As streaming becomes the dominant way people consume TV, a shift toward programmatic buying is accelerating. The increasing availability of biddable inventory, combined with the flexibility that programmatic offers, is prompting some to question the necessity of a TV upfront that demands hefty ad dollar commitments.

It’s reasonable to speculate that a world where a few networks sell upward of 75% of their linear ad inventory for the upcoming year in just a few short weeks may not make long-term sense. However, advertisers will always negotiate commitments to exercise their spending leverage and ensure they aren’t shut out of inventory crucial to the success of their brands. 

That said, the methods used to achieve these goals via commitments are likely to evolve significantly from the TV markets of the recent past. If anything, the upfronts are poised to be revitalized thanks to the growth of programmatic technology.

In the “early days” of this fast-growing medium (i.e., just a few years ago), most marketers bought CTV in the same way as traditional TV — through direct deals. By last year, though, we saw the “early majority” of brands shift from direct I/O toward programmatic and this year we predict that the “late majority” will consolidate their CTV upfronts within a demand-side platform (DSP).

In fact, Advertiser Perceptions found that 69% of advertisers plan to utilize programmatic guaranteed and 56% plan to use private marketplace (PMP) buys in the next 12 months, compared to only 53% planning to use direct I/O. This shows us that TV buying behaviors are changing and mixed, hybrid buying methods are more popular than ever.

Buying TV directly or programmatically is only the first of many decisions buyers must make as they prepare their upfront strategy. Here are my predictions and how advertisers can capitalize on the growing shift toward programmatic.

1. Consolidate TV buys in a softer market: One main reason buyers want to participate in the upfront is to guarantee their share of coveted inventory. The challenge arises when this leads to a proliferation of direct deals that may target the same household too many times. 

One of the biggest advantages of programmatic campaigns with a DSP, specifically via PMPs, is that you can consolidate CTV buys into a unified buying method. This allows you to understand and manage reach and frequency holistically and reduce overlap between CTV and linear, as well as overlap between publishers to maximize reach. This saves advertisers money while making for a better customer experience.

2. Uplevel audience strategies in a converging landscape: As an industry, we like to bucket TV into “linear” and “CTV,” but it’s all just TV to the consumer. The challenge for advertisers is connecting the dots between both channel types to understand things like holistic reach and frequency and who is being exposed to your ads regardless of what viewers are watching or how they are accessing content on their TVs. 

With programmatic, these insights can be leveraged for advanced TV targeting that goes beyond basic demographic audiences. This starts with a foundation of diverse and holistic data, such as combining high-quality ACR data with set-top box data. This allows for a unified approach to TV. It also enables advertisers to reach their audiences more effectively by better understanding viewing behaviors and powering use cases, such as suppressing linear audiences on CTV to drive incremental reach. 

3. Aim for identity-based supply at scale: All of these strategies are only effective if you can actually reach the right audiences. This is why having a foundation of identity within an ad platform — which powers more precise reach — is critical.

While cookie deprecation may seem irrelevant to TV buyers, it sets the stage for other signal deprecations, such as IP addresses. A lack of an “identity spine” also makes connecting measurement between digital channels and inventory difficult. That’s why TV buyers will increasingly value future-proof TV activation backed by robust identity.

Despite initial reservations, the industry is witnessing a significant shift toward programmatic buying, with a hybrid model proving to be particularly effective. As this trend continues, advertisers who embrace these changes will likely find themselves better positioned to reach their desired audiences more effectively and precisely. 

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.

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.

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.” 

The CW has ordered two scripted series to air as originals on the network. Wild Cards is a crime-solving drama with Vanessa Morgan of Riverdale and Giacomo Gianniotti of Grey’s Anatomy in the cast. Sight Unseen is about a detective forced to leave the job after losing her sight, with Dolly Lewis starring. 

Both are slated to premiere on The CW next year. Wild Cards will also air on CBC in Canada and Sight Unseen will air on CTV in Canada. 

“Wild Cards and Sight Unseen are two unique, binge-worthy shows that reflect The CW’s commitment to compelling, top-tier storytelling that will appeal to our loyal fans and attract a wide range of new viewers,” The CW head of scripted programming Liz Wise Lyall said. “We are thrilled to collaborate with our partners at Blink49 Studios, Front Street Pictures, Piller/Segan [Wild Cards] and Sisters Troubetzkoy Productions [Sight Unseen] to bring these dynamic series to life and highlight just how expansive The CW brand can be.”

Wild Cards follows the unlikely duo of a gruff cop and a clever con woman. Gianniotti plays the cop and Morgan is the scammer. Produced by Blink49 Studios and Front Street Pictures for commissioning broadcaster CBC in Canada, Wild Cards is created by Michael Konyves. 

Sight Unseen has Lewis as Tess, a homicide detective forced to quit the job after nearly killing her partner and being diagnosed as clinically blind. She is haunted by the unsolved cases she left behind, but develops a fresh perspective on criminal cases. 

Sight Unseen is produced by Blink49 Studios and Front Street Pictures in association with Sisters Troubetzkoy Productions for commissioning broadcaster Bell Media’s CTV in Canada.  

Amid the strikes in Hollywood, The CW has acquired a number of shows from other countries, most of them from Canada. 

Ad-supported apps drew the vast majority of time spent watching connected TV in the first half of 2023, but the level of attention paid to streaming ads fell, according to a new report from TVision.

TVision said 66% of CTV viewing went to ad-supported apps in the first half of the year, up 38% from a 48% share in the second half of 2023. 

The share of viewing for virtual multichannel video programming distributors fell 27% to a 19% share and viewing of subscription VOD app dropped 25% to 6%, TVision said.

But while more people are watching ad-supported streaming, the attention paid to streaming ads dropped.

TVision found that CTV ad attention dropped from 31.2% to 29.6%. 

CTV presence-in-room, which signals whether a viewer is in the room and able to receive the message, dropped from 59.2% to 55.9%. Linear attention and viewer presence both slightly increased. 

TVision said the dip in attention was party caused by more people watching. It also noted that most CTV apps run a clock during commercial breaks letting viewers know exactly when they should return to the room as programming resumes.

Overwhelmingly, CTV ads are delivered when the majority of viewers are not watching CTV ads are generally delivered evenly across a 24-hour day and do not align with how viewers tune in to CTV programming. 

TVision found that 40% of CTV ads are delivered in lower-value late-night, overnight, and morning dayparts. That compares to linear TV ads, where only 20% of commercials are delivered in these less-attentive time periods. 

The app generating the most attention is ad-free Apple TV Plus, with an attention index of 136.7, compared to a CTV average of 119.1. YouTube had an attention share of 120.9 and Amazon Prime Video had a 119.4 score. Netflix and Peacock were below average with indexes of 113.4 and 112 respectively.

During the first half of the year, Netflix increased its household reach to  62.9% the most of any streaming app.

“It’s likely that the new ad-supported subscription model helped propel Netflix to an increase in subscribers in the first half of the year,” TVision said. “But Netflix’s deep well of content including returning series like You and Bridgerton, as well as new shows like Night Agent also help Netflix maintain its prominence.” 

Second in reach was YouTube, which posted a gain to 58.6%. Other apps increasing reach were Peacock, Paramount Plus and Tubi.

YouTube was tops in share of time spent viewing at 17.3%, followed by Netflix at 11.5%  

Disney Plus led in co-viewing with 1.53 people in front of the screen per hour viewed, followed by Paramount Plus at 1.48 and Philo at 1.41.

Although overall streaming viewing time continues to grow as the number of CTV enabled households has ticked up to 84%. But the number of apps that are watched in Americais declining. Households have gone from watching an average of 7.3 apps at the start of the pandemic in Q2 2020 to 6.6 apps in Q2 2023. Meanwhile 23% of homes use 10 or more apps.

Travel advertisers increased their spending on CTV by 41% and restaurants boosted spending by 20%. Government and organizations cut back b 52% and retailers reduced expenditures by 15% compared to the the second half of 2022, which included the Chrstimas holiday.

“Legacy television companies jumped on board the subscription-first model,” TVision said in its report. “But with new economic realities and household reach for CTV settling to a constant at approximately 82-84% of all households over the last few years, the streaming industry must pivot to find new revenue. With most time spent viewing now taking place in apps with ad-supported models, it’s clear that subscription-only is out and ad-supported CTV is here to stay.

“With access to more granular insights about CTV audience engagement, viewer attention and in-room presence, the opportunity exists for advertisers to engage much more effectively with CTV audiences,” the report said.

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.

The growth of connected television hit a new milestone, reaching 51% of global video impressions, according to a new report from Innovid.

Innovid said that CTV’s share of video ad impressions has increased by 10.9% since 2021. 

“In 2019, CTV accounted for just 31% of total impression share by device,” said Dave Helmreich, Chief Commercial Officer at Innovid. “Today, it accounts for over half of all video impressions – and that share is already up another 3 percentage points in Q1 2023. As TV viewership continues to shift towards streaming, the share of CTV impressions will only continue to grow – and this trend is evident as Upfront buys continue to flow towards CTV inventory.” 

In its report, Innovid found that CTV interactive ads outperform standard video ads, with interactive formats providing a 600% lift in engagement. Interactive CTV formats also have a better competition rate–96.4%--compared to standard video ads. 

The number of interactive CTV campaigns increased 15% during the year, with 17% more advertisers employing the format. 

Advertisers are also increasing their use of dynamic creative, which personalized messages at scale. Innovid found that. Performance for ads using dynamic creative showed a 5% lift above standard creative delivery.

Innovid analyzed over 330 billion video advertising impressions served on its platform during 2022 to compile its report. 

Amazon Freevee’s hit series Jury Duty was the No. 1 show on connected TV for the week of May 1, according to a new ranking created by measurement company TVision.

The No  2 show, according to TVision’s Power Score, was Ted Lasso on Apple TV, followed by Fatal Attraction on Paramount Plus. 

The TV Power Score ranking  is designed to compare streaming shows on an apples-to-apples basis. In calculating its Power Score, TVision, which measures activity across over 1,000 apps, looks at  the amount of time viewers pay attention to the program, the amount of program time available for the season, the program’s reach, as well as the application’s reach.

TVision said it chose that combination of metrics to enable a neutral look at the quality of programming and its unique, inherent ability to draw in viewers - regardless of the scale of the platform, or the program’s release schedule.

Netflix, the top streaming service, has 9 of the top 20 shows on the Power Rankings.

"Movies have box office sales. Linear TV has ratings. Music has the top 40, but CTV programming—one of the most important influences on today’s cultural zeitgeist—has lacked a fair measure of performance ranking CTV content across all apps,” said Yan Liu, CEO of TVision. “At TVision we are uniquely designed to solve this problem - with our ability to measure all programs across thousands of apps - from niche to the largest players. That's why we have introduced the TVision Power Score."

