers to create TV ads with one-click simplicity, and then leverage AI systems to optimize creative and media buying using an endless set of variables.  This optimization approach, executed at the nexus of creative and real-time/programmatic TV buying, will transform TV from a reach and awareness medium into a powerful outcome-based medium, leveraging the unique TV attributes — sight, sound, emotion via large-screen, uncluttered delivery — to drive ads with higher impact and better ROI than any other advertising medium.  

AI is already accelerating the transformation of TV.  Within the next few years, TV will be accessible by millions of advertisers via democratized TV buying consoles that will be able to create ads, then deploy and optimize them using AI. The consequence will be a new TV advertising landscape that proves its value in a wholly measurable way.

Even as TV advertising dollars flow into connected TV, marketers and agency executives cite numerous challenges while mounting advanced advertising campaigns, according to executives surveyed by Yahoo! Advertising.

Poll respondents said it is difficult to integrate addressable linear campaigns with digital campaigns, with 53% pointing to a lack of common metrics across channels for their distress.

The survey also found complaints about creating a holistic framework for planning and measurement (41%), data-sharing restrictions from walled gardens (40%), choosing the right partner (34%), limited internal resources (27%) and organizational silos (26%).

The research found that nine of 10 advertisers said using a single, omnichannel solution was essential to managing linear and digital campaigns. As much as advertisers talk about campaign consolidation, in their way are a lack of transparency on impression deliveries (34%) and high costs (34%).

Also Read: Yahoo Adds DirecTV Set-Top-Box Data To Advertising Platform

“Connecting linear and digital data opens up exciting opportunities in audience targeting and measurement,” Yahoo chief revenue officer Elizabeth Herbst-Brady said. “Marketers often face interoperability challenges and need partners and technology platforms to help them harmonize metrics, data and audiences.”

The study also asked for the benefits of merging linear and digital, and 70% of those surveyed cited the ability to target audiences. Better measurement was a benefit to 55%, frequency control was cited by 55%, sharper planning and forecasting was mentioned by 50% and contextual content was mentioned by 39%.

“The benefits of integrating linear TV and digital campaigns are clear, but advertisers must overcome significant challenges to fully harness advanced TV,” Herbst-Brady said. “Advertisers need an omnichannel solution that manages both linear and digital campaigns while addressing the complexities of unifying data across channels.”

The survey is based on a poll of more than 300 TV marketers from both clients and ad agencies conducted in March.

A report from DirecTV Advertising ahead of the upfronts suggested that even sponsors who are buying connected TV continue to lean into linear addressable advertising.

The DirecTV report says that in 2022, 59% of CTV buyers also bought linear addressable advertising from multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs) and virtual MVPDs like Sling TV and YouTube TV.

“When it comes to TV advertising today, it helps to be delivery agnostic,” the report said. “Advertisers realize they can maximize reach and drive efficiency by buying addressable across both linear and CTV. Neither channel is sufficient on its own.”

This year, eight out of 10 CTV buyers said they will spend the same or more in linear addressable.

“Advertisers want the ability to reach the right audiences and measure against them, so they are setting themselves up for success,” the report said. “Today, just 11% report that their linear planning and CTV planning are entirely separate from one another. On the back end, even though some advertisers cite shortcomings with cross-media measurement solutions, most teams are at least collaborating on campaign reporting across both CTV and linear.”

DirecTV also noted that 65% of U.S. adults regularly watch broadcast, cable and ad-supported streaming, a trend called cord-stacking  Only 14% watch ad-supported streaming exclusively.

The study was conducted for DirecTV by Advertiser Perceptions, which talked to 350 U.S. advertisers in January.

Ad-tech company Strategus said it launched a product that measures the impact that programmatic connected-TV advertising campaigns have on search and social activity for brands.

Search and Social Impact Attribution matches paid-search and social-ad clicks with people exposed to one or more CTV ads, Strategus said. That allows advertising to observe a direct connection as consumers move along the path to conversion.

“Today’s performance marketing campaigns shouldn’t be tracked or analyzed in silos,” said Joel Cox, co-founder and senior VP of strategy and innovation at Strategus. “Instead, advertisers must be able to understand the impact of each individual action within the context of the entire campaign. As marketers increasingly rely on CTV as a key component of their marketing campaigns, our new performance solution for search and social attribution allows them to track the impact of each CTV advertisement, providing new levels of clarity into brand lift and campaign efficacy.”

Strategus has conducted research that found that a combination of programmatic CTV campaigns and search and social ads deliver higher rates of conversion. In one campaign, consumers who were served a CTV ad from Strategus in concert with a Google search ad were more than 100% more likely to convert into customers.

“As a performance marketer, understanding brand awareness impact on sales is important but also challenging,” said Pat Patterson, senior marketing manager at Meetup, a Strategus client. “Search and Social Impact Attribution gave us more insight into the customer journey, which aided this analysis and gave us validation that higher funnel activities aided our sales acquisition channels.”

MediaRadar, the advertising intelligence company, said it made a deal with PlayOn to use PlayOn’s video recording platform to improve MediaRadar’s streaming media analytics.

The deal marks the first time PlayOn has let its platform be used for a business-to-business application.

“MediaRadar is always seeking new, better, and increasingly granular methods of collecting and analyzing OTT Media advertising data to improve the valuable insights we provide to our clients,” MediaRadar CEO Todd Krizelman said. “Our partnership with PlayOn adds another data source to strengthen our OTT insights portfolio and increase the accuracy and value of our analytics.”

MediaRadar tracks which brands are advertising on streaming services, including Hulu, HBO Max, Paramount Plus, Netflix, Disney Plus, Peacock and Pluto TV, and how much they’re spending.

Consumer use PlayOn to watch recordings of streaming video on their PC, mobile devices or connected TV. PlayOn is using its large panel of viewers in the U.S. to record video and tag the start and end times of advertising commercial breaks. 

“We are excited to announce MediaRadar as PlayOn’s first commercial partner to benefit from the opening of our cloud-based streaming video capture platform to third parties,“ PlayOn CEO Jeff Lawrence said. “We think the opportunities for analytics companies to leverage the platform are vast, and we are excited to see the commercial applications that arise from it. MediaRadar is the perfect launch partner for PlayOn‘s new commercial line of business.”

PlayOn sees more ways its platform can be used, including audio fingerprinting for automatic content recognition, artificial intelligence-based visual analysis, scene detection and metadata generation.

OpenX Technologies and Oracle have made a deal to bring Oracle Audiences to connected TV through OpenX’s supply-side platform.

With spending on connected-TV advertising increasing rapidly, the integration is designed to make buying targeted inventory easier and provide greater scale and reach, the companies said.

The deal marks the first time Oracle audience data has been integrated into a supply-side platform for CTV.

OpenX’s platform is unique because its Open Audience offering has a built-in identity spine, enabling it to match its inventory to audiences defined by Oracle data and make it available to programmatic buyers.

The OpenX device graph has 67 million CTV households.

“We package the segments into deal IDs on our side and make them available to the buyer,” Mike Chowla, senior VP, product at OpenX, told Broadcasting+Cable.

OpenX enabled buyers to access inventory from content partners, including Warner Bros. Discovery, Hallmark Media, Crackle, AMC Networks, Paramount and Fox.

Often when buyers request inventory through a demand-side platform, the DSP only takes a fraction of the inventory available from an SSP. With Oracle Audiences integrated on its platform OpenX can filter the request and send the DSP what we think they’re most likely to buy,” Chowla said. “There is a big advantage in the kind of reach you can get doing your targeting on the supply side.”

Initially, OpenX will have 500 of Oracle’s audiences available to advertisers “off the shelf,” Tim Carr, head of product marketing for Oracle, said. Additional audiences from Oracle’s library can be sent over to an advertiser as a custom audience to use in campaigns.

Chowla said he’s seeing an increase in supply-side targeting across the industry. OpenX and Oracle are making it easier and more economical.

