NDA, in partnership with Xandr, is collecting the views of some of our industry’s leading figures for their predictions on 2022 and beyond. Next up is Catherine Hallam | Head of Data Strategy, Commercial Advertising & Marketing and Jayesh Rajdev, Controller of Advanced Advertising, ITV.
How is collaboration evolving in your market to deliver better results for advertisers and better experiences for consumers?
Best-in-class innovation doesn’t happen in a vacuum: we know that we are at our best when we collaborate closely with our customers and tech suppliers.
This is the reason why, last month, we launched AdLabs to supercharge our innovation. Part of our ‘Better Together’ philosophy, this new way of working has allowed us to quickly normalise being ‘in beta’ with our customers. By involving them earlier in our product development pipeline, we are innovating at scale, faster and with more purpose than ever before.
Are walled gardens from the tech giants an opportunity or challenge for digital advertising?
The walled garden model doesn’t solely apply to tech giants.
At ITV, we cannot deny the fact that Planet V’s walled garden approach provides significant benefits to advertisers: access to 35m authenticated UK ITV Hub users, the highest targeting assurances, premium TV content, and full transparency.
Conversely the “Open Web” for CTV remains fraught with challenges including limited scale, data fidelity issues, ad fraud, and ad tech taxes associated with an increasingly complex supply chain.
How are advertiser relationships with publishers evolving?
We’ve always had incredibly strong relationships with TV advertisers, but as our digital offering gains prominence we’ve seen a clear desire for more sophisticated digitally-driven relationships with ITV.
We are also seeing the new breed of DTC advertisers looking to apply digital-first tactics with us. Via our first-party data product ‘Data Match’, more advertisers are maximising the impact of their ITV Hub campaigns using a longer-term test and learn approach.
Meanwhile, via AdLabs, we are increasingly having broader planning and measurement conversations that are evolving into pilot programmes and new products, such as our evolving suite of Shoppable solutions.
What do we need to do to build a healthier ecosystem and how can we ensure this is sustainable long term?
With video consumption fragmenting, it’s an increasingly complex TV ecosystem that needs collaboration across broadcasters and media owners in order to thrive.
A healthier ecosystem will drive better results for all – for advertisers, via their results and increased ROI; for agencies via the simplification of programmatic buying practices. Expect to see SamsungAd’s TV inventory available in Planet V soon with further broadcasters and CTV operators to be announced… watch this space!
Is the demise of the cookie the end of personalised advertising?
Whilst the future of addressable advertising for other players may seem daunting without third party cookies, here at ITV our practices remain unaffected as we always have been non-reliant on third party cookies. We have always taken a privacy-first approach to data collection and validation in our registration process, and provide our registered users with clear transparency and control of the usage of their data. T
his opens up smarter insights, targeting and measurement (as well as accuracy, of course). This data is particularly strong when used in combination with advertisers’ own data, and expect to see our ‘Data Match’ offering evolve with retailer data in 2022, available to advertisers without extensive pools of their own first-party data.
What role will the new breed of identity solutions play?
Given our walled garden approach, identity solutions such as “universal IDs” have less relevance for ITV.
However, “bridging partners” could play a role in the evolution of our data suite, enabling us to collaborate with partners to shape new solutions (where there is not a direct link between IDs on both sides). As data processing is scrutinised and regulated more, the challenge for these identity solutions will be to contribute sufficient value and scale in the increasingly complex digital ecosystem.