TVision plans to update its Power Score for CTV Shows on a weekly basis. It will also be releasing rankings for movies on CTV on a monthly basis.

For May, the top movie was Netflix’s Murder Mystery 2. It was followed by Apple TV’s Ghosted and Peacock’s Ticket to Paradise.

TVision notes that its rankings are likely to be different from other lists, like the Netflix Top Ten or Nielsen’s ranking of streaming shows.

“The Power Score is meant to reflect how engaged viewers are with the content, regardless of the scale of the platform. If a program does not engage a significant portion of the app’s viewers, or capture high attention, that will lower the score.k” TVision says.

TVision said the goal of the list is to help the industry better understand the relative value and engagement of content across all CTV apps.

"What I am most excited about is that using TVision’s data, and applying the right formulas, we can finally get a measure of relative performance of all the amazing content, across various streaming services. And even more exciting, truly predictive signals on breakout shows and movies." Joe Marchese, Executive Chairman, Human Ventures, and former head of ad sales at Fox.

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. ■

Viewing of ad-supported connected TV apps was up 55% in the second half of 2022, compared to the second half of 2020, according to a new report from measurement company TVision.

TVision’s The State of CTV Advertising report says that as consumers move to CTV, advertisers are looking for strategies for using CTV to reach viewers no longer subscribing to traditional TV.

“While CTV presents a massive opportunity to reach TV viewers, it can be an extremely frustrating and opaque environment for advertisers, due to walled gardens and their own proprietary metrics,” TVision CEO Yan Liu said. “With the data from our single source panel, we are able to report universal metrics across hundreds of apps, which tell the real story on who advertisers are reaching and how well they are engaging those audiences.”

TVision says that 83% of households are CTV enabled. The average home used 7.3 apps and nearly 30% of homes use 10 or more apps.

Corroborating an earlier report from Nielsen, TVision says that YouTube has supplanted Netflix as the streaming app with the biggest share of time spent viewing, Netflix’s household reach dropped to 61% in the second half of 2022, from 66% in the first half 2022, but it still reaching more households than any other app, including YouTube.

In the report, NBCUniversal’s Peacock stacks up surprisingly well. According to TVision, Peacock has a 3.9% share of time spent viewing, which puts it ahead of Disney Plus, Paramount Plus and tied with HBO Max.

The report notes that Disney Plus and Netflix now offer advertisers new opportunities to advertise and connect with hard-to-reach audiences. The best combination for reaching CTV viewers is Netflix with the Roku Channel, which have an audience overlap of just 41.9%.

TVision is well known for measuring attention. By that metric, Netflix and YouTube TV are tops among streamers, followed by Amazon Prime Video, HBO Max, Peacock and Hulu.

TVision also noted that FAST apps including The Roku Channel, Tubi and Pluto increased their share of viewing in the second half of 2022 compared to the first half of the year. But the report says that in the second half, FAST viewers were older and paid less attention than CTV viewers historically.

The entertainment, legal, health and retail industries are responsible for the largest share of CTV ad volume. The government sector, spurred by election-cycle spending, and automotive advertisers dramatically increased their investments in the second half of 2022. ■

Free ad-supported TV (FAST) is quickly moving from fringe to mainstream in the race to displace traditional cable with over-the-top (OTT) and connected TV (CTV) services, and with good reason: consumers will not pay for all their TV content.

Today, FAST provides a familiar linear viewing experience for consumers while enabling rightsholders to more widely distribute content and unlock increased ad revenue opportunities. Many rightsholders utilize FAST as a cost-effective way to maximize audience reach by monetizing a relevant part of their catalog content. For advertisers, the growing streaming model is equally as enticing, providing them with a highly targeted way to reach viewers at scale.

FAST viewership hours more than doubled in 2021. Fueled by an influx of new premium content, growing audiences and fresh advertising dollars, the FAST market in the United States is poised to reach 216 million monthly active users in 2023, according to a study from nScreenMedia. 

\With 92% of U.S. households reachable via CTV open programmatic advertising, CTV is a scarce and coveted ad positioning for advertisers in the marketplace today. According to a 2022 CTV/OTT Advertiser Study from Advertiser Perceptions and Premion, 25% of respondents called CTV/OTT the most valuable media type in 2021, and 84% said the inventory is at least as valuable as primetime TV. As such, CTV ad spend is expected to increase by 22% in 2022.

It’s important that content owners and rightsholders be strategic in growing their FAST business so they can fully capitalize on the platform’s benefits and increase their value to advertisers. Here are three prongs to a successful FAST plan of action:

1.) Clearly define your content strategy. Be strategic about the content package you offer viewers on FAST services. Why this content, why in FAST? If you’re a sports league, for example, at this current moment it’s likely not smart to put your top-tier live games on FAST, but you can strategize about how to leverage catalog content to create a compelling consumer experience in a linear format.

2.) Promote discoverability. FAST channels don’t adhere to the “if you build it, they will come” ideology. Driving viewers to your FAST channel is a deal-making and marketing challenge. Be thoughtful about how you’re working with FAST service partners to get promotion and valuable placement on the screen and within their programming guide. You should also be leveraging your own channels, such as social media, to alert your audience about your FAST offerings. If you don’t focus on building an audience across your FAST ecosystem, you won’t.

3.) If you haven’t already, get involved now. FAST in its current state is reminiscent of the early days of YouTube; right now, there’s still tremendous opportunity to build your audience and establish your brand without competition from all angles. In the next 12 to 18 months, content owners and rightsholders should have a strategy to incorporate FAST into their media mix alongside social, licensing, and OTT plays. With seismic shifts expected in the FAST arena in the next 24 months, content owners joining the game too late could face limited FAST inventory and end up at the mercy of FAST platforms’ requests for content rather than driving their own channel placement and scheduling.

The Future of FAST

The TV ecosystem is undergoing unprecedented change. Will the future of TV consist of a combination of FAST services, a few bespoke SVOD/AVOD apps, and aggregation/bundled services? Perhaps. It’s likely to somewhat resemble what we have today, albeit in a more convenient content delivery method. As with any entertainment model transitioning from fringe to mainstream, it takes the big content owners and rights holders to come in and cement that model’s viability and positioning in the marketplace. We are seeing this happen very quickly with FAST.

As FAST offerings continue to increase their share of entertainment time, rights holders will flock to engage viewers with not just catalog material but, increasingly, fresh, premium content. It’s possible we’ll start to see top-tier content like live sports games on FAST channels, akin to a free-to-air partner today, in the not-so-distant future. For rightsholders and advertisers alike, FAST is ripe with opportunity and worth exploring as a key part of your direct-to-consumer business. ■

I found myself in a classic “chicken or the egg” TV industry debate at a recent business dinner. 

The conversation centered on whether the internet and connected TV led to innovations in television or whether the massive revenue increases from advanced TV advertising led to investments in innovations like CTV, streaming and a move toward digital-first distribution. 

How the bits make it from point A to point B on a screen doesn’t matter, whether it’s a set-top box, tablet or mobile phone. Under the hood, CTV is still just television that happens to be delivered over IP. And FAST? Besides a cool-sounding acronym, free ad-supported television is still the traditional broadcast model. I don’t pay to watch CBS broadcast TV free over the air — advertisers do! 

Somebody at the dinner table pushed this starry-eyed view: “You don’t need standards in CTV.” 

On the contrary. To build any kind of industry, you must eventually have standardization. Every growing sector has two choices: 1) you standardize and have an industry or 2) you don’t standardize, and you have a monopoly or, worse, an ad hoc conglomerate. 

I know about this cycle. My own company was one-half of an addressable advertising tech duopoly and we’ve now grown as much as we can in the U.S. We must now work to standardize and build an industry so that we can work with the other partners in the space to grow it. That’s the only way forward.  

The entire television industry is based on this classic business arc. RCA was once an early example of vertical integration, owning content creation via NBC, transmission through station-group ownership and manufacturing, making cameras and television sets. When the move to color was happening, the Federal Communications Commission held a competition and RCA’s NTSC lost to the Color Wheel developed and backed by CBS. When RCA threatened to go its own way due to its market dominance, the FCC reversed course and adopted NTSC as the “standard.” 

Program-guide software in cable television is another example. The guide technology was held by a single company that charged exorbitant fees and became a roadblock to new technologies that cable operators wanted to deploy. The solution? A major cable operator invested heavily in developing its own hardware platform and software stack, effectively putting the guide company out of business and commoditizing the set-top box industry at the same time.  Another monopoly tumbled. 

Free markets abhor monopolies. They’ll put up with them for a little while but eventually everybody hates paying the freight because monopolies can charge whatever they want and stifle innovation. At some point, someone will break in and disrupt your model just to steal market share because monopolies are unstable.  

CTV and FAST may be today’s dangling shiny objects to many in the industry but they did not magically appear overnight. They both followed the classic monopoly-to-standardization pattern that started with the internet’s birth in the ’60s. The internet was a Defense Department and university monopoly until the creation of the Ethernet protocol and HTML as its everyday language, standards that allowed everyone to participate, not just a privileged few.  

The tech monoliths have created their own monopolies by building impenetrable silos for advertisers, but even those are slowly starting to crumble.  

Google’s ad monopoly started being chipped away the second the IAB and major advertisers banded together to create header bidding and threw pebbles into the Google Ad Manager gears. Suddenly, the playing field was leveled, and Google was forced to work with companies they never had to before, pushing it toward transparency and universal standards. 

Meta’s time is certainly going to come. It offers a platform to create campaigns that can exist only on its own network and nowhere else.  

Still, marketers believe they have to spend money with them. There are too many users there and they can’t afford to ignore them. 

In the short term, Facebook will continue to attract advertising dollars But in the long run, like many other content companies, its walled strategy will become a loser and it will have to conform with standards just like Google.  

The tide is turning against Facebook on two fronts:  Advertisers are tiring of making endless calls to multiple ad tech ecosystems to reach their desired audiences, especially when they want to know exactly what they are getting in return for their investment and added work.  

At the same time, Facebook’s prime demographic is moving out of the age group that advertisers really care about, pushing the company into an identity crisis, even trying to make themselves look like TikTok. Parent company Meta’s stock price spent much of 2022 beaten down on weak earnings, and their metaverse strategy is looking like a very expensive albatross. 

We may be seeing the writing on the wall that being a monopoly forever is not in the cards for many technology-driven brands, including those in television. 

Make no mistake: CTV is here to stay and there are lucrative businesses to be built around it. They may seem sexy as the new shiny tech gadgets. Taking pages from the Google and Facebook playbook, they’ve built up many silos and we have seen how those monopoly cycles eventually fail. Expect chaos in the short term as competing technologies ultimately create a stable business ecosystem. 