“The growth of CTV and retail media has driven a new spotlight to SSPs and their ability to facilitate the type of deals buyers need and we were really excited to step in with OpenX and get something started,” Brent Gaskamp, VP of platform partnerships at Oracle, said.

The integration with OpenX will also help buyers make transactions in private marketplaces, where programmatic TV deals tend to get done.

The integration with OpenX will also provide buyers with a closer link to the data creating a higher quality connection.

Gaskamp said integrating with OpenX was accomplished pretty quickly. “OpenX really had great tools on their side to connect to,” Gaskamp said.

Oracle’s data spine was originally built to connect offline retail purchase data to the online world. Gaskamp said. The integration with OpenX brings Oracle into the world of CTV and television more broadly.

Oracle clients will now be able to use data they’ve been using to target and measure their digital display and digital video advertising for CTV, Gaskamp said.

“Being able to have a consistent data signal that they can use across those media investment becomes really important for a lot of buyers,” he said. “Having similar targets and similar data sets can truly show them where performance is happening in many cases, so a lot of our advertiser partners are excited about these capabilities.”

While Oracle has made this initial SSP CTV deal with OpenX, other integrations may be on the horizon.

“We’re agnostic and we’re reaching our customers wherever they want us to be,” Gaskamp said. “Whether it’s agencies or brands asking us to show up with Oracle data in different platforms and different areas, we’ll continue to expand for sure.”

With more ad dollars flowing to ad-supported connected TV, a new study aimed to determine if streamers were paying attention to the commercials they are showing and found ways to improve how closely viewers look at advertising.

The study found that nearly every variable affected attention, from the streaming service type to the content viewed, the time of day, the viewer’s age and how frequently an ad is seen.

On a fundamental level, the study, commissioned by media agency Publicis Media and Yahoo found that most consumers were OK with seeing commercials during programming if it meant they’d pay less — or nothing — to watch. According to the study, 82% of CTV viewers expect ads on free streaming services and seven in 10 ad-supported VOD users are at least somewhat satisfied with their CTV experience.

But the data on viewability and attention, collected by TVision through facial recognition and eye tracking, and the information on receptiveness, resulting from surveys conducted by Open Mind Strategy, found that paying customers paid more attention, in some cases.

The study found that ad-supported tiers of subscription services — including Hulu, Peacock and HBO Max — and virtual multichannel video programming distributors (vMVPDs) like YouTube TV, Philo and FuboTV, generated higher attention than commercial-free versions. The attention percentage for vMVPDs was 35% and the attention percentage for ad-supported hybrids was 33%. That was higher than the 30% generated by smart-TV FAST channels (30%) or FAST platforms (28%). 

Similarly, hybrids and vMVPDs drew more attention time than their free counterparts.

But the study found that some FAST apps were among the higher scorers in terms of attention. Xumo actually had the highest attention percentage of the apps studied, with 47%, and Roku was in the top 20 with 34%. 

The Yahoo and Publicis Media study found that younger viewers (under 40) are almost 60% more likely to spend time with hybrid applications than their older counterparts.

Commercials that appeared on content with high engagement — crime dramas, political commentary, game shows — generated higher attention shares, compared to spots that aired in awards shows, sci-fi or action/adventure programming.

The highest-performing commercials featured people or elements from the show being watched.

Commercials needed six to 10 exposures to generate peak attention, but relatively few ads achieved that level of exposure. Meanwhile, being overly repetitive had a negative impact on brand sentiment. Changing the ad creative over multiple exposures had a positive impact on receptiveness, the study found.

And as on other TV platforms, pod position mattered, with the first commercial in a pod getting more attention time than spots in the middle or at the end of a pod.

The study analyzed 66,000 ads from January to November 2022. The TV panel included 5,000 households and 15,000 individuals who received 1.3 million impressions in four CTV environments. The Open Mind Strategy survey had 1,000 respondents. ■

DoubleVerify said it has developed a solution for streaming’s ‘TV Off’ problem.

Last year, media buyer GroupM, working with measurement company iSpot.TV, found that many ads were being delivered to television and other devices that were turned off and not being watched by viewers.

The study said that the problem was costing connected TV (CTV) advertisers $1 billion in wasted impressions.

DoubleVerify’s own research found that one in four CTV environments and apps continued to play ads even after the television was turned off.

Also: DoubleVerify Sees Less ‘TV Off’ Ad Fraud With ‘On-Screen’ Certification

DoubleVerify said its new scalable solution can verify viewability, determining whether or not an ad on a website or app was actually seen by a CTV user.

“As CTV impressions continue to be sold at a premium, brands need insight into which platforms and environments offer the best viewability rates,” DoubleVerify CEO Mark Zagorski said. “To that end, we’re excited to launch this first-of-its-kind solution and continue to lead in measurement and innovation for CTV buyers. This release enables advertisers to address growing challenges in CTV, such as the “TV off” issue, and offers insight into whether ads had the opportunity to make an impact across digital environments, in a consistent manner.”

DoubleVerify said a number of leading brands already plan to leverage DV’s new viewability solution but didn’t disclose their identities. ■

Despite concerns over the global economic outlook, demand for quality CTV inventory has never been higher, and advertisers are eager to tap into greater flexibility when it comes to purchasing this highly coveted inventory. However, even with advertisers’ and publishers’ desire to harness the benefits and revenue inherent in programmatic CTV buying, the pace of adoption hasn’t kept pace with the levels of enthusiasm.

So what’s needed to take programmatic CTV buying and revenue to the next level? The answer is a simple one: transparency. Fortunately, the technology needed to drive greater transparency in CTV buying is already available in the form of content object data signals. Let’s talk about why these signals are so important and how they’re going to change the trajectory of programmatic CTV adoption for advertisers and publishers alike.

What Are Content Object Data Signals?

When advertisers buy inventory on linear TV, they know precisely where it will appear -- the network, show, ad slot, genre and rating of the content, you name it. This transparency enables complete confidence in the brand safety of content, and it’s one of the primary reasons linear TV spend has remained so strong, despite heavy shifts in viewership to streaming channels.

So what about programmatic CTV? How do we bring this level of transparency into this fast-growing space? That’s where content object data signals come in. Content objects are information that publishers can pass through the bidstream to give advertisers valuable information on the inventory they’re buying. These signals can include network, show, genre, ratings and other key pieces of information that allow advertisers to know precisely where their ads will be running.

Content objects are a vital tool that publishers and advertisers can use to enhance contextual targeting, and buyers are able to leverage the information gleaned from content object signals for better attribution and optimization. In other words, they’re the missing piece of the puzzle when it comes to bringing the incredibly desirable transparency of linear into the programmatic CTV space. So why isn’t the use of content objects ubiquitous?

Barriers to Content Object Data Signal Adoption

One of the main reasons content object signals aren’t pervasive in programmatic CTV buying today is a simple lack of awareness. In fact, a recent study found only about half of U.S. and U.K. advertisers are familiar with content object signals and use them to purchase CTV and OTT video ad inventory. 

In terms of inventory, there are also simply not enough publishers passing these valuable insights into the bidstream yet. This is more than a lack of awareness of the option to do so. Rather, some publishers harbor the misconception that passing content object signals into the bidstream will lead to too much advertiser cherry-picking on inventory and, thus, a lack of scale. But indeed, research shows quite the opposite: 62% of U.S. brands and 82% of UK brands say they would increase their spend with partners that provide data such as content object signals, and a majority of advertisers say they are willing to pay a premium for the transparency that content object signals afford them.

Benefits of Greater Transparency in Programmatic CTV

Overall, there’s a tremendous amount of value to be unlocked within the programmatic CTV space, for buyers and publishers alike, and content object data signals hold the key. These include the following:

Scale. Many of today’s advertisers feel that they need to buy with big-name publishers if they want to get brand-safe inventory in the CTV space, but that’s simply not the case. By passing inventory details via content object signals, small and mid-size publishers will open up a tremendous amount of inventory to advertisers that wouldn’t have otherwise considered such purchases (and instead favored direct, hard-to-scale deals with publishers).

