As connected TV (CTV) continues to eat into linear TV’s share of viewing time, there is a significant opportunity for brands to reach audiences, but several obstacles continue to prevent advertisers from fully embracing the medium in 2025.
Broadcast video-on-demand (BVOD) now accounts for 49% of all time spent consuming content from “traditional” broadcasters in the UK. And – when you add in subscription video-on-demand (SVOD), advertising-based video-on-demand (AVOD), and video-sharing platforms – CTV is the viewing choice across most age groups already.
However, while IAB UK expects CTV ad spend to reach £2.94 billion by 2028 (from £1.91 billion in 2024), current ad spend levels don’t reflect how people are consuming TV, due to multiple challenges.
“Multiple challenges and barriers have emerged through our research and recent interviews across the industry. The first is education… I think there are still a lot of people that don’t understand what CTV encompasses. There’s a real mixed understanding. And there’s a mixed understanding of what it can deliver for a brand – whether it’s business, whether it’s performance, how targeted it is, how scalable the audience is – and that links to it being a bit of an unknown currency,” said Kristie Naha-Biswas, Head of Insight, Leading Future of Media at IAB UK, opening the IAB UK’s ‘Shaping the future of CTV advertising’ roundtable event.
“With TV, you know what you’re getting… You know what it’s going to deliver, what the outcomes are going to be for your advertisers. But, for CTV, there’s still that barrier of knowing how you translate TV currency into CTV…
“There’s huge fragmentation. So far, agencies and advertisers have a real difficulty identifying the right partners that are going to bring value to the plan and have that known outcome and know what the currency is that they’re buying.
Setting the standard
The IAB UK roundtable event helped to set the scene for 2025 within the CTV space, exploring the challenges and opportunities that will define the future of the medium through panels and breakout discussions.
The panel delved into the challenges and the desperate need for standardisation within CTV.
“There are so many different silos,” said Nathan Taylor-Billings, Head of Addressable Activation, UK & Ireland at Kinesso. “You have to do different things across different channels or mediums of buying CTV, because it’s not one-size-fits-all. We have to change our approach depending on the route that we’re buying on behalf of our clients and our advertisers.”
There was agreement that, while it may not be a good thing to have one entity controlling everything, there is a need for standardisation to address the challenges facing the industry. Although, there are several obstacles on the way to achieving that too.
“There are a handful of players who are going to have enough dominance in this space that they’ll recognise the opportunity and move the needle forward,” said Pippa Scaife, VP, Global Partnerships at NBCUniversal. “There’s an appetite for collaboration, and we’re seeing that more and more… However, there’s a lot of walled gardening happening in CTV at the moment, because of the fragmentation and the number of different endpoints – whether that’s from a content or a hardware perspective. There are just so many different variables.
“Everybody has developed their own USP, and that’s made it incredibly competitive, and everybody’s selling in a slightly different way. That makes collaboration, even with the best will in the world, very difficult.”
By achieving this standardisation, the industry can then begin to tackle the other challenges, such as brand safety and transparency.
“CTV isn’t immune to [brand safety issues],” said Tim Willcox, Regional VP, UK at PubMatic. Despite an expectation that there would be more scrutiny than other platforms, due to traditional TV being brand safe and predictable, “it’s still a challenge today.”
“If you look at brand safety and suitability, brand suitability is brand safety now really,” Willcox added. “That’s not necessarily on the publishers; the advertisers have key responsibility here as well.”
This also ties in closely to the issue of transparency, and the fact that advertisers are often unaware of where their ads are being placed.
“What is the advertiser and the agency actually buying? What’s the content within that?” Dory Tse, Senior Business Development Manager at Rakuten, asked rhetorically. “It’s not necessarily transparent to the buyer. It could be labelled incorrectly. It could be not labelled at all.”
Helping to build the advanced TV ecosystem
The panel was followed by a short presentation from Anthony Katsur, Chief Executive Officer at IAB Tech Lab.
He shared information about the initiatives and solutions IAB Tech Lab has introduced to create a better CTV ecosystem, including the Tech Lab Advanced TV Charter, Ad Creative ID Framework, Advanced TV Commit Group, Open Measurement SDK for CTV, App-ads.txt for CTV, and more.
It’s just TV, isn’t it?
The morning’s second, and final panel, discussed what can be done to move CTV forward in the UK. One of those things being to get rid of different labels that each type of TV has, because it’s “one of the biggest mistakes we’ve ever made,” according to Richard Brant, Senior Director, Advanced TV UK & International at Vevo.
“It immediately silos the operations,” he said. “As soon as you put connected in front of it, suddenly that stuff becomes digital, and the stuff that has been connected TV for 20 years is suddenly something different… What that does immediately is ignore how viewers actually watch TV.”
Hilary Goldsmith, Chief Customer Officer at Nexxen, added: “We’re all talking about the same thing, we’re all talking about TV, but we’ve all got slightly different glasses on… That’s where some of the inertia in the movement is coming from, because it all feels very familiar, but underneath it’s also very different. I think that’s spinning people round in circles a little bit.”
Though agreeing that labelling, and the fragmentation caused by that, is a big problem within CTV, Stephen Emsall, Head of Advanced TV at MiQ, believes that the “biggest thing holding CTV back” is transparency.
Everything seems to be a little opaque when you get your information back. This means demand is being halted, because there are a lot of trust issues,” said Emsall. “I don’t know what I’m actually appearing in front of.
“It will continue to evolve, and the ad placements are going to get more and more premium. So, if we can start to open up the floodgates from a transparency point of view, understand where the content is, and be able to report back on that, I think we’re going to start to see that migration of revenue.”
On the other hand, Melinda Clow, Managing Partner, Programmatic Activation at Omnicom, pointed to frequency as being a challenge that needs to be overcome.
“The ASA published a report and talked about bombardment being one of the main reasons why consumers distrust this space,” said Clow. “It’s not just consumers; it’s brands and advertisers as well. A common question that comes up is, ‘tell me what my frequency is across the plan. Tell me what technology is in place to protect the user experience.’
“It’s on every part of the ecosystem to talk about how they’re going to deliver a really positive user and brand experience.”