However, the hockey stick of growth will not come for CTV until everything works the same way when standards are in place, even if it is “the Wild West of the internet.” ■ 

PadSquad, which creates interactive and shoppable digital ads, said it is working with Innovid to expand into connected TV.

“Streaming is the dominant way people consume popular content today, and yet TV ads still look the same as they did in the twentieth century,” said Lance Wolder, head of marketing at PadSquad. “It’s about time video creative formats evolve to complement and enhance the streaming experience.”

The new advanced CTV offering allows brands to enhance TV ad creative with second-screen experiences such as polls and shoppable carousels on mobile devices. All PadSquad formats feature QR codes. The offering is designed to enhance the value of impressions and allows for attribution modeling to measure and optimize business outcomes.

“This partnership is all about scale and speed,” Wolder said. “Partnering with a trusted video leader like Innovid enables us to create advanced CTV formats for brands and serve them across all of the most popular devices and platforms people use around the world.”

Innovid’s platform enables the delivery, personalization and measurement of converged TV.

“Interactive video is one of the most influential advertising formats in the market today. Our research shows that interactive CTV campaigns – when compared to interactive mobile or PC campaigns – deliver stronger results across key performance and attention metrics,” said Krista Panoff, senior VP of global enterprise development at Innovid. “Through this partnership, savvy advertisers can further embrace programmatic and agile media buying practices without sacrificing creative quality – that’s a win-win for all.” ■

Estrella Media said it is working with Comcast’s FreeWheel unit to help boost its connected TV advertising businesses.

The combination will take advantage of the growth in Hispanic CTV viewing, the companies said.

"Our passionate audience is watching more CTV than ever before," said René Santaella, chief digital & streaming officer, Estrella Media. "We need to make sure they get an excellent free ad-supported experience surrounding the content they love. FreeWheel is helping our ad sales operation achieve better ROI on CTV so everyone wins."

Estrella’s streaming channels generated 1.33 billion minutes of viewing of original content in November, with a third of that on CTV, Estrella said.

FreeWheel technology will enable direct and programmatic ad sales of Estrella’s CTV and OTT inventory. 

"As audiences fragment across screens, programmers and advertisers need  solutions that can help them find and scale this viewership across CTV," said Katy Loria, chief revenue officer at FreeWheel. "Estrella is seeing significant growth with the important U.S. Hispanic market across its CTV audiences. We're thrilled to be a key partner to help the company drive and monetize this business." ■

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. ■

Media buyer GroupM expects ad spending on television and professional video will edge up 0.1% to $67.7 billion as part of a less optimistic forecast released Monday.

GroupM  sees traditional TV down 3.8% to $64.4 billion in 2023, with the decline offset by a 19% increase in spending on connected TV to $13.3 billion.

The media buyer sees a similar pattern in 2024 and 2025, followed by overall TV and provide falling 0.5% in 2026 and dropping 1.3% to $67.4 billion in 2027. At that point, traditional TV will be falling 2.8% to $47.4 billion, while CTV will be increasing 1.8% to $20 billion.

Also Read: GroupM Sees Pay TV Reaching Less than 50% of U.S. Homes By 2025

Globally, GroupM execs TV and professional video advertising to grow 1.5% to $157.8 billion in 2023. And 2.7% to $162.1 billion in 2024.

Across all media, GroupM expects global advertising to grow 5.9% in 2023, a bit slower than inflation and down from a forecast of 6.4% growth GroupM made in June. Strong gains are predicted for connected TV, retail media and fast-growing markets including India.

Also Read: Magna Sees National TV Network Ad Revenue Down 6.3% in 2023

In the U.S., GroupM expects ad spending across all media to increase 5.5% to $321.9 billion.  Barring an escalation of the war in Ukraine or another COVID-19-sized global disaster, Beyond that, GroupM expects advertising to increase 6.2% in 2024 before returning to a trend of decelerating mid-single-digit growth through 2027.

GroupM says the reduced global expectations are largely caused by developments in China. 

The media buyer also notes a change in what it calls digital endemic companies. 

Digital endemics could afford a “grow at all costs”  mindset while the cost of capital was cheap, GroupM said. “But as central banks globally have raised interest rates this year, venture capital funded companies and newly public companies have had to become more conservative, and we have seen a significant deceleration in sales and marketing expenses across this category. There is also an element of maturation among this group that has likely led to deceleration in advertising growth.”

GroupM notes that retail media is expected to reach $110.7 billion this year, an upgrade from a prediction of $101 billion made in September. Retail media will grow another 10.1% to $121.9 billion in 2023. 

 Media buyer Zenith also released a global ad forecast and predicted 4.5% growth in 2023.

Zenith expects the ad business to be resilient despite the current economic headwinds, with the expansion of new channels such as retail media and advertising on subscription video on demand (SVOD) services being strong spots.

Zenith estimates total video ad spending will make up 30% of the overall advertising market and will grow at a 4.8% compounded average growth rate between 2022 and 2025, supported by the growth of advertising on platforms such as SVOD, FAST and all other AVOD, which includes platforms such as YouTube and TikTok. 

Advertising on SVOD services will grow strongly, reaching $13.1 billion in 2025 at a compounded average growth rate of 27.9% from 2022 to 2025. While the launch of advertising on Disney Plus  and Netflix has gained the most attention, other platforms are likely to follow suit.

Retail Media, which consists of display and search advertising on e-commerce sites and/or the online sites of traditional retailers, will also drive significant growth as retailers increasingly focus on retail advertising solutions. Outside of China, where Retail Media is already prevalent, Retail Media is expected to grow from $39.2 billion in 2022 to $64.2 billion in 2025, representing a compounded annual growth rate of 17.8% over the period. ■

iSpot, which has built its TV-measurement business on big data, has bought a stake in TVision as part of a $16 million funding round, and will get exclusive access to person-level data on connected TV viewing from TVision's audience panels.

TVision is best known for measuring viewer attention, but the technology it uses to see how intently people in a household are watching a particular show or commercial, is also used to count how many people are watching to calculate co-viewing, and which members of a household are watching to generate demo information.

The investment, led by iSpot with longtime TVision investors SIG Capital, Accomplice and Golden Ventures also participating, comes at a time when CTV viewing is growing and marketers are shifting ad dollars to CTV to reach those viewers, but ad buyers say there is no reliable way to measure it.

The investment also comes at a time when TV measurement Goliath Nielsen is being challenged by high-tech alternatives — led by iSpot — that are using data from smart TVs and set-top boxes to better count viewers in a more complex TV landscape in which streaming and fragmentation are becoming a bigger factor. 

Also: Viewers Spending More Time with AVOD Than SVOD: TVision

“The $90 billion TV and CTV marketplace cannot transact on methods developed decades ago and expect to give today’s advertisers real visibility into how multiscreen TV drives their very modern brand KPIs. The industry needs ever-more investment in new technologies capable of capturing the reach, engagement, and audience insights that boost advertiser confidence in escalating their ad investment with multiscreen TV publishers,” Video Advertising Bureau president and CEO Sean Cunningham said. “We applaud the work iSpot and TVision have done to advance the industry and are encouraged by the investments each are making to develop more accurate and representative cross-platform measurement capabilities.”

iSpot CEO Sean Muller, who will become a TVision director, told Broadcasting+Cable that iSpot and TVision have been working together for three years. Earlier this year, iSpot got a $325 million investment from Goldman Sachs.

“We really wanted to expand our relationship and partnership with TVision,” Muller said.

“We also wanted to invest in panel technology, which we believe continues to be important for the industry,” Muller said. “We are a huge believer in big data as the front line of measurement and that continues to be the case. But we also believe in being able to get to the person level in the household to supplement that measurement.”

Together, iSpot and TVision will be able to bring a new standard and new currency to a TV world in which linear TV and connected TV are unified in the way they’re planned, bought and measured, Muller said. “This partnership can accelerate the process,” he said.

Before the upfront, there was much clamor about alternative measurement companies and new currencies. After the upfront, it looked like Nielsen remained dominant. But with Nielsen looking to roll out its new Nielsen One system later this year, the industry may get another chance to weigh its options.

"We really hope that people make further Investments in these new currencies and especially in the unification of linear and CTV because ultimately, it just helps the industry,” Muller said. “Come the 2023-24 upfront it's 100% new currency. We see 2023-24 as a pivotal year.”

The TVision panel has 5,000 homes and about 14,000 people. Panelists let TVision mount a camera-like device on top of their TV sets, enabling TVision to monitor who is in the room when the TV is on and precisely what they’re looking at. Originally TVision focused on measuring how much attention people were paying to specific elements of shows’ commercials but the company realized this asset could be used for other purposes, including measuring co-viewing.

“We believe our panel has a lot of potential to produce even more products,” TVision CEO Yan Liu told B+C. He said the TVision panel is more cost-efficient and user-friendly for panelists, who don’t have to push buttons to have their viewing registered as they do in Nielsen’s panels.

With iSpot’s investment, TVision might increase the size of its panel, but Liu said he doesn’t believe it has to be as big as Nielsen’s, which has 30,000 to 40,000 homes because TVision doesn't use its panel to measure all viewing. Viewing is measured using big data and TVision's panel is used to answer questions and calibrate that big data.

”The future of currency is combining big data sets with panel data,“ Liu said.

If big data can show how many households are tuned in, TVision's panel provides a view as to how many people in those households were watching and which members of the household.

“We already know who lives in the household,” Muller said. ”Using the TVision data we know The Voice on Tuesday night had an average of 1.35 viewers on a second-by-second basis in front of the TV and also gives us a distribution of the age and gender of those.“

That means ad buyers can get the demo data they've long depended on, particularly for CTV.

“Right now, there is no currency for CTV,” Muller said. “The publishers are essentially self-reporting in many cases. They're not even selling on people or co-viewing.

"We’re highly focused on unified measurement and the idea that CTV and linear should be transacted together,” he continued. “Unified measurement is going to much more granular demos across 900 different streaming publishers.”

Some media companies said they were encouraged by iSpot and TVision getting together.

“This partnership is a step towards accurately counting every individual in front of the TV screen,” said Andrea Zapata, executive VP, ad sales research, measurement and insights at Warner Bros. Discovery. “TVision’s modern measurement approach is more precise in identifying who is in front of the screen. With investments towards panel growth and the inclusion of multiple TV sets in a household, there is a real possibility of having a representative panel that relies less on additional panel(s) for calibration.”

NBCUniversal has been particularly aggressive in vetting potential alternatives to Nielsen and a big backer of iSpot.

“Combining iSpot's massive panel with TVision’s modern approach to counting real people helps advertisers measure co-viewing across linear and CTV with greater accuracy across households and diverse audiences,” said Kelly Abcarian, executive VP, measurement and impact at NBCUniversal. “A cross-platform currency, based on the exact ad and powered by fast and accurate co-viewing metrics, will also bring a completely new approach to valuing premium content.” ■

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.

