Want to Assemble an Advanced TV Tech Stack? Keep it Independent
The growing interest in advanced TV has brought the worlds of digital buying and traditional TV crashing together. Advanced TV buys, like most media buys, require the cohesion of data, an exchange or platform to purchase and deliver media, and a way to measure results. In an ideal world, this trio of needs should drive advertisers to think about the best tools and partners needed to maximize the best possible performance.
In reality, we operate in a fast-moving industry where bandwidth is limited and budgets and integration times are scrutinized to death, resulting in advertisers not always selecting the best possible path forward. Many brands – especially digital-natives – still rely on the same multi-solution partners that they’ve been working with for years to handle their TV campaigns.
While this is easy, it does the ad buyer a great disservice. Using the same partner to handle targeting, buying, and measurement gives that partner the opportunity to grade its own homework. Odds are, that grade would put the partner on the dean’s list, regardless of whether or not the campaign results meet the brand’s goals.
With all of the complexity that goes into CTV buys, the best move for advertisers is to build a stack of individual companies that specialize in a particular aspect of the chain: data, media, and measurement.
Data
For decades, TV buyers relied on very basic data points to “target” their desired audiences. This imprecise intel was based around small panels and was used to spend millions of dollars on upfront buys. It’s no wonder that many have met the CTV age with excitement – the ability to combine granular digital targeting with TV content seems like the holy grail.
It can be – provided that the data used to target is accurate. As with digital advertising, there is no shortage of data providers for CTV, with options ranging from audiences to contextual show-level insights.
With all these options, buyers must be discerning when looking at the data source, where it can be activated, and if it’s configured to meet your particular advertising goals. Some data providers have simply ported over their digital display audiences and are now offering them as advanced TV options. This isn’t effective, because advanced TV is its own unique channel. The audience that brands use must be built for advanced TV, utilizing TV insights as part of the audience build.
To ensure in-market delivery, savvy TV planners also need to verify their partners are consistently providing fresh data. A data provider simply adding net new IDs to an audience, as opposed to a data provider that runs a full refresh of the segment, will provide drastically different results.
When ad buyers use one multi-solution partner to execute all of their campaigns, they may be stuck using targeting data that isn’t built specifically for TV. To make matters worse, they may not even be able to ask about the origin of the data or make choices. They’re simply locked into what’s available. Without that choice or customization, it’s very hard to drive ROI.
Media
In the world of programmatic ad buying, it’s long established that it’s not ethical for a media supplier to measure itself. It leads to a quandary where the supplier can simply report that its campaigns worked and ask for more investment. Brands have been pushing back against this black box paradigm for years.
While many have caught on to the idea that this isn’t practical for digital ads, it’s not the case in traditional TV. The channel historically has worked in a way where buyers didn’t know if their ads worked or not, but they trusted their media partners that the campaigns hit the appropriate reach goals.
That can’t fly in digital, and certainly not in CTV. There’s simply too much at stake in this emerging channel for media platforms to offer all of their own reporting and data options.
It’s difficult for even a publisher to properly report on their own media performance. A recent MIQ study found up to 114 different supply paths running for a single CTV service. The chaos is evidenced in how difficult it still is to properly frequency cap a CTV campaign when bids come through for the same inventory across different sources.
Measurement
Measurement is both remarkably simple and incredibly nuanced. At the highest level, a campaign either worked, or it didn’t. The proliferation of the actions available to measure, and the ID spaces they are measured in, leads to a complex landscape where tying everything back to the original impression can only be done with many transformative steps and data leakage along the way.
The concept of measurement is nebulous, especially in the world of advanced TV. This starts with the sheer number of actions that are measurable. Brands can judge their campaigns on viewership (how many households saw an ad) or conversions (how many households that saw an ad responded with some kind of action). Those who specialize in TV measurement can tap into viewership reach, audience delivery, brand lift, consideration and even sales attribution.
With all of the different ways to judge success, it’s important that measurement offers the highest level of accuracy, while delivering the exact attribution needs of the advertiser. Some campaigns are simply branding-focused and require reach, while some are more direct response focused. It doesn’t make sense to measure those the same way.
Of the three key elements in a CTV buy, measurement may be the one that is most critical to outsource to an independent partner. It’s also one of the hardest to figure out, not least because of the need for accurate post-viewing attribution measurement.
Given this complexity, it doesn’t necessarily make sense for a data provider to measure the end campaign results or vice versa. Consider the potential conflict of interest from measurement giants like Comscore or VideoAmp measuring the performance of the same TV segments and advanced audiences they provide. A media partner would have too much incentive to grade itself as hitting all of the necessary campaign goals, in order to get the advertiser to spend more on media. A specialist may be the only way to effectively weave together the strands of different metrics into one cohesive and comprehensive view of performance.
Given this complexity, it doesn’t necessarily make sense for a data provider to measure the end campaign results. Consider the inherent conflict of interest from measurement giants and media partners when measuring the performance of the same TV segments and advanced audiences they provide themselves. Partnering with a specialist provider allows for the opportunity to draw together different data sets to paint a more complete, accurate picture.
Specialization with cohesion is the future
There’s something to be said for vendors that independently specialize and excel in one area and can seamlessly work across other partners and platforms. These companies are not beholden to activating data on a specific platform that also tracks and reports on attribution for instance. They have the runway to make decisions on what methodologies make sense, and where they can appropriately leverage interoperability of solutions without compromising on their results.
When brands and agencies work with specialized solutions, they can hold their vendors to higher standards, while also trusting that every piece of the campaign is going to be delivered to meet the brand’s standards. While this isn’t as easy as punting everything over to a single partner, it does produce campaigns that perform and drive ROI, thus paying off in the long run.
[Editor's note: This is a contributed article from Alliant. Streaming Media accepts vendor bylines based solely on their value to our readers.]
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