Flexibility. Programmatic CTV buying enables advertisers to buy the inventory they want, when they want it, and at the price they want. At present, a lot of brands and agencies that desire this flexibility are abstaining from programmatic CTV due to a perceived lack of transparency and brand safety. By removing these perceived dangers, publishers will be able to welcome a whole slew of new, eager brands into the CTV buying fold.

Continuity across buys. Content object signals enable CTV buys to harness the strengths of both the linear and digital worlds -- rich content information on one side and strong impression-level data on the other. In doing so, programmatic CTV can help campaigns that span linear TV and digital video become more cohesive across channels.

With greater transparency comes greater adoption. In this regard, content object signals hold the key to unlocking the tremendous advertising value and revenue potential from programmatic CTV that advertisers and publishers have been long awaiting. ■

In yet another sign that advertisers will shift marketing dollar from traditional TV to connected TV, agency executives surveyed by Pixability said they plan to invest more in CTV, even in an environment when some advertisers are being more conservative about spending in a cloudy economy.

YouTube, which is increasingly being watched on TV sets, is likely to be the recipient of a good share of those new CTV dollars.

Pixability found that 75% of agencies said they planned to spend more on connected TV. At the biggest agencies, intent to spend on CTV was even higher with 79% eying more CTV investment.

YouTube was the leading platform where agencies said they would be putting their dollars to reach CTV audiences, marking a shift from looking at YouTube as a social media platform.

At the biggest agencies, 75% said they would be investing client dollars on YouTube, followed by 70% who named Roku and 68% picking Peacock. Also on the list were Amazon Fire TV, Hulu, HBO Max (with ads), Samsung TV Plus, Paramount Plus, Tubi, Disney Plus, Pluto TV, Freevee, Discovery Plus and Sling TV.

“This data reflects what we’re hearing from our big customers,” said David George, CEO of Pixability. “While overall spend may be flat or even down in places, CTV spend will be increasing and YouTube will be playing an increasingly important role in CTV plans.”

All that CTV spending means linear TV budgets will decline. In the survey, 41% of agencies said they would be investing less in traditional TV, compared to 45% maintaining spending levels and 14% investing more.

The recent launch of ad-supported versions of Netflix and Disney Plus will have an impact on the market, with 39% of agencies saying they would be moving money from other CTV platforms to advertising on Netflix and 17% saying they would take money from traditional TV budgets.

The survey found that while the biggest agencies prioritize brand safety on YouTube, independent agencies first look at measurement and performance.

Media agency professionals estimate that roughly 36% of impressions would occur against unsuitable content if no brand suitability measures are implemented on YouTube, the report said. ■

It’s probably safe to call 2022 the Year of Connected TV, especially on the advertising side. Brands and agencies are shifting billions of dollars CTV-ward, and away from legacy broadcast and cable outlets. 

You really can’t buy a TV these days that’s not smart/connected, with a built-in operating system from someone such as Samsung or Google or Amazon, opening up a universe of streaming options. And if you don’t like that OS, or still have an older, dumb screen, you can join the video party with a Roku stick, Amazon Fire TV dongle or Apple TV puck. 

CTV is in turn opening vistas of impactful, tightly targeted advertising that just isn’t possible with legacy TV.  Brands love that. But in the rush to CTV, we may have overlooked some nuance. 

This past week, Needham & Company senior research analyst Laura Martin dropped a short note gently warning clients that maybe Connected TVs aren’t quite all that, at least not quite yet. Really, she suggests, brands and investors need a more complex understanding of what CTV is, and what it really can be. 

“From an inbox filled with stats related to the 30 stocks we cover, occasionally we see a data point that haunts us,” wrote Martin. “We can't shake the feeling that, if that data point turns out to be important, it undermines important economic assumptions we (and often Wall Street) hold as true.”

According to August numbers from services provider Amagi, “nearly 80% of CTV viewing is shared viewing,” Martin noted. Two, three or even more people are watching connected TVs together all but a fifth of the time. 

Okay, so what? 

We’ve been gathering together to watch I Love Lucy or The Wonderful World of Disney or the NFL or Friends or Game of Thrones for decades. You media philosophers will suggest we’ve been doing it since long before Plato noticed firelight flickering on cave walls. With those giant connected TVs festooning the walls of millions of homes these days, tens of millions of us are happily watching the digital hearth together. 

Except, Martin points out, that perfectly normal behavior diminishes the precision targeting promised by streaming services, platforms, and marketers. Connected TVs in fact aren’t quite as precise as the mobile phones, tablets and PCs that have yielded $55 billion a year in digital advertising. That has (at least) three potential implications: 

* Shared viewing means some targeting advertising is “wasted” on those who may not care about the ad. Should marketers pay less, imposing a “shared viewing discount” of some sort? In particular, what does it mean for Netflix, which launched its ad-supported tier Thursday at reportedly very high rates? Those sky-high CPMs might have been difficult to defend regardless, but when folks are watching Bridgerton or Stranger Things together, what are advertisers actually getting what they’re paying for? Double actually, what are they paying for? 

* CTV’s bigger screens make for more impactful shows and ads, certainly when compared to a dinky iPhone screen. But if shared viewing makes for less valuable viewing, will advertisers seeking that laser-guided precision slow their shift from mobile, to ensure they’re hitting just the right viewers as efficiently as possible? With the economy slowing and marketing budgets tightening, efficient spending will matter more.

* Ad frequency is a challenge that CTV services and platforms are supposed to manage. But lots of shared viewing could complicated “frequency capping” strategies, and affect the viewer experience, Martin suggested. 

It’s no time to panic, of course, even as the ad business, and the broader economy, tightens up. What may result, however, is a more complex and nuanced understanding of what CTV can do, and perhaps help advertisers avoid disappointment from using it for the wrong things. 

For instance, not every brand needs to target their message down to a single individual. 

If you’re Pizza Hut or McDonald’s, your target audience could be “everyone with a stomach,” whether they’re 8 or 80. That kind of advertiser cares more about appetites than demographics.

Similarly, other brands may care more about where people are, rather than who they are. The geo-targeting possible with CTV is a gift that keeps giving. And still other advertisers really only care about reaching the household, rather than any one member. 

Again, advertisers must learn to use connected TV the right way, and not confuse it with broadcast, cable, or mobile. It’s best understood as a hybrid of all that came before it, with new possibilities but also some limitations. In some situations, other alternatives might actually be better. 

Certainly, more nuance is needed. Roku took a beating in the markets last week after its quarterly earnings and future guidance proved decidedly underwhelming. 

Roku made its name selling cheap, flexible hardware to connect all those dumb TVs to the Interwebz, which led 65 million households to install its products. These days, most of Roku’s revenue comes from the ads that run on its streaming service and platform. 

That makes Roku a hybrid, but also a harbinger for what’s coming to the broader streaming sector. And that’s a little nervous making. 

“The first thing companies do in the face of such uncertainty is cancel their ad budgets,” said Roku CEO Anthony Wood during the earnings call. “Big advertisers that we traditionally get spend from are not spending this quarter. They aren’t spending with anyone. It’s not just they’re not spending with us.”

If Roku’s rotten numbers indeed show where the industry is headed, CTV’s boom may be coming to end. 

Add in Laura Martin’s note, and the continuing lack of standardization in areas such as metrics, and the coming months will be more complex. What’s going to result? Most likely, 2023 may not known as the Next Year of Connected TV as much as The Year Marketers Start to Figure It Out. That’s still progress, however unsexy it might be.

It looks like people don’t hate advertising as much as they dislike paying for streaming TV.

In a new survey conducted by LG Ad Solutions, which sells commercials, 80% of respondents said they use ad-supported connected TV models, with 67% preferring those models to more expensive ad-free subscriptions. 