In recent years, we’ve seen some pretty cool marketing tactics from political campaigns, including one candidate who enlisted the meme community and another’s foray into the world of video games. And while these past activations definitely exhibited a “cool” factor, this year’s 2022 midterm election marketing campaigns are banking on CTV for the “conversion” factor.

One of the obvious benefits of streaming is that it's a digital version of traditional linear media -- same content, same screen size, but with the ability to apply the benefits of programmatic ad buying. In simple terms, this means advertisers can do more than just target the “standard adults 25 to 54” they are accustomed to on linear, and leverage expanded segments including behavior, interests, and geography.

That’s why this year’s 2022 midterm elections are expected to exceed $8 billion in political ad spend, with an estimated 15% of that going to CTV, as candidates leverage streaming’s superior targeting abilities to connect with potential voters on a local level. Not to mention, CTV is redefining what “local” really means.

Getting Granular with Geography

There are 210 designated market areas (DMAs) in the U.S. and more than 41,000 zip codes within, which traditional linear TV allows advertisers to target viewers by. For political advertisers, however, targeting by zip codes doesn't quite cut it. When you break it down, congressional and legislative districts rarely line up with zip code maps, which sometimes forces candidates to buy an entire city or metro area in order to reach all the voters they want. This can result in a huge waste of money. 

Streaming, on the other hand, provides the ability to go beyond zip codes and target congressional and legislative districts from a geo perspective. This digital style targeting on television screens is something political campaigns were never able to access at scale before. And when you pair this with behavior and interest targeting, all of a sudden a political candidate can target “Democratic-leaning swing voters, that care about climate change, and live in a specific congressional district.”

This scenario recently played out in the primary for New York’s 19th Congressional District, which encompasses all or part of 11 different counties, spanning three different DMAs: New York City, Albany, and Utica. Instead of putting all their money into linear -- where they would have had to spend money across all three DMAs including the very expensive New York market -- campaigns utilized streaming to limit their buys to households within the district, making those buys far more cost-effective.

Understanding the Outcomes

Another benefit of streaming being digitally delivered is that it allows candidates to transcend the probabilistic feed they’re accustomed to on linear and get down to deterministic data. Sure, linear provides a confirmation that your spot ran on this channel at this time, but streaming provides a wealth of information that is tied to a specific household based on data from IP addresses, device IDs, and geolocation. 

All those data signals coming in can be leveraged towards performance-based attribution and measurement. So candidates can see which people were exposed to what ad, and if they went to the website, joined the email list, downloaded an app, donated to the campaign, or actually walked into a physical location to vote. This is a huge step up from linear where at most candidates can determine that their ad ran, and then probabilistically attribute activity to it during a window of time. 

In recent years, we’ve seen some innovative attempts to tap into culture, but this year candidates are focused on optimizing messaging, speaking to local voters and driving conversions. And at a time when the digital is struggling to adjust to privacy regulations, iOS changes, and the sunsetting of the cookie, CTV is offering a privacy-compliant, one-stop-shop platform for candidates to drive conversions. ■

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. ■

Television is transforming. Linear TV is on a slow decline, thanks to the rise of CTV and the proliferation of streaming platforms. Some math: Apple+Paramount+Disney+ ESPN+Crackle+BET+SamsungTV+Discovery+... equals a new world of television (and head-scratching lack of creativity on names). And Netflix announced it would begin to accept ads, creating a brand new behemoth in ad-supported streaming.

Consumers prefer to watch content on their own schedules, and we’re already witnessing the next generation of content consumers eschewing linear, meaning broadcasters will continue to lean deeply into connected TV apps like Paramount Plus, Peacock and others to retain audiences from linear. Some will even build new ones (although a small chorus of critics about the streaming revolution grows louder). 

As broadcasters embrace CTV as their bold and bright future, they must consider maximizing revenues through advertising. Linear TV was and remains the greatest brand-building opportunity in history. Most programming attracts a lean-back experience where people pay attention to ads but do not immediately purchase something, and CTV provides much of that same experience. 

CTV is seemingly a lifeline for broadcast and cable companies, but the wrong measurement could have disastrous ramifications. Advertisers and broadcasters are increasingly under pressure to think of CTV as more like digital because of its ability to enable more direct response advertising options. But to think of CTV as solely -- or even primarily -- a performance vehicle is a dangerous path. Certainly short-term outcomes (e.g., site visits, immediate online sales) matter to many advertisers, but to overlook the more powerful long-term brand outcomes that CTV can generate will cause broadcasters to shrink their revenue pie.

Here are four things I believe broadcasters must remember as they establish their CTV measurement strategy:

Consumers still pay attention to brand-building ads. 

The GEICO Gecko, the speaking and anthropomorphic M&Ms, the celebrity spokespeople of AT&T and Progressive, and the celebrity cameos all drive brand awareness and lasting consideration. 

It is still an opportunity to reach a huge audience and drive future product consideration. Ads geared towards brand building, which tell a compelling story appealing to viewers' emotions, will remain a powerful tool. You will struggle to drive conversations later if you don’t focus on generating brand lift first. Performance ads can capture demand, but brand ads generate demand.

Large advertisers still have a large brand-building budget they need to invest. The largest, most desired advertisers continue to invest in brand building. Earlier this year, Nielsen reported that brand awareness remains the top objective of global marketers. Bigger budgets in brand-building will remain moving forward, and TV (connected or linear) is where they are most inclined to spend it. If measurement discussions all point towards conversions and ROAs, publishers will be asking for performance dollars and moving away from TV’s main competitive advantage.

The attractiveness of performance media budgets is an illusion.

A debate is playing out about whether CTV is primarily a brand or performance channel -- and a shift towards performance is being discussed. I think there is room for both, but brand building should not take a back seat to performance. As investors pour money into performance-only CTV, positioning CTV (or linear for that matter) as solely a performance medium will only serve to decrease advertiser satisfaction. 

While performance media spend on CTV may be increasing in the short-term, many of these dollars are experimental, with the turnover of performance budgets being higher. I’ve heard from dozens of DTC marketers some version of “I tried CTV, but did not see immediate ROAs, so we stopped.” DTC advertisers investing an influx of dollars -- due to the low barrier of entry on CTV compared to linear -- may make you feel like you are getting richer, but these campaigns will be judged on their ability to drive immediate sales. Focusing on backward-facing metrics like multi-touch attribution (MTA) will paint an incomplete picture of an ad’s efficacy, leading to incorrect assumptions about success, and loss of media budgets later.

Brand building is highly measurable.

Many publishers are tempted to dive head-first into performance media because they know advertisers want measurement and erroneously believe KPIs like reach and brand outcomes are harder to measure. In reality, the right technology now exists and is scalable to validate how successful a tactic or campaign is in reaching a demographic or behavioral trait across channels and driving consumers down the funnel. By providing the right data, publishers can demonstrate how impactful campaigns were using their platform.

The most important thing to remember is that both linear and CTV broadcasters are in the business of building brands, not selling inventory. As CTV becomes a larger percentage of their business, they shouldn’t undervalue media simply because it’s digitized.

To allow performance media to be the primary measure by which your ROI is judged would be to slide towards infomercial-like programming and constant calls to action while turning off viewers and eroding brand affinities. As linear proved for decades, consumers want their commercial interrupts to take the same cinematic approach their content does.

I truly believe that CTV is a great spot to continually attract the world’s largest advertisers and recapture the budgets lost to linear’s decline. But only if they focus on the right measurement and tell the right story: there is no better way to build a brand than on TV. ￭

Innovid said that half of the video ad impressions serviced through its platform came in programming viewed on connected TV, the highest share ever, during the second quarter.

CTV impression volume was up 23% during the quarter, Innovid said.

"Innovid was founded on the premise that one day, the majority of TV content will be delivered through streaming channels," said Zvika Netter, co-founder and CEO of Innovid. "As seen with our CTV volume growth, that prediction is coming to life – driven by the ongoing migration of TV viewership not just toward CTV, but to ad-supported CTV as well – which is the foundation of our business."

The growth of CTV has followed the shift of consumers to streaming from traditional TV and the trend for streaming viewers to move from high cost subscription video services to lower-cost ad supported options.

This week The Walt Disney Co. said that it would be introducing the ad supported version of Disney Plus on December 8. Netflix will also be getting into the advertising business early next year.

"We believe a substantial share of streaming's future will be ad supported," added Netter. "As the CTV market matures and more and more TV media platforms are being added to the ecosystem on a regular basis, it reinforces our value proposition. The industry needs an independent scalable solution to integrate across platforms and partners, enabling brands to tap into the opportunity for enhanced reach, engagement, and performance through CTV advertising."

Innovid said that CTV accounted for 50% of all of Innovid's video impression volume served in the second quarter, up from 46% in Q2 of 2021, and CTV contributed 47% of total revenue in the second quarter, excluding TVSquared, which Innovid acquired in March.

Innovid's mobile video impressions increased 11% year-over-year and accounted for 38% of all video impression volume, while desktop decreased by 3% and accounted for 12% of video impressions served by Innovid. ■

Spin Magazine said it is working with independent streaming content distributor Best Ever Channels to create a free, ad-supported streaming (FAST) channel based on the music publication.

The channel is expected to have its debut in either the fourth quarter of 2022 or the first quarter of 2023.

The Spin channel would be joining the fast-growing CTV space, which has rapidly been adding viewers and attracting ad dollars.

“Spin is fun, irreverent, and high-profile,“ Spin magazine CEO Jimmy Hutcheson said. ”Spin has a certain style/tone that needs the right team to bring this channel to life. We’re delighted to be partnering with the team at BEC to create our FAST channel. 

“We spent time searching for a company that could truly build a channel that embodies what Spin means in terms of what our fans and readers expect, and I know Barry, Jonathon and their team will make that a reality,“ he added. ”They have deep knowledge of the streaming space, and I can’t wait for the channel’s launch later this year.”

Also: Gunpowder & Sky Scares Up Horror-Themed FAST Channel

At BEC, the Spin channel is being worked on by Barry Gordon, co-CEO of BEC, who brings decades of music-industry, comedy and Hollywood production experience to the project, and Jonathon Barbato, co-CEO of BEC and former head of marketing for Starz/Encore and MGM TV.

BEC expects the channel to be available on a variety of streaming platforms. It plans to offer connected TV device manufacturers exclusive, Spin branded music-based shows to play outside of the FAST channel. This content will be available for advertiser brand integrations and offered for license periods of up to three years.

