If you want to buy ads on connected TV, do you want to place them in a premium TV show or in a virtual fireplace app?
Some think CTV’s inability to distinguish between inventory types on biddable systems is holding back the medium.
That is why OpenX, a programmatic advertising technology company, is launching an initiative to clean up the system.
Ahead of speaking at Beet Retreat Santa Monica 2023, in this video interview with Mike Shields for Beet.TV, Matt Sattel, SVP, Global Buyer Development, OpenX, explains the rationale.
The current state of CTV buying
“There are two ways that people are buying CTV,” Sattel explains:
- “Direct buys through PMP and PG deals, which is where a bulk of the dollars are going right now.”
- “Non-transparent biddable CTV, which provides a lot of challenges for buyers, especially because they lack confidence in what actually is included in that CTV buy.”
While the first method is considerably transacted in the NewFronts, the second leaves buyers feeling short-changed due to the lack of clarity on what they’re actually purchasing, Sattel thinks.
Striving for transparency and confidence
For CTV to realize its promise, Sattel believes ad buyers will need to see “transparency and confidence”
This means the industry needs to clean up the ecosystem, properly classifying supply and reducing invalid traffic (IVT).
OpenX’s just-announced an initiative aims to properly classify content, reduce invalid traffic and provide premium advertising experiences.
The company is also removing all resellers from its CTV supply. “Any buy that you would think to go through OpenX is going to be true CTV on the glass and ultimately is going to not have any reseller included in that,” Sattel says.
Sattel says ad buyers complain they cannot understand what inventory is described by an ad bundle identifier from an ad platform.
“We’re cleaning up the supply to make sure that any bundle ID that’s transacted through OpenX is going to be again, true CTV,” he says.
The goal is to give buyers and publishers the confidence to trust Biddable CTV as a strategy they can implement, opening up opportunities for incremental spend for publishers and scalability for buyers.
The Beet Retreat Santa Monica will take place at the Fairmont Miramar Hotel & Bungalows November 15-17. The presenting sponsors are Experian, Moloco and OpenX. Supporting sponsors are Adobe, LoopMe and Uber.