The survey found that 30% of consumers have dropped a subscription connected-TV (CTV) service in the last 12 months, while 25% have added a free ad-supported CTV service during that same time period.

And going forward, 31% said they are planning to remove a subscription service in the next 12 months, while 23% are planning on adding more free ad-supported CTV services. 

The results support Netflix’s decision to move quickly to launch a cheaper, ad-supported product, which will appear in November and cost just $6.99 a month.

“There have been two recent ‘big shifts’ in television viewing habits,“ LG Ad Solutions global chief marketing officer Tony Marlow said. “The first big shift was rapid adoption of streaming content on connected televisions, fueled in part by stay-at-home guidance at the onset of the pandemic. This first shift was underpinned by subscription-based video content.

“The second big shift is underway right now,“ Marlow said. “Consumers are drifting away from some of their CTV subscriptions and increasingly preferring free content that is supported by ads. This presents an opportunity to provide better CTV experiences for viewers and opportunities for marketers to connect with their audiences on the biggest screen in the home.” 

The shift to streaming was rough on marketers, with more viewers spending time on ad-free services. The return to ad-supported viewing gives marketers a chance to reach consumers, particularly if they deliver relevant ads.

The survey found that 76% of consumers said they prefer ads relevant to their interests and 65% prefer ads relevant to the content they are watching. Streaming ads are more relevant than others, 49% of those surveyed said, and 36% say they pay more attention to the ads they see on streaming.

And the shift to streaming on CTV continues, with 21% of respondents saying they are watching less linear TV than a year ago.

LG Ads Solutions said it surveyed 770 U.S. consumers online in September for this study. ■

There’s been a lot written lately about the perceived challenges with CTV measurement across both programming and ads. 

And to be sure, the relatively nascent CTV market does have much maturing to do in terms of standardized measurement practices. These growing pains are only amplified by the increasingly growing number of users flocking to CTV devices and services. 

But the measurement challenges gaining attention today are not so much a factor of the CTV format as they are a result of trying to apply digital advertising solutions to what is still a TV experience. 

On one hand, the “connected” part of CTV is digital by nature. It therefore has the potential to be more contextually relevant to audiences with better measurement opportunities in comparison to traditional TV advertising. But while programming (and ads) sent to CTV devices share a common transmission method as that sent to mobile phones, laptops, and tablets, the TV is an inherently different kind of device. 

For instance, viewers interact with those other devices differently than with a TV. A TV uses a remote. Those other devices use touch screens, links, and more. That interaction provides different types of engagement signals than TV, and as such measure differently. 

What’s more, digital measurement solutions created for phones and similar devices assume a single-viewer scenario. TV, however, is a shared experience, usually with multiple viewers watching the same programming (add ads) on the same screen at the same time in the same room (which is why co-viewing metrics are so important).

CTV is a wholly unique environment. It’s a TV environment. So it must be measured with practices that take into account the uniqueness of the TV reality.

Yet despite these fundamental differences, many are still trying to apply the same technology used to measure mobile/computer ad viewability to the TV space. Forgive the cliche, but that’s the classic definition of forcing a square peg into a round hole.

While buying ad inventory across multiple service platforms is relatively simple, measuring ads across them all can be incredibly complex. The maze of pathways, technologies, and partnerships between ad services, content providers, and streaming platforms is simply too fragmented to find the solution there.

To date, we’ve gotten away with it because the volume of activity and spending was relatively low. Asking that maze to police itself is sort of like grading your own homework. But all that is changing. Brands spending tens of millions on CTV ads are demanding independent, accurate, third-party measurement.

And therein lies the challenge. While digital measurement solutions won’t work for the CTV environment, traditional TV measurement models won’t work either. The Nielsen framework was created for a world of content scarcity, where a large number of viewers had a limited number of programming choices. So a panel system based on the viewing habits of just 20,000 users made sense…then. 

Clearly, the streaming TV space has far more choices both in the programming itself and the source of that programming. That’s where the fragmentation comes from. There are multiple content providers and streaming platforms, each with their own ad inventory and data systems, with very little transparency or standardization between them. 

But there is one constant, one single point of truth that supersedes it all: the destination. 

Rather than searching for answers across disparate content providers, service platforms, ad services and others adding to the fragmentation, look to one destination where all this activity ends -- the TV.

After all, TV-specific challenges require TV-specific solutions. 

The TV set is the independent point of truth through which all ads, programming, and content flows regardless of the source. 

The point is made abundantly clear in the recent news from iSpot and GroupM that 17% of ads served through peripheral streaming devices are delivered to TV sets that are off. The peripheral can’t tell if the TV is on or not. But that same study also affirms, ads delivered to devices always hit the glass. 

Sure, peripheral manufacturers can work on better recognizing the "off" signal from the TVs they’re plugged into. And streaming platforms can introduce more prompts to ensure viewers are still engaged. But neither really gets to the core question, which is "what’s on the screen."

The most accurate answer to that question comes from smart TV manufacturers with the technology to report on what the screen is showing. Glass-level automatic content recognition data that answers these questions at the most centralized point-- the TV screen. 

It’s an independent verification that has the potential to clear up all this confusion and establish at long last the single point of truth advertisers seek. Of course, there are a few steps needed to reach that goal.

First, smart TVs will soon be the default UX in the home, replacing peripherals, dongles, and any other workaround that’s been utilized to date. Streaming content to an unconnected TV via an external connected device won’t generate the glass-level ACR data we’re talking about. The good news is that smart TV penetration has reached an all-time high in the U.S. And all new TVs sold are likely to be connected TVs -- it’s almost impossible to find a set that is not internet-enabled.

Next is standardization of how CTV is counted. While the second-by-second, attribution and other digital-like qualities adopted by CTV are a net plus, if the marketplace does not factor in co-viewing, brands and publishers will be swapping small panels for bad math and leaving money and viewership allocation on the table.

This industry needs every resource at its disposal to ensure the full promise of CTV advertising is realized. If left unchecked, today’s uncertainties around CTV ad verification could stunt the growth of the CTV market just when it's poised to take off.

The takeaway here is that the TV is no longer just a dumb piece of hardware that only displays content. It’s evolved into a smart, connected device with sophisticated software designed for the unique TV environment. As such, it’s a mistake to overlook the solutions smart TVs can offer to today’s CTV challenges. ■

Advanced Advertising Summit panel “The Local View” looked at TV stations and cable operators reaping revenue on their digital and over-the-top platforms. Local advertising on linear TV is in a good spot, the panelists said, and OTT adds to the take. 

“What we like to focus on is the tremendous broad reach of broadcast,” said Christopher Martinez, Hearst Television OTT director of sales. “Linear and OTT working together has revitalized the need for local.”

Also: More Coverage from the 10th Anniversary NYC TV Week

Jon Lafayette, business editor of B+C Multichannel News, moderated the panel. 

Jim Loughran, senior VP of convergent video partnerships at Viamedia, acknowledged the cord-cutting issue and said, “broadcast and cable have huge reach and it’s not going away.“ Adding OTT to the local mix, he added, “makes the reach excellent.”

Kristin Wnuk, director of local sales at Roku, mentioned the measurability of OTT. “CTV and OTT absolutely gives clients the opportunity to extend their reach,” she said. “It also gives clients the opportunity to measure differently.”

Carol Hinnant, Comscore chief revenue officer, said there are “too many siloes” in terms of measuring viewing on the various platforms. “That is definitely the challenge,” she said.

Loughran mentioned how some clients don’t understand the value of some of the advanced measurements available to them, including cross-platform attribution. “People are very comfortable with doing things the way they’ve been doing them for a long time,” he said, adding that it’s on the salespeople to tell the story well.

Hinnant agreed. “That’s the key word, educating,” she said, “The desire to have better metrics is there.”

Wnuk said most everyone in television is trying to bridge the gap between linear and digital. “We are at a time when not all ad impressions are created equally,” she added.