Also: Amazon's IMDb TV Spins 'Judy Justice' into It's Own FAST Channel

“In addition to the channel, we’re planning to offer Spin advertisers and sponsors the benefit of impressions and brand attrition across, streaming platforms, CTVs, and podcasts which will provide them multiplatform brand exposure and ad-sales opportunities in a way that exceeds most FAST or AVOD channels in today’s universe,” Gordon said. “We’re honored to partner with SPIN on creating this channel, which I know music fans everywhere will love.”

Best Ever Channels offers 12 channels in FAST and AVOD formats, including Best TV Ever, The Grid and Best Westerns Ever. It also has its own streaming service, Best Classics Ever, which is available on Amazon Fire TV, mobile and the web. ■

Despite the huge amount of attention given to connected TV, realistically, we’re still years away from the true year of CTV. While CTV has seen record growth over the last two-plus years, there’s still a very sizable viewership on linear television; only 2% of respondents to TiVo’s Q4 2021 Video Trends Report reported canceling their pay TV service in the last six months, down considerably from the last survey. 

So, if cable and streaming will continue to coexist for the long term, advertisers shouldn’t feel like they have to choose between the two mediums. Bridging the linear and digital ecosystems can bring tremendous benefits to how advertisers tap into quality inventory, reach audiences across screens and measure and attribute their outcomes. 

Upfront buying vs. RTB trading 

Just as linear and CTV are converging, upfront buying and real-time bidding  (RTB) don’t exist in silos. Advertisers securing upfront inventory can still make future ad buys via real-time bidding and retain control over when they buy and how much they pay. For example, a small direct-to-consumer company seeking to drive sales of a specific product will have different goals and budget constraints than an established pharmaceutical business looking to increase brand awareness. Accordingly, each advertiser’s media mix will be reliant on these factors and more.   

This strategy is central to the future of TV buying, as advertisers will require the flexibility to reach their digital audiences with more transparency into how TV ads perform. 

Like-for-like inventory in CTV

Linear TV is still bought the way it historically has been — via Nielsen demographics and network/daypart. How do advertisers find the same like-for-like network inventory in CTV while tapping into the mass audience linear offers?

Matching technology now exists that identifies a unique identifier and then maps it to the CTV app owner or publisher to give advertisers advantages in both pre-bid and in reporting. When the impression can be confirmed as having served on a cable network publisher in a CTV/OTT environment, the unique identifier is matched to its corresponding cable network. Advertisers can then avoid bidding on an impression if this match wasn’t made and can access the combined impressions delivered at the network level. For example, if an impression is delivered on linear cable network "Discovery" and a CTV impression is delivered on a unique identifier determined to also be Discovery, these impressions are reported together. 

There are also capabilities available that allow advertisers to essentially bring together connected devices and households using cookie-less graphs. Using these graphs, advertisers can build audiences with data from across both linear and CTV to create single, anonymized, targetable IDs. The result is audiences that are curated for cross-screen TV. In this way, advertisers can connect with both TV viewers and cord-cutters and cord-nevers by adding CTV to linear TV media plans, boosting efficiency and minimizing ad spend waste.

CTV reporting to match linear results in cross-screen campaigns

The new way advertisers can think about CTV is as an extension of traditional TV supply, so their advertising remains fluid regardless of where, how and when their audience is watching. While media reports of ratings declines and finite supply in linear might scare advertisers away, these are mostly exaggerated scenarios. The reality is, many viewers are consuming TV across a variety of formats and will continue to do so. 

To get an understanding of how to measure both traditional and digital TV advertising in a streamlined way, advertisers can apply post-log data showing when TV ads are running to CTV. Centralizing ad performance data, including channel, daypart, network and more, from across all TV formats in one place allows advertisers to use and then apply data and insights from one TV channel to another. The ability to monitor performance and audience trends in near-real-time can help in optimizing campaigns across every screen and channel. Retaining ownership of this data is vital for use in other marketing activations via third-party applications.

CTV advertisers can also align GRP with CTV through indexed audiences, enhancing demo-based ad buys with behavioral and purchase data for advanced targeting. Data-driven audience technology can unearth the networks and dayparts that best apply to high-value audiences, helping advertisers optimize frequency, cut media waste and boost the reach of linear campaigns.

Linear television isn’t going anywhere and the digital-only ecosystem isn’t quite ready for primetime. Bringing together these ecosystems so they can work in harmony is how advertisers can reach and engage their audiences everywhere they are watching without sacrificing viewer experience. ■

With more of its viewing taking place on connected TV, Google's YouTube is launching new interactive features consumers can use while watching on bigger screens.

CTV viewers will be able to link what they’re watching on TV to their mobile devices, enabling them to share videos, read comments or start a chat session.

YouTube has been available on TV screens for 12 years. In the last two years, CTV viewing has boomed, with YouTube being one of the most-watched CTV services, with viewers watching 700 million hours of YouTube content on TV daily.

Also: YouTube Takes on TV With Frequency Caps and Shopping

“As more people watch YouTube on their TVs, one challenge we face as a design team is how to keep the experience simple, streamlined and intuitive, but also bring the best of YouTube to the TV. Today, we’re excited to share a new feature that gives TV viewers a direct way to access the full power of YouTube at your fingertips while watching on your TV,” said Brynn Evans, head of design for the YouTube app on TV, in a blog post.

The effort is the result of hundreds of hours of research into how viewers consume YouTube on TV. Two early insights were that remote controls are hard to use and that 70% of people said they use another digital device while watching TV.

“When we dug into this further, we noticed that people were not only simultaneously opening the YouTube mobile app, but were also engaging with the video (e.g. liking, subscribing) via their phones — all while playing the same video on the TV,” Evans said. “With these insights in mind, we stopped thinking about how to fit all these features into the big screen, and instead pivoted to think about how the phone can be more deeply connected to the TV experience overall.”

In order to use the new features, users must be signed into the same YouTube account on their TV and their mobile device. The YouTube app has to be opened on the mobile device and a “Connect” button needs to be clicked.

Once that’s done, the interactive features are activated.

More features on are the way, Evans said. 

“We’re already starting to test new designs for our video watch page to help fold in more uniquely YouTube features — such as browsing and shopping for products featured in videos – directly to the big screen to help you decide when to pick up your phone and engage,” he said.  ■

Reaffirming the strength of the connected TV ad market, Extreme Reach said CTV ad impressions rose 23% in the first quarter.

Extreme Reach said CTV’s share of digital video impressions jumped to 38% in the first quarter, up 23% from 31% in the fourth quarter. In the first quarter a year ago CTV had a 41% share of impressions.

CTV’s share increased in the quarter because the number of advertisers using the channel is swelling. Extreme Reach said that 67% of its advertising clients were using CTV for between 50% and 100% of their media mix.

"Since 2018, CTV has led other devices in share of impressions,” said Mary Vestewig, VP of digital account management at Extreme Reach. “When we look at the media mix across ad serving clients, regardless of volume of impressions, we see that for 67% of our advertisers, CTV accounted for 50% to 100% of the total ad mix in Q1. This seems to indicate that we’re seeing a return to pre-pandemic levels across all devices. Of course the video ad market changes constantly in response to shifts in consumer behavior, but as more streaming services adopt ad supported models, we anticipate that CTV will only grow larger.”

As CTV gathers steam, it is taking impressions from mobile devices. Advertisers who focus on CTV impressions devote a smaller share of their marketing efforts to putting ads in mobile apps. The inverse is true as well: those who devote a smaller share of their resources to CTV are buying more ads in mobile apps.

CTV is also taking impressions from desktop ads, which decreased 14% to a 19% share of impressions, the lowest since Q4 2019.

Premium publishers delivered 49% of the CTV impressions, up 49% from Q4.

Digital video increasingly is being dominated by 30-second commercials, with 91% of messages running at that length, the biggest share of impressions since Extreme Reach began monitoring the market in 2016.

CTV viewers are more engaged than in the past, with the video completion rate rising to 79% in the quarter from 75% in Q4.

For all of 2021, Extreme Reach said CTV accounted for 35% of impressions served for the year. Media aggregators accounted for 53% of impressions in 2021, while premium publishers accounted for 47%. That’s a 42% decline in impression volume for premium publishers compared to full year 2019, which indicates that aggregators now have more access to premium inventory, and advertisers have more choices for reaching their target audiences. ■

Throughout the industry, the pressure being put on publishers to bundle tech and demand partnerships is a signal that it is a good time to create new transparency and fairness standards for CTV. 

To get the best price and highest amount of fair competition for their inventory, CTV publishers should select ad tech platforms and demand partners through separate processes. The best tech platform for a publisher may be from a vendor that also provides demand or maybe from a vendor that provides technology only. However, publishers need a consistent, objective framework to make choices that will benefit their short-term revenue goals along with long-term growth and independence.

Beware of First Looks 

Both auction theory and years of empirical evidence tell us that publishers achieve the best yields when multiple bidders compete simultaneously in a transparent and fair unified auction – even for PMP deals. One aspect of the waterfall that is often overlooked is that they are highly beneficial to the demand partner at the top of the waterfall, which reduces competition for the publisher. The partner that has the first look at inventory sees all the inventory but is not subject to price competition. The same holds true for PMP and other deals where buyers are competing on price – if one partner has preferred access, the publisher isn’t getting the highest price across demand sources.

Demand partners that have that privileged top of the waterfall position – or get first preferred access to deals – are often tempted to discourage publishers from moving to a unified auction because they know the extra competition will hurt their fill rates even as the publisher benefits from that additional bid density on every impression. One method that self-interested demand partners can use to thwart a move to unified auctions is to refuse to bid into them or insist they can only be called from tech platforms they provide which may still give them a first look.   

Publishers encountering resistance to demand partners running in a unified auction should see this resistance as a red flag that the partner is favoring their own interests rather than working to get the publisher maximum yield. 

Beware of the Toll Gate 

Another reason that vendors may try to tie part of the ad stack together is to establish a toll gate (aka revenue collection opportunity) on external demand sources. If an ad server vendor effectively forces publishers to source programmatic demand through a programmatic path they control, there is likely to be toll gate now or in the future. Publishers should seek out innovative capabilities that make it easier to connect their parts of the stack to the rest of the ecosystem without any tolls. 

With web display, there are multiple options for how to connect demand sources and that means publishers can choose the path that is best for them. We are at a critical point in the evolution of programmatic CTV advertising where we are collectively deciding whether the future will be one where publishers can freely choose the technology platforms and demand that suit them best or whether those choices will be tied to together in ways that create sub-optimal outcomes for the entire ecosystem. If those choices exist, then vendors that offer the best value and efficiency will be winners. If those choices are curtailed, then the vendors with the largest legacy footprints will be the winners. The pie will be much larger if value and efficiency are rewarded. 

