Addressing CTV Advertising Challenges: A Call for Industry-Wide Solutions

The Connected TV (CTV) landscape is evolving rapidly, but certain challenges continue to hinder its full potential for both advertisers and viewers.

I was watching TV one evening and every ad break on my chosen streaming platform played the exact same ad –meaning that in an evening’s viewing, I'd seen the same ad over 12 times at least.

This over-frequency of ads within single viewing sessions seems to be a common issue, leading to frustration among audiences and diminishing the value for brands.

This problem raises an important question about why the promise of CTV isn’t being fully realised. At conferences and ad-tech summits about CTV, the data and technology advances are incredibly promising. Yet still, the viewer and brand experience seem to be falling short.

Identifying the Causes

The fault underlaying the issue is hard to pinpoint. However, there are many ‘buyer beware’ warnings to be issued as many gear up to shift budgets from linear to streaming over the next few years to match audience trends. Recent examples present probable causes:

·      Media Buying Practices: Instances of poor frequency management including overlooking setting the frequency cap when placing the booking (issuing the IO or trading via a programmatic route) and uncoordinated buying across multiple internal teams or ad-tech providers within the same publisher’s inventory. Surprisingly, some streaming/VOD providers charge a premium for frequency capping up to 25% on the CPM. These create more unnecessary barriers to a seamless user experience.

·      Publisher Constraints: Some publishers may overestimate their ability to handle larger budgets within reasonable set campaign parameters (audience, timeframe, frequency etc.) causing excessive impressions in single viewing sessions to push the campaign and satisfy the base audience delivery requirement (a problem with impression-based buying). Without proper frequency caps set or brands/agencies paying the premium to cap, this will continue to happen.

·      Ad Tech Limitations: Issues with identifiers and IDs etc. or the use of multiple DSPs trading on the same inventory.

Collaborative Solutions for a Better CTV

Through greater collaboration on these topics, agencies, publishers, and brands alike can work to create meaningful progress as an industry. We can’t stop the tide; consumer behaviors are changing at pace, and we need to keep up, but it shouldn’t be at the expense of viewer’s media experiences and their relationship with brands.

·      Agencies: must enforce greater controls, higher standards, & ensure accountability through working more closely with partners and publishers in programmatic trading.

·      Publishers: should hold greater responsibility of their inventory and ensure that ad-tech partnerships deliver the experience they want for their viewers.

·      Brands: need to advocate for better practices by calling out issues and encouraging manual auditing, given the lack of independent 3rd party measurement.

What’s Next of CTV?

CTV technology has been advancing steadily and there is an abundance of talent in the teams progressing this category. However, these inconsistencies affect all of us; advertisers, their agencies, ad-tech partners, and publishers. Nothing gets solved until these issues get brought to light. As an industry, we must prioritise high-quality, brand-safe, creatively produced CTV content for consumers.