When Lafayette asked about hot ad categories, the panelists mentioned the chip shortage continuing to slow down auto sales, but said other categories have bumped up. Loughran mentioned COVID testing and vaccine centers, cannabis, sports gambling and solar energy ramping up spending. “You have things that didn’t exist before,” he said.

Political spending, the panelists noted, remains red hot around our divided nation. “Political’s very strong. It’s gonna be very strong until they change the rules,” said Loughran. 

Despite reports of its demise, local television looks to stay hot, the panelists agreed. “Is local dead?” Wnuk asked. “It’s absolutely not.” 

NYC TV Week continues on Tuesday with the Next TV Summit and on Wednesday with the Hispanic TV Summit. ■

The Advanced Advertising Summit panel “CTV’s Big Moment“ looked at the booming connected-TV space and how the likes of Disney Plus and Netflix will fare as they push into the ad-supported connected-TV world. Adam Gaynor, chief revenue officer and interim president of Gamut, said the category looks “incredibly strong,” with more and more viewing happening on the streaming side. 

Diana Horowitz, Imagine Communications VP of strategic sales and advertising technology, said the viewer boom is a catalyst for advertising. “As viewership continues to grow,” she said, “the advertising outlook is very strong.”

Danielle DeLauro, VAB executive VP, moderated the panel. Lori Cassorla, senior VP, group media director, investments at Mediahub Worldwide, said a lot of advertisers Mediahub works with are shifting to streaming, “but it’s definitely not a wholesale share shift,” with broadcast still commanding eyeballs. 

Also: More Coverage from the 10th Anniversary NYC TV Week

DeLauro asked the panel about Netflix and Disney Plus entering the advertising space. Marni Rommel, VP of business development at Beachfront, said users will try the new platforms. “I think we’ll see a lot of testing and experimenting” in the near future, she said. “People follow the content they want to see.”

Anthony Susi, director at Xandr, said a minimal ad load will be likely for Netflix. “When you’re into Stranger Things, you don’t want to break,” he said. “It needs to be a careful go-to-market.”

Gaynor noted how frequent repetition of ads diminishes the viewer experience considerably. “We know what we do in the marketplace helps the end-all viewer,” he said. 

The panel mentioned how the streamers will be bigger players in sports. “Live sports is a huge, huge piece of the marketplace and content that people crave,” Cassorla said.

Programmatic was also discussed. Gaynor said programmatic “should be considered a process, and not a product.” He mentioned how programmatic “drastically limits our ability to scale in a marketplace,” whether it’s campaigning politicians or car dealers. 

The panelists said the FAST category looks to remain hot. “We’re getting a lot of demand from our customers,” said Horowitz. “There’s a hunger for the great content. Free ad-supported content, I expect to see a lot of growth.”

Free is the right price for many in this day and age. “People are only willing to pay for a certain amount of subscriptions,” Cassorla said. “The fragmentation is making us all build our own cable bundles.” ■

Streaming television continued to grow in the second quarter, according to Conviva’s State of Streaming Report.

Global streaming time was up 14%. In the more-mature North American market, streaming was up 5% after posting a similar gain in Q1. In Asia, streaming was up 90% and Latin America saw a 70% gain.

The majority of streaming hours are happening on big screens, either via smart TVs or connected devices. Smart TVs — up 31.4% — were the fastest-growing device type globally for the eighth-straight quarter, accounting for 35.3% of global viewing. Connected TV devices handled 34.6% of streaming, up 2.8%.

In North America, 37.6% of viewing comes on smart TVs and 37.6% happens on connected devices.

Among device makers, Roku had the highest share of global streaming at 23.1%. Amazon’s Fire TV followed with 12.1%. Then came Samsung, Android TV, Apple, LG, Android, PCs, Apple TV and Apple tablets.

Roku’s hours were up 3.8%.

In the U.S. Roku’s share was 32.6% to lead the industry. It was followed by Amazon Fire TV, Samsung TV, Apple iPhone and LG TV.

Conviva said streaming video quality showed improvement in some metrics, but degraded in others. Bitrates were up and there was less buffering, but it took longer for videos to start.

Minutes per video play averaged 20.8 globally and 22.3 in North America.

“The race is on to see which publishers will meet these expectations, including providing the best experience when it’s most important. Those that do will quickly eclipse the competition,” Conviva president and CEO Keith Zubchevich said.

“For long-form VOD content watched from the couch, that means improving bit rate,“ Zubchevich said. “For live content, that means decreasing VST and buffering to provide a similar experience to linear TV. For mobile devices, where bitrate is less important, publishers may want to think about optimizing VST and buffering. And as streaming ads become a way of life, optimizing their performance will separate the leaders from the pack.” 

To prepare its report, Conviva analyzed data primarily collected from the company’s proprietary sensor technology, which is currently embedded in 3.3 billion streaming video applications. It measures in excess of 500 million unique viewers watching 180 billion streams per year and nearly 2 trillion real-time transactions per day across more than 180 countries. ■

Multicultural audiences are bigger streamers than general market audiences, according to a new report from App Science.

For example, Hispanic American households have seven connected TV streaming apps, compared to six in general market homes.

Hispanic homes are 17% more likely to have streaming apps than the general market. At the same time African American homes are also 17% more likely to have streaming apps and Asian American homes are 33% more likely to be streaming.

Sports, crime and drama were the most popular CTV viewing genres among multicultural audiences, according to App Science, a subsidiary of Sabio Holdings. 

App Science’s first Multicultural Trends Report said that viewers in each of those multicultural groups were at least four times more likely to watch shows in those genres than general market viewers.

In Hispanic American households, the most popular CTV streaming apps were Dazn, HGTV Go, VRV, Movies Anywhere, Freeform and Showtime. Top streaming apps on mobile include Canela TV, Univision Now, Telemundo, Vix, YouTube Kids and Viki.

In African American households there were seven CTV streaming apps on average. The most popular CTV apps were Showtime, Livestream, Epix, Xfinity Stream, Pluto TV and Freeform. The top streaming apps on mobile were Worldstar, Starz, Buzzvideo, Xumo, Crackle and Tubi.

Asian American households averaged eight CTV apps, compared to six for the general market. The most popular apps in Asian American homes were Hotstar,  Roku, Dailymotion, Sling TV, Vimeo and Fox Sports. The top streaming apps on mobile were OnDemand Korea, Viki, iQIYI, Dailymotion, HBO Max and Crunchyroll.

“With this report, we aim to help advertisers to better understand multicultural audiences, so they can learn how to best connect with them and drive more effective advertising,” said Helen Lum, executive VP at App Science.

Data for the report was sourced from App Science’s proprietary 55 million household graph, which is powered by human behavioral signals from mobile and CTV device databases and enhanced with third party consumer data to provide consumption habits of U.S. households. ■

Local advertisers benefit from campaigns that utilize more than one media channel, according to new data from Frequence.

Frequence, which offers an automated platform that enables media owners including Charter Communications to sell, execute and report omnichannel campaigns, found that combining media products increases conversion rates. In some cases, conversion rates were three times higher than campaigns running in a single type of media.

For local advertisers accustomed to running digital display advertising only, adding connected TV (CTV) to the mix increases conversion rates while driving down the cost per conversion to clients. 

Based on data collected from campaigns running on Frequence’s platform over nine months involving 32,000 local ads and 2.2 billion impressions, the optimal media mix was 70% to 75% display ads and 25% to 30% video. That mix results in a boost in conversions of up to 25%.

Frequence CEO Tom Cheli told Broadcasting+Cable that the results of the study weren’t surprising, but having the data might help convince clients to take a more omnichannel approach.  

“If Instead of reaching a person five times with display ads, you can show them some video, whether that be preroll or CTV, and get your message in front of them in different forms, you’re going to have a beneficial effect,” Cheli said. “That made sense. But until you see the data, you don’t know for sure.” 

(Cheli was on the phone from Hungary, where his daughter Morgan was representing America as part of the USA under-17 national basketball team.)

