NAB 2025: Performance Storytelling in the CTV Era
On April 7 at NAB 2025’s Streaming Summit, conference chair Dan Rayburn and LG Ad Solutions CMO Tony Marlow squared off in a fireside chat on “Performance Storytelling in the CTV Era.” From the outset, Marlow declared, the challenge and the goal LG Ad Solutions sets for itself is to “monetize CTV premium ads from the moment you turn on your TV.”
Rayburn, recognizing that this monetization challenge demands tracking a moving target, asked, “How are changes in how users consume content changing things for advertisers?”
Marlow explained that to trace the arc of content consumption and its impact on advertising required turning back the clock to the beginning of the pandemic in early 2020 when streaming “hit a hockey stick growth curve.”
First and Second Shift Streaming: Subs Give Way to Ads
This, he said, was the first phase in the streaming monetization’s big shift, which was largely subscription-centric; the second big shift, which he maintains is still underway, is toward advertising as the prime mover of streaming monetization. “Economic headwinds,” he says, have left streaming consumers “disinclined to pay for subscriptions.” Streaming consumers, he says, have confined themselves to “a smaller repertoire of subscription services” and have increasingly begun supplementing subscription services in their go-to viewing habits with ad-based, or at least ad-augmented viewing,
Marlow then noted two striking statistics that no one would have been likely to predict a half-decade ago: eight out of ten Americans, he said, consume FAST, and seven out of ten say they prefer it to subscription-based services because it’s for free. Marlow speculated that however much streaming consumers may have trended toward subscriptions when streaming consumption really took off during the pandemic, viewers who grew up with ad-supported TV have shown that they have no problem going back to it.
FAST Popularity vs. FAST Profitability
Rayburn countered that as much as people like to talk about the rise of FAST, its “popularity doesn’t equal profitability."
Speaking for a company that operates in a nether zone between Smart TV hardware and OS-based Smart TV monetization, Marlow acknowledged that while hardware margins are “razor-thin,” media profitability is high.
He attributes these high media margins to “the addressability of digital channels” and their innate ability “to make that emotive connection to users” with the content delivered while at the same time measuring if it worked. The upside of smart TVs, which older and legacy media generations could never match, is its ability to return “direct-response metrics” and to provide sales that are at once “highly measurable and addressable at a household level.”
AI’s Potentially Transformative Role in CTV Monetization
Rayburn went on to ask how brands are measuring the success they’re having. Marlow credits a sea change in measurement and specifically the swiftness and responsiveness brands enjoy today to the impact of AI, which he boldly maintains “can change the world in 1-2 years. The feedback loop,” he explains, “is faster than it’s ever been before.” This means that brands can act on the data they get “faster than ever,” and what’s more, the availability of this quick-turn, actionable data means that CTV can justify the higher cost of advertising because it’s more addressable than any medium we’ve seen before.
“The beauty of this medium,” he said, “is how much we know about the viewers to address ads.”
AI is critical to delivering on this promise, Marlow added, because of the accuracy of the data it delivers, and because the unprecedented turnaround time means we can “act on it more quickly.”
Not All Ads Are Local, But the More Local, The Better
Rayburn asked about the challenges of delivering local ads, particularly when it comes to dynamic ad insertion and large-scale streaming.
Marlow contended that great strides have been made in that area, particularly as evidenced by the election ads created in 2024 “on both sides of the aisle” that enabled the production of highly effective hyperlocal ads. Such ads provided a model for contextual advertising across all genres going forward, Marlow said, because the available data makes it possible (maybe not now but in the near future) to create ads “that may be so personal [to the user] that it’s never seen by anyone else.”
Of course, the downside of this, he acknowledged, comes when ads get too personal, which underscores the balance that advertisers need to achieve between connecting with the viewer because of the relevancy of the ad and “putting people off.” Marlow cited the example of a good ad that recognizes that someone is a distance runner and showing them ads for appropriate shoes, and a more personally invasive ad that says, “I noticed you ran in Central Park today. Maybe you need a new pair of shoes.”
Marlow recalled the scene in the Tom Cruise sci-fi film Minority Report where Cruise walks into a retail store and he hears a voice saying, “Last time you were here, you bought these pants. Do you want to buy them again?” There’s a trade-off, he contended, and we have to find a happy medium. “Do you want ads to be relevant or do you not?”
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