CTV Needs a Code of Conduct 

As header bidding took off for display ads on the web, many ecosystem participants were concerned about unfair auctions and vendors controlling the wrapper favoring their own demand. The success of Prebid.js and the principles of Prebid.org addressed this issue. Prebid.org promoted fairness and transparency through its Code of Conduct which required all member companies to abide by a set of rules that ensured fair auctions.

By setting standards that ensured fair and transparent auctions, Prebid provided publishers the option to choose their tech stack separately from their demand partners which meant publishers could find the combination that maximized their yield and best served their needs.  

Unfortunately, CTV unified auctions are not heading in the same direction. Too many vendors are trying to leverage their demand for preferential access or trying to use control of one part of the ad stack to restrict publisher choice in other components.  In order for programmatic CTV to become a fair and transparent marketplace, we need the principles that Prebid.org championed on the web to become industry standard for CTV, such as having a fair wrapper and to design for interoperability.  

Demand partners should be willing to bid into unified auctions where the operator has agreed to fair and transparent auctions. Vendors throughout the stack should be willing to interoperate with publisher's choice of components and not restrict publishers to using their full stack. These changes won’t happen unless publishers insist their vendors adhere to principles of fairness, transparency and interoperability. ■

Viamedia, an independent ad company serving local cable operators, said it launched its Parity Ads Platform, which simultaneously inserts regionally targeted ads on linear streams to match local commercials appearing on cable. 

The platform is designed to help local operators take advantage of the growth of CTV in their markets.

"Our new Parity Ads Platform is one of the industry's first transitional approaches and introduces the immediate next step to achieving fully dynamic advertising," said David Solomon, president & CEO at Viamedia. "This presents an enormous opportunity for our MVPD partners around the country to essentially turn their linear inventory into connected TV inventory, all while better serving their local communities, businesses and advertisers."

Viamedia’s Parity Ads Platform enables MVPDs to regionalize streaming distribution by inserting regionally targeted ads on linear streams which mirror the ads running on traditional SD and HD channels. Viamedia sees the Parity Ads Platform as transitional approach convergence. The platform is designed to help accelerate time-to-market and to reduce technological risks associated with transitioning linear into digital streams.

“The industry is beginning to catch on to the benefits of a parity approach. As subscribers are transitioned to streaming, there's often not enough impressions to sell independently. By replicating the same ad on two platforms, MVPDs are able to optimize linear and CTV feeds for advertisers, maximizing inventory and ad sales during the migration. This system is specifically developed to drive greater demand and value for existing advertising inventory,” Solomon said. ■

Tubi, Fox’s free, ad-supported streaming service said it is working with Nielsen to measure viewing on more devices.

Nielsen’s Digital Ad Ratings products will include Tubi viewing on computers, mobile devices, and connected TV devices. 

The added inputs will give advertisers a more comprehensive view of ad performance on Tubi, inclusive of co-viewing. Nielsen said the move is a step towards its Nielsen One service, Nielsen’s new cross-platform measurement system.

“As a movie and television streaming service with 80% of our viewers watching on TV screens, we’re excited about the proposed integration of Nielsen Digital Ad Ratings measurement across our device partners,” said Mark Rotblat, chief revenue officer at Tubi. “This upcoming device coverage replaces slim proxies with comprehensive and stable currency-grade measurement, allowing our advertisers to transact on audiences in a way that is apples-to-apples with traditional TV.”

With the proposed Nielsen DAR integration on Tubi, brands will get deeper contextual insights and be able to align brand objectives with the thousands of movies and television titles audiences consume. Advertisers will also be able to better understand the demographic and interest-based attributes of an audience.   

"We are excited to expand our relationship with Tubi through this integration, which enables enhanced and comprehensive measurement through Nielsen Digital Ad Ratings,” said Ameneh Atai, GM, digital audience measurement at Nielsen. “In this increasingly fragmented media landscape, the need for independent measurement is more critical than ever, as is providing more transparency to advertisers. Nielsen Digital Ad Ratings delivers audience measurement metrics across computers, smartphones, tablets and connected TV, providing campaign insights across digital media platforms and a deeper understanding of the unique reach of Tubi's target audiences.” ■

VideoByte, a provider of connected TV advertising technology, said it selected DoubleVerify to head its effort to protect the advertisers, publishers and users it works with from invalid traffic.

“DoubleVerify is leading the way when it comes to CTV measurement,” said Nicholas Frazee, CRO for Videobyte. “We wanted to continue to partner with companies such as DoubleVerify so we can offer innovative capabilities for all of our partners through third-party verification and controls.”

As CTV has grown, so have fraud schemes. Many of those schemes have been detected by DoubleVerify, inoculating its users.

DoubleVerify was one of the first companies to get accreditation from the Media Rating Council for ad impression measurement and sophisticated invalid traffic detection, including app fraud in CTV.

Also: DoubleVerify Finds CTV Ads Running with TV Set Turned Off

“We are proud of the innovation that DoubleVerify has achieved in driving media quality controls and measurement in the CTV space,” added Steven Woolway, executive VP, business development for DoubleVerify. “Our partnership with VideoByte demonstrates the value of a leading CTV provider embracing DV’s solutions to offer a superior product to marketers.”

Working together DoubleVerify and Videobyte also will assist publishers in intelligently optimizing demand sources. With a more granular understanding of apps, traffic and categories, both businesses are helping publishers to increase yield and revenue, the companies said. ■

Programmatic video ad spend in the US is projected to reach $43 billion in 2022 compared to CTV’s $19 billion, but CTV is growing fast. So fast that it's causing major headaches for buyers and sellers, who are juggling complicated point solutions and untested processes and drowning in unstandardized data. What's more, advertisers often don't have visibility into what they're buying, making it hard to justify increasing the budget.

Take a simple example: a brand wants to buy on NBC’s Peacock platform, but they only want to buy prime-time sitcoms, not morning shows, sports or news. The meta-data that’s universally available on linear buying channels – like show title and description – isn’t available for programmatic CTV, so they aren’t able to select specific content at any scale. In other words, a programmatic CTV buyer can’t pick what content to bid on. That’s starting to change, but accelerating this shift will require coordination across buyers, sellers and middlemen.

Pressure to Offer Content Targeting

Programmatic technology was originally built to target audiences, not content. As a result much of the programming information that TV media buyers are used to doesn’t show up in a bid request. It’s slow to change for a few reasons, but there is major pressure building. Many publishers are nervous that their last and most valuable asset -- “traditional” TV shows -- will be commoditized. These publishers save much of their longform content for direct sales, and so they aren’t always focused on adding more transparency and control to their programmatic CTV buying experience.

However, transparency will ultimately win out. For hesitant publishers, it’s just a matter of time before they feel that they must enable programmatic CTV buying to include the same information that they provide for direct buys. This would seem a no-brainer, with demand from brands and agencies for programmatic CTV expected to be relentless in 2022 and beyond. There is also past precedent. Publishers were reluctant to be transparent with display advertising placements a decade ago, and now many earn a majority of their revenue through channels such as PMPs. As CTV continues to steal audiences from traditional TV, the resulting increase in inventory supply will make its way into programmatic channels similar to display and video before it.

For publishers that have started to share information about shows -- from title to genre to topic keywords – the process is completely unstandardized. A buyer would have to manually read the information across every bid request to actually know what to buy. These publishers are best positioned to embrace the next wave of programmatic CTV where contextual buying, similar to TV buying, is side-by-side with audience-based buying, but they need a way to improve the information they are sharing.

Enter the Content Object

CTV is very fragmented, without a major player or industry body dictating most of the processes and standards.

There have been some rumbles across the industry for a potentially small but important step toward standardized content information sharing within the programmatic buying process. Content Object is a field within the IAB’s OpenRTB API standard that offers a potential solution to the issue CTV has with content targeting, but has met with slow adoption. Given that nearly everyone operates in a way that is friendly to OpenRTB, and that Content Object is a field that can be shared almost universally across buyers, sellers and tech partners, we need to give this option a closer look.

For Content Object to take off, the CTV ecosystem needs to agree upon content standards, especially taxonomies. Many of these can be lifted from linear TV metadata, but publishers may need the help to make sense of the new data – translating it into an input to control inventory and pricing.

For a start, publishers should consider passing Content Object data signals to SSPs and buyers because it will provide more transparency to buyers and ultimately drive more demand and yield (CPM increases). SSPs and DSPs can then get a cross-ecosystem view of content object data and start to determine the best way to standardize this information according to IAB recommendations. These middle-men can also start to better understand how different data equates to changes in yield -- helping publishers maximize the revenue for their inventory while providing insights that brands need to feel more comfortable increasing their spend. 

Content Object Signals Unlock New Demand

Enabling content-targeted programmatic CTV will bring a host of new demand for publishers. More traditional media buyers will feel more comfortable because they can buy using the same approach that they use for linear TV and get more transparency within this new channel. 

Once more linear buyers become comfortable with programmatic, they’ll start to discover the opportunities to measure beyond current metrics. By encouraging more programmatic CTV media buying, more buyers become more used to the flexibility and transparency afforded by programmatic and will start to adopt new metrics and new targeting types. These steps will move us closer to transforming TV into a transparent and data-rich channel, and helping to close the gap between linear TV and CTV. 

PubMatic is an independent technology company delivering digital advertising’s supply chain of the future. ■

YouTube, looking to compete with free-ad supported streaming channels as more of its viewing occurs on connected TVs, is offering viewers a collection of licensed TV programs they can watch for free with commercial interruptions.

Google’s streaming video giant said it has more than 4,000 episodes of shows including relatively recent series like Hell’s Kitchen, cult favorites The Prisoner and Thunderbirds, such classics as Bonanza and The Dick Van Dyke Show and black and white oldies like The Rifleman and Dennis the Menace.

It plans to add up to 1,000 new titles each week that users can access via web browsers, mobile devices and connected TVs via the YouTube TV app.

Also: YouTube's $8.63 Billion in Q4 Revenue Surpassed Netflix

YouTube also has more than 1,500 movies from studios including Disney, Warner Bros., Paramount, Lionsgate and Filmrise. New titles available to stream free with ads in March include Gone in Sixty Seconds, Runaway Bride and Legally Blonde.

YouTube built a huge business with user generated content but found the original content business more challenging.

Now a big chunk of its viewership is coming via connected TVs, with people watching on a big screen with friends and family. YouTube points to Nielsen stats showing that YouTube reached 135 million people on connected TVs in the U.S. in December.

“To enhance the viewing experience in the living room, we’re unveiling brand new streamlined navigation and immersive banner art to help you more easily find your favorite TV shows from the comfort of the couch whether you choose to rent, purchase or watch for free with ads. Many of these titles are also now available in high definition 1080p with 5.1 surround sound audio on supported devices,” YouTube said in a blog post.

More people are spending more time streaming content, and increasingly, they’re choosing lower-cost ad supported options over pricier subscription services.