The study went further and showed that it was worthwhile for advertisers to add more-expensive video media to their marketing mix. “Should they do streaming television?“ he asked. “I think the answer is a resounding yes. They shouldn’t always go for the cheapest form of media and put all their eggs in one basket.”

Reaching a consumer with video before running display ads boosted the conversions resulting from a campaign. 

The study also found that the multichannel approach was better for advertisers in all of the categories it tested, including auto, education, entertainment, retail, service, political and home improvement.

“For every single one of them, conversion rates were higher, so multichannel is going to be the right way to do it,” Cheil said.

Local advertisers don’t have big budgets, but even if they’re spending as little as $1,500 per month “you’re better off spending it across a couple of products,” he said.

Frequence’s platform makes it easier for media sellers to offer local advertisers more choices at a time when the media world is getting more complex. Many local clients don’t have marketing departments or data specialists, but the media companies do as part of their sales forces. 

“We’re really an enablement platform,” he said. “This is just kind of a proof point for us. This is a pretty convincing amount of data that confirms that.” ■

As consumers continue to spend more time watching streaming TV and listening to online audio, political advertisers are investing billions in streaming media channels to reach and engage target voters. 

During the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, political advertising spend on connected TV was estimated to be upwards of $750 million, exceeding even optimistic projections. As the coronavirus ebbs and TV viewing time returns to prepandemic levels, 2022 political CTV ad-spend projections are now estimated at a boggling $1.48 billion. Even looking at these forecasts conservatively, they suggest despite 2022 being a midterm election, political CTV ad spend is on course to nearly double what it was in 2020.

The astounding growth rate of CTV political advertising spend is driven in large part by the fact streaming media is purpose-built for political advertising campaigns. Campaigns and causes that effectively tap into connected media advertising‘s scale, flexibility and advanced targeting capabilities stand to gain.

Whether political advertisers are interested in reaching Generation Z, the baby boomers or any group in between, streaming is on its way to become the dominant way to watch TV. Most U.S. homes (79%) still subscribing to pay TV also carry a subscription streaming service. By mid-2023, most homes won’t have a cable or satellite-TV subscription for the first time in more than 40 years. Even 40% of baby boomers spend more time consuming video content via streaming services today, compared to 45% who watch more cable and network TV. Across age groups, advertisers wanting to engage consumers will need a household-first view of streaming media audiences whether they want to reach streaming-only households, hybrid households — subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) and pay TV — or want to coordinate addressable campaigns across linear addressable and streaming channels.

Reaching intended targets is critical to political advertising success. Connected media allows for precision-targeted, addressable advertising with messaging designed to resonate with specific voter segments. Advertisers can also target based on political interests and behaviors, such as party membership, past voting behavior and issue orientation for more effective advertising reach and messaging.

The Local Advantage

A defining characteristic of political advertising is nearly all ads run at the local level. Streaming media in effect is entirely “local” as it is addressable at the household level — regardless of program or station — making it a natural fit for political advertising campaigns. In addition to targeting households based on attributes like tendency to vote and party affiliation, CTV and smart speakers enable campaign geography to be tailored to specific neighborhoods, municipal boundaries, congressional districts and state borders.

With midterm elections approaching, advertisers must consider one of the biggest challenges in reaching precise targets via connected channels — scale. Historically, no more than half of the eligible population votes during midterm elections. And only a subset of those will turn out to support a specific candidate or cause — and even fewer are undecided. This makes the window to reach the right U.S. adults small, requiring political advertisers to play a scale game — targeting as many of the right voters as possible with specific messaging. For advertisers to scale this approach, they’ll need to tap into a large data set that includes nearly all ad-addressable homes. 

To target streaming media advertising precisely, advertisers need to reach people in the places they engage by precisely associating devices to streaming households. This means capturing and resolving the many signals that make up a household’s streaming identity, including those from streaming-capable devices, streaming channels and even proprietary identifiers employed by some streaming publishers and device manufacturers. By resolving identity across walled gardens via interoperable solutions, advertisers can achieve greater reach and better targeting, as well as messaging consistency.

Motivating voters to turn out is no easy feat, but it’s better accomplished when political advertisers can reach more of the right targets with messaging that resonates. The combination of data-driven audience targeting, real-time flexibility of a digital channel and geographic precision make streaming media an effective, highly efficient choice for political advertisers to get the most bang from tight budgets. With near-record ad spending predicted this election cycle, audience targeting that scales across connected channels could make all the difference come November. ￭

Success in TV advertising has always been built on quality and premium experiences. The complexity of the rapidly digitizing marketplace might have drowned out certain quality-centric conversations in recent years, but it never changed that fundamental ground truth. Now those conversations are more important than ever. 

After years of divergence and fragmentation in the TV space — across streaming, over-the-top, connected TV, you name it — we’ve reached an important inflection point as it relates to the kinds of conversations happening on the media-buying front. While TV buys remain multifaceted and nuanced, many of the familiar dichotomies within the space — between linear and digital, between branding and addressability — are falling away. In their place, we’re seeing conversations converge around one factor: quality.

It's a welcome shift within the industry, one that’s long in coming and essential to the continued advancement of the TV space. Let’s take a deeper look at how we got here and why quality and premium experiences will lead us where we need to go now. 

 A Shift in Tone and Focus

When it comes to buying eyeballs, there are a lot of ways for advertisers to get tonnage these days, and on the cheap. But what’s become particularly apparent in the TV space is that not all impressions are created equal. As the TV and video landscape has fragmented, so has the value associated with reaching viewers across the many varied platforms, channels and devices on which they consume content. 

Simply put: People participating in a premium TV experience tend to be more engaged and vested in their programming than those who are giving fleeting attention to the latest cat video. Advertisers understand this, and they are increasingly looking to ensure their media spends prioritize the former over the latter. 

More specifically, what we’re seeing more these days is a number of savvy advertisers looking for extensions of their standard TV buys into streaming and OTT inventory — but not just any streaming or OTT inventory. They want to ensure their linear extensions are geared toward network inventory where the value and experience are just as premium as they’ve come to expect from their linear placements. They want exclusive, quality inventory, and they want white-glove service. But at the same time, they want to create a cross-platform experience and to wrap sophisticated conversion data and analytics around it. 

The conversations surrounding these cross-platform buys are a far cry from the volume-based transactions happening in the programmatic TV space today. And that’s because control of fragmented TV budgets is yet again shifting. 

Talking to Empowered TV Buyers 

When streaming and OTT advertising opportunities came into being, the media-buying landscape split. For years, linear and streaming advertising were handled by separate teams, the latter of which tended to fall in the camp of the digital buying teams. Now, a lot of that is changing. Traditional TV buyers are now increasingly bringing linear extensions under their purview, and they’re being empowered to extend their relentless insistence on quality inventory and premium experiences into new areas. 

This shift makes sense. After all, if content is appearing on that big screen in the living room, does it really matter which kind of pipes it is flowing through? Also, by bringing these buys together under the same buyer’s purview, we’re seeing a much more unified approach to measurement when it comes to campaign impact. 

Part of the reason TV inventory fragmented across buying teams in the first place was because of the vastly different measurement mechanisms that emerged in the early days of streaming and OTT. The new inventory was digital, with a digital language surrounding it, and so it made sense that responsibility for these buys slid toward the teams most familiar with the language. But here again, we’re seeing a shift.

As the TV industry pivots toward a more unifying language inclusive of impressions — versus less extensible concepts like gross ratings points (GRPs) — TV buyers are becoming sophisticated in their understanding of audience addressability and how best to target both their linear and streaming spending for maximum effect. They’re asking more nuanced questions than ever, and it’s paying off when it comes to a renewed emphasis on quality and premium experiences.

Today’s empowered TV buyers are leveraging their deep expertise from decades of linear buys and up-leveling their results through the transparency, measurability and added reach of streaming and OTT — and it’s really just the beginning. As the systems and partnerships that support the vast TV landscape continue to unify and connect more dots on the back end, advertisers will continue to extend the power of their creative and messaging across new audiences and platforms alike.

