Connected television will provide the most significant video platform for advertisers with the growth of programmatic media buying. These automated transactions will depend on a variety of supporting technologies to help brands identify the households they want to reach while also respecting consumer privacy. For marketers to commit more of their media budgets to CTV, they’ll also demand metrics that help them to evaluate the success of their campaigns.
“Due to the number of platforms and devices that run ads at any given time, it can be a challenge for marketers to accurately measure the success of the CTV ad campaign,” Dave Simon, vice president of sales at ad-tech firm Viant Technology, said in this Beet.TV interview. “For that reason, we see measurement and reporting becoming a key driver of purchasing decisions in the future.”
Viant’s demand-side platform for programmatic buying, Adelphic, offers advanced reporting tools for multitouch attribution analytics across a variety of media platforms and connected devices. Those platforms include “walled-garden” media environments that have proprietary data about their audiences, making cross-platform measurement more difficult.
“With Viant’s people-based DSP, advertisers are able to accurately target and meet their audiences where it’s most relevant for them,” Simon said to Sr. Editor Rob Williams. “We solve this challenge by providing a cookie-less privacy-compliant ID that enables measurement across any platform.”
Transparency of Ad Inventories
Marketers and media buyers want as much information as possible about the advertising inventories offered by media companies, including video publishers and streaming platforms. That information includes metadata about content that provides the surrounding context for their advertisements, and details about the order in which their ads appear during commercial breaks, or pods.
Content metadata “allows advertisers to not only understand that their ads will run with a video, but also what kind of video that their ads will appear on,” Simon said. “This is important as marketers are able to receive more visibility into where their ads will be and if they’re reaching relevant audiences alongside brand-safe content.”
Unified Buying for CTV and Linear TV
Viant recently partnered with ad-tech company Beachfront to help media buyers manage their video advertising campaigns across traditional linear TV and newer ad-supported streaming platforms.
“The biggest benefit of this partnership is that it brings the control, the transparency and addressability of CTV across the aisle to linear TV,” Simon said. “We’re now making it possible for our brands and agencies to utilize all forms of TV in a smarter fashion. That in turn allows them to activate more efficient campaigns while accelerating the time it takes to activate TV ads.”
Growing Dominance of CTV
Simon predicts that CTV will expand its current role of providing incremental reach beyond linear TV campaigns.
“In the future when all ads run programmatically, CTV will anchor the broad-reaching campaigns, leveraging privacy-compliant household IDs for measurement,” Simon said. “That will be complemented and accentuated by linear TV and/or another platform like digital out of home or digital audio.”
All streaming platforms, including subscription video on demand (SVOD) pioneers like Netflix that have eschewed advertising, will have some kind of ad-supported offering, Simon predicted.
“This will bring, of course, more reach as well as more premium inventory into programmatic and that’s a win for all sides,” Simon said. “Additionally, I believe we will have an agreed-upon currency across linear TV as well as CTV, and we’re betting on household impressions as that currency.”
You are watching Transforming CTV: Delivering a Better Ad Experience for Viewers,” a Beet.TV Leadership Series presented by Beachfront. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.