YouTube offers YouTube Premium, which provides videos and YouTube music ad free for $11.99 a month.

CTV is one of the fastest-growing areas in video advertising as brands look to engage with cord-cutters and other streamers.

Also: YouTube Moves BrandCast to Broadcast’s Upfront Week

YouTube will be selling the ads in these shows mainly through YouTube Select, a collection of YouTube’s most-watched content aimed at brand-safety conscious television advertisers. ■

CTV has renewed original drama series Transplant for a third season, the Canadian TV network announced Thursday (February 17). The second season will continue to air in Canada on CTV Mondays at 10 p.m. ET before moving to Tuesdays at 10 p.m. ET starting March 1.

Season three will film in Montreal and will have 13 episodes. Hamza Haq will be reprising his role as Dr. Bashir 'Bash' Hamed, a Syrian refugee who practices emergency medicine at York Memorial Hospital in Toronto. 

The season currently has 1.1 million viewers in ages 25-54, provided by Numeris, Total Canada, Winter 2021-22 season (December 13, 2021 - February 13, 2022, including preliminary data). Season two will premiere in the U.S. on NBC March 6 at 10 p.m. The drama is also slated for release in the U.K., Australia, Spain, Germany, The Netherlands and more. 

"Viewers around the world have embraced Transplant, and we look forward to bringing this exceptional cast back as we continue to tell the stories of York Memorial Hospital," said Justin Stockman, VP, content development & programming, Bell Media. "With our partners at Sphere Media and Universal International Studios, Canadians can look forward to more of the emotional and gripping narratives they have come to love."

Transplant is produced by Sphere Media in association with CTV and Universal International Studios, a division of Universal Studio Group. ■

A new survey conducted for Magnite finds that 44% of cable subscribers would cancel cable if they could get access to live streamed sports and events.

More live events are being streamed, and once consumer awareness catches up, even more cord cutting could result, said Magnite, the largest sell-side advertising platform, which generates a growing share of its revenue from connected TV advertising.

"Anecdotally, we know that live TV, especially live sports, is unparalleled in its ability to get people engaged and we commissioned this study to better understand how people access and interact with this content," said Sean Buckley, chief revenue officer at Magnite. "One of the findings from this study is that engagement with live content extends to the advertising that airs alongside it. With more audiences tuning into live TV via streaming, it’s another indicator that advertisers should be actively exploring this channel.”

Magnite’s study, entitled CTV Live Streaming: TV’s Next Big Moment, found that 68% of current CTV viewers use at least one live streaming service.

Among viewers who stream live sports, 49% agreed with the statement that “TV ads are an important part of my TV watching experience," with 62% saying they had discovered new products as a result of watching ads on streaming services. 

Among those sports streamers, 67% said they pay more attention to ads that match their lifestyle and interests.

Also: Magnite, fuboTV Team To Offer Addressable Ads in Sports on CTV

“CTV is a premium viewing experience with highly engaged audiences that can’t be reached via traditional linear and pay TV,” said Diana Horowitz, senior VP, advertising sales at fuboTV. “Historically live sports kept audiences tied to their cable subscriptions. That’s no longer the  case with live sports including marquee events and regional sports networks widely available on CTV platforms like fuboTV. In fact, 90% of our viewers watch fuboTV live and 93% of sports content on fuboTV is viewed live.”

The report also said that live sports streamers are likely to watch multiple ad-supported services and use an average of 3.6 sports apps. Sports fans unsurprisingly prefer to watch live over watching on demand. The report notes that 70% of live sports programming is watched in real time. One edge that cable or broadcast TV has over streaming services is a delay to live TV viewed on the internet due to latency in the technology.

The survey was conducted for Magnite by Lucid, which surveyed 1,500 U.S. adult television watchers (at least 7 hours per week) online between December 23 and December 30. ■

The adoption of streaming by consumers slowed in the fourth quarter of 2021, with just a 1% increase in the fourth quarter, according to Conviva’s State of Streaming report.

Globally, adoption of streaming by consumers grew just 7% year on year, Conviva said.

“Like many other industries, streaming adoption spiked during the pandemic, as people spent more time at home and continually sought the fresh, creative content delivered by streaming publishers,” said Keith Zubchevich, president and CEO, Conviva. “Fortunately, like sweatpants and sourdough, streaming is holding on to the enormous growth it saw over the past eight quarters. The growth rate may be slowing, but the streaming industry is now well established and unlikely to ever go back to prepandemic levels.”

Conviva also found that streamers increasingly using smart TVs to view streaming content. Smart TVs showed a 47% increase in streaming time year over year. Android TV was up 42%, LG grew 36% and Samsung grew 27%. Connected TV devices were down 2%, although Roku was up 12%. Amazon Fire TV was down 7% and Apple TV lost 1%.

Also: Global Streaming Rises 21% in 3Q: Conviva Report

In terms of viewing quality, Conviva found that it took longer for videos to start playing, particularly in Asia and North America. On the other hand, buffering problems were down 22% and bitrates improved by 12%.

Advertising start time grew to 2.6 seconds from just 0.3 seconds a year ago. But there were fewer missed ad opportunities and picture quality improved.

Conviva collected the data for its report using proprietary sensor technology across 500 million viewers who watched 200 billion streams per year using 4 billion applications. ■

CTV has caused a seismic shift in the media and entertainment landscape, which can mainly be attributed to its reach and accessibility. Consumers are continuing to cut the cable cord and gravitate toward this media platform as CTV provides access to an abundant amount of programming and has expanded how and where audiences can view content. CTV is not only changing the way consumers interact with media- advertisers are quickly adapting to the changing TV landscape and tapping into targeted audiences in order to effectively engage with consumers 

As the adoption of CTV continues to revolutionize the media landscape, it’s important to begin to look for opportunities to take advantage of the medium’s rapid growth trajectory. CTV will only continue to grow in available offerings, and provide highly accessible content to consumers across multiple platforms, giving the brands who advertise on these platforms further access to consumer data.

We are witnessing the globalization of content -- streaming platforms are featuring both VoD content and dedicated channels, meaning that there will be equal emphasis on both live and linear programming as we move forward. Within both on-demand content and live programming lies opportunities for targeted advertisements to reach the desired consumer. 

For a brand to really strategically position itself at the forefront of this changing landscape, it is imperative they prepare a clear and targeted advertising plan in an effort to connect to their audience through CTV. This can be accomplished by ensuring that CTV platforms are specifically included in a company’s advertising & marketing budget. To not take advantage of the advertising capabilities offered through CTV, especially given its rapid growth nationally with consumers, would be a missed opportunity for brands. 

Enter the FAST (free, ad-supported streaming TV) market. We’re at a time when brands are mapping out their intended budgets and strategies for the year ahead. Brand marketers would be wise to consider setting aside the resources to consider building their own streaming TV channel. Publishers or advertisers can start their own channel at little to no overhead cost thanks to the many FAST services out there today, and they can also immediately profit off of the channel’s viewership. Easy access to existing viewership or audiences will give any brand looking to grow via CTV a leg up over their competition. 

So, you might be thinking: what’s next? Where is the next opportunity? Right now, the untapped opportunities in the future of CTV lie in both the marketing capabilities of advertisers to reach a targeted audience, and in the ability to create highly customizable content for a brand’s audience. The collaborative opportunities across brands and audiences are truly endless here. If a brand can tap into the interests of their unique audience, not only can customized advertisements appear on a CTV platform, but unique content geared specifically towards the interests of an audience can be quickly developed and streamed via CTV. Simply put, streaming TV services offer more diverse offerings and therefore provide advertisers with the ability to target consumers at a more granular level. 

Unlike a larger broadcasting network, this streamlines the process of developing content and advertisements because of the access to unique consumer data down to the household or individual streaming device. This allows advertisers to reach their target audience like never before by using clear data points directly from the consumers' CTV habits. 

In thinking through the previously mentioned advertising and marketing opportunities for a targeted audience, we can ask ourselves: what’s on the horizon from CTV? We can expect to see advertisers from all media platforms flocking over to CTV from traditional, linear TV in an attempt to access a growing audience. 

We are watching audiences consume content in this manner more than ever, with growth in 2020, and beyond, simply skyrocketing. Because of this, we can expect not only unique and targeted ads to come through our CTV devices, but we can also expect to see custom streaming content in the form of series, shorts, movies, or even variety shows featuring the specific talent or brand that an audience craves. 

In this changing landscape of TV media, we are not in a position of “if” CTV will surpass traditional linear TV, but “when”. And increasingly, that “when” is pointing to now. Now is the time to think and act strategically in an effort to keep up with the rapidly changing behaviors of TV consumers and advertisers. To not change and adapt to your audience is to miss out on so much untapped potential in your ad spend.

Distro TV is an independent free ad-supported streaming television platform. ■

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. ■

Media buyer Magna Global forecasts that total U.S long-form video ad revenue will rise 7% in 2022 after a 6% gain in 2021 to $65.6 billion.

For long-form video in 2022, Magna sees the biggest gains coming in AVOD, OTT and CTV revenue at 29%. Growth in 2021 was 26% in 2021 and accounted for a 2% share of the overall ad spending.

National broadcast and cable are expected to decline 5% in 2022 with local TV growing 13%, including political and Olympic spending. Without those cyclical events, local video revenue is seen declining 3%.

 Also: Magna Sees U.S. Long-Form Video Ad Revenue Rising 4% in 2022 

Short form video is seen rising 27% in 2022 after a 47% increase to $16.3 billion in 2021.

All U.S. media ad revenues are expected to be up 13%, with digital up 17%. That follows a 24% rebound to $284.3 billion in 2021, according to Magna.

 Also: U.S. TV Ad Spending To Rise By 4% in 2022, Zenith Forecasts

Global ad revenues are expected to grow 12% in 2022, with TV up 3.4% and digital up 16%. 

“The global ad market recovered above and beyond the economic recovery in 2021. Mature linear ad formats recovered to 90% of the pre-COVID level, just as the economy did. Digital ad formats, by contrast, grew much faster than expected, driven by multiple organic growth factors, e-commerce boom being the most significant,” said Vincent Létang, executive VP, global market research at Magna. 

“Traditional, brand- and privacy-safe media remain crucial to building consumer brands, as shown by the strong demand boosting TV costs in 2021, but marketers are increasingly diversifying into digital formats to reach hard-to-reach audiences, improve ROI  and connect more seamlessly to e-commerce. This once-in-a-lifetime planet alignment of growth factors led to the unprecedented market  growth we experienced in 2021,” Létang said. ■

Future Today, a streaming video company with channels including HappyKids, Fawesome and Filmrise, says working with AT&T’s Xandr unit is helping it cash in on the booming connected TV market.

Advertisers are shifting ad dollars to connected TV, but at the same time, the number of CTV players and the amount of content in the market has made it difficult for a smaller, independent players to attract programmatic buyers.