In this reimagined TV landscape, quality and premium experiences will reign supreme. Just as they always have. ▪️

Innovid said it launched its converged TV measurement platform, InnnovidXP and that media buyer Dentsu is among its early clients.

Incorporating TVSquared, acquired in March, InnovidXP is a cross-platform, tag-free measurement product based on data from more than one billion TV impressions daily, an ad serving footprint over 88% of U.S. CTV homes and creative personalization technology.

“Cross-platform TV measurement powered by ad serving technology seamlessly creates the most complete picture of the TV ecosystem, addressing a big gap for advertisers in the converged TV marketplace,” said Celeste Castle, executive VP and head of research and measurement, Dentsu. “It’s about finding the right data, creatives, investments and video mixes to effectively and efficiently reach audiences that are dispersing across platforms, channels and screens. Empowering our clients with transparent, consistent and reliable measurement insights across linear and CTV plays a vital role in the growth of the total video marketplace.”

Brands can use InnovidXP to measure and manage linear and CTV advertising.

“Advertisers have long called for an independent measurement solution that can provide a unified, consistent, cross-platform view of advertising, alongside meaningful, actionable metrics. InnovidXP has answered that call,” said Jo Kinsella, president, TVSquared by Innovid.

InnovidXP offers the flexibility to measure a diverse set of KPIs, supporting reach and performance objectives across advertising categories including CPG, automotive, retail, travel, insurance and DTC. ■

The quarantine portion of the pandemic had a profound impact on the consumption habits of consumers, TV/video being among the most affected.

No surprise there. But what's striking is how quickly the phenomena matured the U.S. market in terms of video streaming.

According to the latest report from Leichtman Research Group (LRG), 87% of U.S. households now have a connected-TV device of some kind — for example, a Roku, an Amazon Fire TV player, a smart TV or even a connected Blu-ray player.

Also: Streaming Penetration Rises to 80% as Smaller Services Grow: Analyst

That penetration rate stood at just 80% two years ago and 69% as recently as 2017. It was just 38% in 2012.

Notably, LRG also found that smart-TV penetration has reached 71% of U.S. homes, up from 58% in 2020.

Across all U.S. households, the research company added, there is a mean of 3.9 devices per TV household, compared to 3.2 in 2020, and 2.4 in 2017.

Overall, 46% of adults in U.S. TV households watch video on a TV via a connected device daily, compared to 40% in 2020, 25% in 2017, and 4% in 2012.

The upshot of all of this: As more and more U.S. homes adopt the streaming habit, there are simply fewer new adopters available for companies like Netflix and Roku to assimilate, at least domestically.

LRG polled 1,902 U.S. consumers for its Connected TVs 2022 survey. ■

Connected TV is expected to fuel strong growth in digital video advertising spending this year, according to a new outlook from the IAB.

While digital video ad spending is seen growing 26% to $49.2 billion in 2022, CTV is expected to increase 39% to $21.2 billion. CTV spending increased 57% last year and has more than doubled between 2020 and 2022.

In a survey, 76% of video buyers called CTV a “must buy” in their media planning budgets.

Also: DoubleVerify CEO Sees Netflix Growing CTV Advertising By 50%

Buyers said that CTV enables them to leverage first-party brand data, location data and shopping data in ways they can’t with traditional linear TV. They also said that CTV was more effective in creating consumer activity and enhancing brand perception.

CTV is also more transparent than other forms of digital video with respect to buyers knowing where ads ran.

While CTV will account for 36% of total time spent with linear TV and CTV in 2022, the report noted, CTV gets only an 18% share of video ad dollars.

Also: Scripps Leads New Station Group Aiming To Bring Political Ads to CTV

Buyers said issues that make CTV buying more difficult than it has to be include problems measuring incremental reach across publishers and platforms, managing frequency across platforms and publishers, a lack of transparency and interoperability within walled gardens and fragmentation of programmatic supply paths.

Many buyers see the market for linear TV and CTV converging, which would make their lives easier. Already, 66% of buyers said they have a single team planning linear TV and CTV campaigns and another 25% expect to have that in the future.

“Digital video is a driving force for buyers and will continue to be in 2022,” said Eric John, VP of the IAB Media Center. “However while CTV leads the substantial growth of digital video ad spend, the amount of dollars currently allocated to CTV is not proportionate to the amount of viewer time spent with the channel. The time is now for brands and buyers to follow consumer attention.”

The IAB’s report was released at the NewFronts in conjunction with Standard Media Index and Advertiser Perceptions. ■

Vizio said it is growing its advertising business, adding Oscar “Oz” Lang and Ben Sullins to its in-house ad-tech team.

The company said it opened a tech Innovation center in Denver in December. It now houses 140 of Vizio’s engineering and tech specialists working on Vizio’s software ad product and entertainment ecosystem. Between Denver, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York, the Vizio Ads and Innovation team has more than 400 people.

Lang was named VP of product management at Vizio. He had been head of product for Adobe’s Advertising Cloud TV business.

Sullins is VP of product engineering. He had been senior VP of engineering at SpotX.

Vizio said other recent ad tech hires have come from WarnerMedia, Comcast, Discovery, Magnite and Vevo.

Also: Vizio Adds Streaming VOD to WatchFree Plus Service

“Since our IPO last year, we have been heavily investing in engineering and software to scale our Platform Plus operations and build out our in-house ad tech team,” said David Rudnick, senior VP of product engineering at Vizio. “This investment will not only provide unique opportunities and measurable outcomes for advertisers, but it also helps us drive better consumer experiences.”

Vizio’s ad products are powered by viewing data from Vizio’s Inscape unit. Vizio Ads’ line of products include True Incremental Reach, Universal Frequency Control and Household Connect, an omnichannel offering helping marketers expand audience reach for cross-device campaigns.

Also: Vizio Claims $100 Million in Upfront Ad Commitments

Vizio’s Homescreen is the first stop for millions households, streamlining the search-and-discovery process for viewers, while providing exclusive opportunities for marketers to reach those viewers with tune-in ads and brand messaging.

“Consumers are rapidly shifting to the Smart TV experience, and because we own the hardware, software, and data, we are able to innovate in ways that others can’t,” Rudnick said. ”With continued momentum on the Platform Plus side of our business, which is a function of better personalization and engagement on SmartCast, we are driving interest with brands, advertisers and content partners to work with Vizio.” ■

Years ago, Reed Hastings predicted that the migration from traditional broadcast to streaming would happen at an annual rate of six percent. 

This was at odds with both supporters and proponents of streaming formats. Streaming bulls adhered to the Silicon Valley myth that TV was already falling apart due to a “massive wave of cord cutting.” 

Yet most brands continued to pour money into traditional linear as it was still the only way for them to reach and create emotional connections with tens of millions of consumers at once.

TV Goes Digital

Turns out Hastings' prediction was pretty accurate. As more viewers turn to streaming or “connected TV" (CTV for short) they are finding a much broader array of options, from subscription apps to free ad-supported streaming TV (FAST) apps. 

This presents a tricky situation for marketers who have difficulty straddling both CTV and linear TV. While both formats are valuable, particularly when used in tandem, the pathways to buy, plan, and measure across both platforms can be hard to navigate. 

Part of the problem is the question of responsibility. The structural systems set up even three years ago on the buy and sell side include digital teams, TV teams and offshoots like advanced TV. Now, this bifurcation has resulted in imaginary fences and organizational obstacles to work through. 

We hear it from brands all the time — they just want a cohesive, holistic TV investment strategy. Not a complicated terrain that pigeon holes them, or excuses why they can’t have the widest reach AND the smartest audience buying strategy. 

Fortunately, there’s a solution on the horizon that will allow advertisers to take advantage of both streaming and linear TV without fragmentation — the smart TV.

The Smart TV Revolution

Smart TV penetration is expected to reach 70% of TV households by the end of 2021. 

