Connected TV (CTV) presents a paradox. It promises targeted advertising and detailed viewer data, yet simultaneously grapples with transparency and brand safety challenges. While advertisers yearn for show-level insights, the one-to-one nature of CTV impressions raises privacy flags.
One executive pushing for greater transparency in CTV advertising is Aulden Kaye Yi, Head of Advertising Partnerships at Philo, a US-based streaming television service offering live and on-demand content.
Yi said in this video interview with Beet.TV that show-level data is one of the biggest transparency challenges in CTV because advertisers are accustomed to associating their ads with specific programs, as they do with traditional linear TV buys.
The Show Must Go On
“There are privacy restrictions around what you can include in a bid request around that household level data,” she said. “That is a challenge, particularly for pre-bid, even for publishers who are able to sell against specific content.”
Another significant hurdle, Yi noted, is the lack of standardization in the signals passed between the buy and sell sides. This inconsistency hinders effective contextual targeting, as different publishers may use varying taxonomies for genres, leading to mismatches with advertisers’ desired targeting parameters.
“We are leveraging the signals that we used to populate our channel guide,” Yi said. This includes data that describes a TV show’s genre. “But there’s no universal taxonomy of genre that has been adopted at this point,” Yi added. “So the signals that we’re passing as one publisher may not be the signals that another publisher is passing, may not be the signals that the buy side is necessarily looking for.”
One of the emerging crop of ad-tech initiatives is aimed at harmonizing the disparate set of TV show genre descriptors into a slimmed-down, common taxonomy.
Solutions for a Safer CTV Ecosystem
Meanwhile, Philo employs several strategies to enhance transparency and brand safety, including deal-based exclusions, IAB category blocks, media file de-duping, and audio fingerprinting in its server-side ad insertion (SSAI).
The company is also exploring AI-powered solutions to fill in missing metadata, such as IAB categories in ad creatives, further strengthening its ability to enforce its rules and optimize campaigns. Yi expressed optimism about the IAB’s Ad Creative Identifier Framework (ACIF), which aims to establish a universal creative ID.
While pre-bid show-level targeting remains challenging due to privacy concerns, Yi sees promise in post-bid aggregated reporting. This approach could offer advertisers valuable insights into where their ads appeared, providing a level of transparency akin to reports multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs) provide to local buyers.
“I think there are some solutions coming up now that look at post-bid aggregated reporting at the show level,” Yi said. “That I think are really interesting and potentially a strong solution to provide advertisers with peace of mind around where their ads are showing.”