Xandr has worked with Future Today since 2018. Since then, Xandr has shifted from its original focus on digital video to connected TV. Working with the Xandr Monetize marketplace established this year, Future Now has been able to boost CTV revenue in the first half of 2021 by 200% compared to the first half of 2020, the companies said.

“It’s about being able to better monetize our inventory,” Vikrant Mathur, CEO of Future Today told Broadcasting+Cable.

Before getting together Future Today was heavily reliant on third parties as sources of demand. As CTV started to take off, “we saw an opportunity to invest more in the programmatic side of the monetization business,” Mathur said.

Also: Most Brands Plan To Spend More on CTV: Advertiser Perceptions

Most of Future Today’s ad sales for its entertainment programming is now done programmatically. Most of its kids business is done via direct sales.

When it first got together with Xandr, Future Today was looking to ensure and enforce quality standards on its platform, allow for new buyer targeting and grow revenue abroad.

“We have healthy relationships with most other DSPs, but with Xandr we’ve been able to do some cool things that we weren’t doing before and we’ve had good monetization,” Mathur said.

Xandr Monetize provided Future Today with robust ad controls that extended the decision-making process for which advertisers and types of ads are appropriate to show within specific inventory.

“When we look at the increase in monetization we’ve seen with Vikrant and Future Today, a lot of it has started ith our Premium Video Catalog,” said Bill Casper, director of partnerships and new business at Xandr.

Xandr’s Premium Video Catalog is designed to provide buyers access to always-on, one-to-one video and connected TV deals from top media owners and distributors across devices, content categories, formats and app types. Deals include the contextual data points and provide targeting and reporting.

Adding Future Today’s channels to the catalog helped buyers find those channels and, on the back end, understand how campaigns are performing. New advertisers can also get on the air a lot quicker buying programmatically than they can through a more traditional relationship.

“There’s wonderful technology, but there’s still a lot of conversations that go on with buyers about the premium content and how to filter through some of the noise that is digital a lot of the time,” Casper added. “So there’s old-fashioned boots on the ground that go along with the technology to help facilitate that.”

That makes having a close relationship with partners like Xandr important to Future Today.

“We think about CTV as the premium aspect of TV blended with digital targeting and monetization capabilities,” Mathur said. “It;s about passing the right signals. If we don’t share that information they’re not going to be able to provide the kind of user experience consumer have come to expect now with CTV being mainstream.”

Future Today and Xandr hope to continue to grow ad revenue together, Casper said Xandr is adding technology that will enable buyers to put their ads in specific ad breaks within shows and in specific slots within pods.

“Next year is going to be a big year for political, which should help contribute to the continued growth in programmatic as some traditional TV dollars shift to digital,” he said.

Mathur notes that viewers will also continue to move from traditional TV to streaming. “I foresee that trend to only accelerate going forward,” he said. “I think the dollars have to follow and programmatic is the big pipe through which a lot of this is going to be delivered.”■

Ad tech company Innovid said it began trading as a publicly owned company on the New York Stock Exchange Wednesday. 

Innovid’s ticker symbol is CTV.

The company went public through a merger with ION Acquisition Corp. in a SPAC deal valued at $1.3 billion.

Founded in 2007, Innovid’s advanced advertising business is taking advantage of the boom in connected TV, which is expected to become a nearly $30 billion business by 2024.

“14 years ago, we made a big bet on the future of TV with the creation of Innovid,” said Zvika Netter, co-founder and CEO at Innovid. “Today, our bet is paying off, allowing us to reimagine what the next chapter of TV looks like as CTV takes off full speed ahead, shaping the bright future of advertising. We are entering the public market knowing that Innovid is the only independent company with the technology, people, reputation, resources, commitment, scale, media bias-free solutions, and independence to create this future for advertisers.”

Also: Innovid Gets MRC Accreditation For Desktop, Mobile Display Ads

With the proceeds from the transaction with ION, Innovid plans to extend its technology and integrate with CTV publishers across international markets. It Is also developing additional personalized CTV ad formats.

“This milestone represents the success of Innovid’s empowered leadership and strategic vision,” said Gilad Shany, CEO of ION. “From the start of our partnership, the Innovid team has demonstrated the power of its innovations and their potential to define the next generation of TV advertising. I look forward to joining Innovid’s Board of Directors to further support the expansion of its global CTV capabilities.”■

The global supply chain is under strain as the world emerges from the COVID-19 pandemic. From microchip shortages to delivery delays, brands are under enormous strain to keep up with consumer demand with limited products and reduced labor, particularly as we enter the holiday shopping season. And supply chain issues may stretch into 2022. Tim Uy of Moody’s Analytics said that the problems caused by disruptions in the supply chain will “get worse before they get better.”

For many brands, the first priority is product-oriented. They must figure out how to produce and ship products to meet demand. At the same time, advertising is a powerful lever that marketers can pull to help the bottom line. 

When managed strategically, advertising budgets can be apportioned to minimize costs, and manage demand. With so many brands moving to CTV in order to reach consumers that have shifted to streaming media, biddable advertising can be a safe haven for brands. While the product supply chain is in chaos, optimizing the CTV supply chain can help keep growth plans on track.

Performance Marketers Find Flexibility

As early adopters of biddable media, performance marketers are well equipped to measure the direct effect that their advertising has on sales. With this knowledge in hand, performance marketers will find that moving more budget into a biddable market gives them immediate control over demand for their products. 

It also affords more flexibility to tailor messaging and targeting based on product availability and regional logistics. For example, an e-commerce shoe retailer with an excess of warm weather shoes can target southern states to move relevant products. Once deliveries for fall and winter products come in, they can quickly move their spend to reach customers in colder weather.

Biddable CTV inventory is also valuable for its “insurance value.” Even the best-laid plans can be sidelined when the supply chain doesn’t come through. For performance marketers who manage a close balance between inventory in house and advertising costs, being able to dial spend quickly up or down can help to ensure that demand is in line with supply even within a short window.

Premium Brands Save on CPMs

For brands that use CTV inventory for brand advertising, biddable inventory can provide a much needed break on costs. Car companies, for example, are experiencing major delays in product delivery for high priced items. Without immediate income, these brands can help reduce costs by moving money to the biddable market where it’s easier to control costs with maximum bids and controlled volume spending. 

At the same time, brands like car companies, appliance retailers and electronics manufacturers need to keep their audience interested. Biddable CTV gives brands an efficient way to stay in front of customers while supply is low so that they are top of mind when the customer is ready to make a purchase once supply is available. CTV provides highly relevant contextual brand advertising options that are also affordable, so that brands can stretch their dollar and reach those customers as they ride out the shortage.

Brand Advertisers Focus on Net-New Audiences

CTV is also a major opportunity for brands to reach new audiences like “cord cutters” and “cord nevers” who aren’t reachable on linear TV channels. As brands move into CTV, focusing on net-new audiences makes sense during this period of supply-chain strain because it can take time to build a new relationship. Brands can introduce new audiences to products that they might be ready to buy months from now, hopefully as the supply chain issues start to ease.

Biddable media in particular gives brands access to a wider variety of CTV publishers, which allows them to diversify and find more people than if they focused solely on the top few CTV media companies. Brands can reach new viewers on premium medium-sized publisher sites for a relative bargain -- often creating an even more relevant experience.

No brand asked for a supply chain crisis, especially in the midst of a pandemic. The silver lining is that these stressors are causing companies to reevaluate their approach to advertising, audience and sales. With millions of consumers moving to streaming media, a clear area of focus is reaching people on this new channel. The wise way to approach CTV for many brands is to focus on biddable media for more reach, more flexibility, and better prices.

Pubmatic is a sell-side platform that delivers superior outcomes for digital advertising.

Vevo said it launched 10 streaming music channels on Allen Media Group’s Local Now.

The deal with Local Now is part of Vevo’s strategy to bring its content to viewers through connected TVs in both on-demand and linear formats. Vevo said that 70 million Americans watch Vevo through CTV each month.

"We are excited to expand our linear footprint nationally with a rapidly-rising FAST service like Local Now, utilized across more than 225 local U.S. markets by millions of consumers, who watch music videos and other premium content through connected devices," said Rob Christensen, VP, advanced TV, Vevo.

Also: Vevo Launches Somos Vevo Ads To Reach Hispanics Via CTV

"Linear programming allows us to create a more tailored lean-back viewing experience on TV that caters to a variety of music fans and preferences," he said.

Christensen noted that there is an appetite for nostalgic content, so Vevo has curated decade-by-decade themed channels. 

The Vevo channels on Local Now are Vevo Pop, Vevo R&B, Vevo Hip Hop, Vevo Reggaeton & Trap, Vevo Country, Vevo Latino, Vevo ‘70s, Vevo ‘80s, Vevo ‘90s, and Vevo 2K. 

Also: Vevo Campaign for Credit Karma Wins Advanced Advertising Innovation Award

For a limited time through the end of the year, Local Now users can tune into Vevo Holiday, a channel programmed for the holiday season.

Local Now has more than 420 free streaming channels, including a Local Now channel in every DMA in the country.

Also: Allen Media’s Local Now Adds Pac-12 Insider

“Local Now is experiencing exponential growth as a free-streaming service. Our audience is reaping the benefits of that growth as we continue to expand our content and channels,” said Byron Allen, founder, chairman, and CEO of the Allen Media Group. “This partnership with Vevo adds more depth to our fast-growing lineup, bringing the biggest music stars to our users’ living rooms or wherever they like to stream.”

The Local Now app is available on Roku, Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, Android TV, Xfinity, Vizio, Samsung, Android and iOS devices.

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.”

Merkle said its Merkury identity resolution and data platform will be using TransUnion’s TruAudience Data Marketplace to enable people-based ad campaigns via connected TV.

Through the combination, brands will be able to leverage first- and third-party data to reach advanced audiences.

Also Read: TransUnion, Diving Into CTV, Buys Data Company

“It is critical for advertisers and publishers to trust the data they are using, which is the cornerstone of TransUnion,” said Michelle Swanston, VP of customer success and data marketplace at TransUnion. “By integrating Merkury and TransUnion identity, marketers and publishers are able to provide greater scale and accuracy to better engage consumers with relevant advertising.”

With the increase in cord cutting, advertisers are turning to CTV and data platforms are making deals to help brands identify potential consumers.

“As the connected TV landscape continues to scale, we are excited to partner with TransUnion to provide marketers with access to people-based advertising opportunities on emerging CTV platforms,” said Andy Fisher, head of Merkury Advanced TV, Merkle/CXM. “Through this partnership, TransUnion’s destination partners, which include dozens of premium publishers and the industry’s leading ad tech platforms, can enable data-driven campaigns for Merkury clients with faster turnaround time.”