And this rapid adoption of smart TVs presents a huge opportunity to unify the entire landscape to one where all TV will be connected. At its core, this means every ad will be a CTV ad — with all the targeting, tracking, and optimizing promises across linear, broadcast, apps, AVOD services, you name it.

That’s right, every ad that hits the glass of a connected TV can and will be addressable.

This will be a win-win-win for everyone. Consumers will get a more customized experience. Advertisers will see better performance on their campaigns. Programmers will be able to deliver a more personalized approach to consumers that generates more engagement.

What’s It Going to Take?

Nearly everyone in the ad industry is bullish on a future where TV advertising is this dynamic, where software makes selling more efficient, and where algorithms deliver ads with the same kind of precision we enjoy on Instagram.

But there’s a reason addressable TV has never gotten much past a $3 billion category, despite the promise. It’s clunky, opaque, and designed only for experts. 

Advertisers like simple, fluid, and liquid markets. After all, anybody can buy ads on Facebook or Google, which is a big reason why anybody and everybody does.

But the technology to solve this is already here. We really can't use the "clunky" excuse anymore. With the rise of smart TVs, pretty much every form of television viewing is now connected to the internet, whether a person is "streaming" or not. And with ACR technology, companies can actually "see" when ad breaks are coming and swap out ads with something more targeted. 

Yet media owners remain at best cautious, and at worst reluctant, to commit fully to the format. This is somewhat understandable, for two reasons. First, many are still stinging from the commoditization of their inventory shortly after they first leaned into automation for the programmatic display market. Now we’re talking about higher CPMs for the most impactful advertising medium there is, where they already have infrastructure built and content deployed. 

Second, and perhaps more impactful, is that no common currency for measuring effectiveness of advertising across screens and platforms. Sure, it’s all measurable. But cross-platform benchmarks and standards are needed to provide the proper context.

But the CTV infrastructure is already maturing rapidly, with solutions for things like creative versioning and deduplication already in place. Media owners have also seen what a data driven approach does for consumers who get more value from data driven platforms — Netflix, Facebook, Spotify, Amazon all have data driven backbones.

Of course, nothing lights a fire like brands demanding change. I’m confident that as big marketers get a taste of what CTV can really offer, and how it will improve their business, they’ll keep pushing for more. 

And all TV will just become CTV. ■

According to the latest Nielsen figures, YouTube controls 6% of all connected TV viewing, trailing only Netflix (7%). 

So it's not surprising that China's ByteDance would like to capture a little of that same momentum for TikTok, another short-form, user-generated video platform that surpassed 1 billion users worldwide in September on the Android mobile platform alone. 

So, after debuting on Amazon Fire TV devices earlier this month, ByteDance said that the TikTok app is now supported by smart TVs sold in the U.S. powered by Android TV and Google TV, as well as Samsung and LG's native operating systems. 

Also read: TikTok App Comes to Amazon Fire TV

TikTok's connected TV initiative isn't brand new. For instance, the TikTok app debuted on Samsung TV's sold in Europe a year ago. 

While describing its mobile apps as delivering "little bursts of joy," ByteDance said its TikTok mobile apps deliver “a TV home-viewing experience, making it easy to watch content from our For You and Following feeds on the big screen. This includes the most liked and viewed videos across a huge range of categories, from gaming and comedy to food and animals.”

Notably, TikTok still isn't supported by devices, including smart TVs, powered by the leading U.S. connected TV OS, Roku. 

Connected TV is likely to stay hot according to a new survey that finds that 56% of advertisers plan to increase spending on CTV next year.

Advertiser Perceptions said that about 90% of video advertisers already run commercials in connected TV programming and that their average spending is about $33 million annually. 

“Advertisers are betting on CTV to solve fundamental marketplace challenges—from building reach in a fragmented market to offering addressability as other direct-to-consumer targeting options fade,” said Erin Firneno, VP of business intelligence at Advertiser Perceptions.

In most cases, marketers are funding their spending in CTV by shifting money from their current digital video budget, while 47% said the money was coming from the general advertising budget and 34% said it was coming from the linear TV budget.

Also: 55 Million Homes Only Watch Connected TV: Magnite

While 70% of advertisers said they most commonly buy CTV ads from device manufacturers, they expect to buy more from ad-supported video on demand (AVOD) platforms over the next year. Currently 64% said they buy from AVOD platforms and 63% said they buy from virtual multichannel video programming distributors (vMVPDs). 

Next year, 71% expect to buy from AVOD platforms, 70% see buying from device makers and 62% will buy from vMVPDs.

More than 90% of advertisers have bought CTV ads programmatically in the past year to get better pricing, ease of use and measurement.

Advertisers think of YouTV (and YouTube TV) and Hulu to be the leaders in the CTV market, along with Amazon and Roku, but they see value in mid-tier publishers as well.

In the survey, 58% of advertisers believe those mid-tier publishers are essential to keep CTV costs down and 64% think they can achieve their reach goals by bundling mid-tier options. Advertising with mid-tier publishers carries a great risk of brand safety or fraud, 60% of those served said.

“Advertisers want reach, but they won’t settle for it at any cost, especially when it comes to brand, environment and audience accountability," said Lauren Fisher, executive VP, business intelligence at Advertiser Perceptions. 

Connected TV has grown to the point where there are 55 million U.S. households that only watch CTV, according to a new study from Magnite.

Those 55 million households mean that 40% of U.S. TV homes are reachable exclusively via CTV and not over the air or via traditional pay TV. 

Los Angeles-based ad technology firm Magnite also found that CTV reaches a more balanced mix of age groups, compared to pay TV, which skews toward viewers 55 years old and up. CTV also delivers an audience as diverse as the country overall, while pay TV is overly white and underrepresents Black, Latin and Asian consumers.

Viewers don’t seem to be adopting CTV to avoid commercials. The study found that 90% of CTV viewers watch ad supported programming, with 47% of the content they see being ad-supported, compared to 53% ad free.

CTV viewers said they were twice as likely to buy a product after seeing an ad they paid attention to and 47% of CTV viewers said they were willing to share the information they find in relevant ads.

Video on social media platforms is a less-effective means of reaching consumers who also watch CTV. Only 21% of CTV users reported that they are likely to pay attention to a video ad on social media.

“CTV is now much more than just an audience extension tool or an add-on to a linear buy, because it’s clear that a large portion of TV viewers have shifted their attention in favor of CTV,” Magnite chief revenue officer, CTV, Sean Buckley said. “While traditional TV audiences have become more homogeneous, CTV viewers encompass a representative cohort of ages and backgrounds. Our goal in conducting this research is to help media owners and advertisers understand how they can use CTV to reach CTV viewers effectively, authentically and respectfully.”

Discovery said it made a deal with LG Electronics USA that will make the Discovery Plus streaming service available on LG Smart TV sets.

“The arrival of the Discovery Plus app on LG Smart TVs delivers a new range of premium, educational and inspiring content to LG TV owners,” said Peggy Ang, LG’s VP of marketing. “LG Smart TVs truly elevate the home entertainment experience with access to the most anticipated and sought-after content delivered with critically-acclaimed picture quality the way the creators intended it to be seen. We are proud to partner with Discovery Plus to bring this content to LG TV owners.”

Discovery Plus offers more than 200 original shows and a library of 60,000 episodes from networks including HGTV, Food Network, DIY and OWN.

Also Read: Discovery Plus Puts Scare into 'Ghostober' with 'Haunted Museum' Scripted Series

"We are thrilled to expand the availability of Discovery Plus and provide LG customers a direct and easy way to stream our much-loved brands, series and talent," said Gabriel Sauerhoff, senior VP, digital distribution and commercial partnerships at Discovery. "The announcement of Discovery Plus on LG Smart TVs builds upon our existing relationship with a valued partner, and we look forward to the continued growth of Discovery Plus and reaching more fans around the world."

Discovery Plus is available in the U.S. starting at $4.99 per month, with an ad-free version available for $6.99 per month.