LONDON – Outside of local cable, TV advertising has traditionally been the preserve of big brands.
But connected TV is changing that.
In fact, in this video interview with Beet.TV, Mark McKee, EVP & GM, FreeWheel, said the medium could democratize TV advertising for smaller ad buyers.
Simplifying the CTV Ecosystem for 2025
Speaking at The Future of TV Advertising Global, McKee acknowledged the inherent complexity of the CTV landscape. “A single piece of content from a publisher can be consumed on more than 400 different endpoints at any one time. That’s complexity,” he said.
Simplifying this ecosystem is crucial to making CTV more accessible and attractive to a wider range of advertisers, he said. By streamlining processes and reducing technical barriers, the industry can empower smaller businesses to compete more effectively and harness the power of CTV.
McKee advocates for a more user-friendly environment. “Oftentimes smaller brands have led and kind of leaned into walled gardens, social types of ways of transaction, because it’s easy,” he said.
McKee highlighted key areas of focus for simplifying the CTV ecosystem in 2025:
- The first involves bridging the gap between traditional linear TV and the more dynamic world of streaming. This means incorporating programmatic buying, automation, and consistent data usage into linear TV, he said.
- Secondly, McKee emphasized the need to streamline the supply path, ensuring a direct connection between advertisers and their target audiences. “There’s a lot of talk around supply path optimization – (there are) too many hops between buyer and seller,” McKee said. “So how do we make the most direct connection between the person with the money and the person with that audience?”
The Rise of Programmatic in Political Advertising
There’s another kind of “democracy” tied to CTV.
Reflecting on the 2024 US election cycle, McKee noted a significant surge in programmatic advertising within the CTV space. Political campaigns and issue-based advertising embraced CTV to a greater extent than ever before. This shift resulted in a dramatic increase in spending, with a thousand percent growth compared to the 2020 election, he said.
“We saw in the streaming space, the adoption of CTV, politics, political spending, issue money, certainly came into the streaming arena in a bigger way, in a programmatic way,” McKee told Beet.TV.
You’re watching Beet.TV’s coverage of The Future of TV Advertising Global. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.
