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 Paul Gubbins, VP, CTV Strategy, Publica.
The speed at which CTV publishers are migrating away from demand waterfalls and exclusive reseller agreements to implement a unified auction for their streaming inventory means many buyers today are faced with a similar dilemma they were several years ago when display publishers made the same switch from sequential demand waterfalls to header bidding.
This is why we are starting to hear more about SPO from the buy side as they try to apply the same logic that worked so well for them in display to the growing AVOD and FAST supply ecosystem. Many of the parameters that underpinned display SPO will apply in CTV, however, several may differ such as AdPod/Slot configuration and the IAB protocols app-ads.txt and ads.cert 2.0.
Buyers will be doing everything in their power next year to ensure their path to a CTV app-based viewer/impression is as direct as it can be rather than bidding into multiple reseller auctions who may each be taking their percentage of media budget and with each hop, increasing the risk of exposure to bad actors spoofing the streaming App inventory the DSP is bidding on.
I predict that 2022 will be the year that the ad agencies and their appointed DSPs really get a grip on their CTV supply strategies via the practice of SPO and start to forge strategic relationships with SSPs which can offer secure supply paths underpinned by all IAB Tech Lab protocols. This includes support for the new parameters being introduced into the OpenRTB 2.6 spec to ensure brands, their agencies and DSPs can take full advantage of the privacy compliant targeting opportunities that now exist in CTV advertising.
A new type of advertiser enters TV for the very first time
The adtech industry spends a lot of time talking about how ‘we’ are going to transition traditional / linear TV advertising dollars to addressable TV and with this topic of discussion, the issue of measurement always arises.
The discussion around what the future of TV measurement looks like and how best we can bridge the gap between traditional broadcast and the growing FAST & AVOD ecosystem is an extremely important one for traditional TV advertisers, however I can’t help but feel we sometimes overlook the more immediate opportunity, and that is in onboarding of a new type of advertiser to TV for the very first time.
AVOD and FAST publishers are increasingly surfacing their first-party data and Smart TV manufacturers already make their ACR (Automatic Content Recognition) data available to advertisers. This increase of privacy-compliant audience data coupled with deterministic identifiers in the form of the Device ID entering the CTV supply ecosystem is attracting advertisers from both social and digital that have thus far been locked out of TV advertising due to the upfront spend commitments required and a lack of data for them to target.
I predict that 2022 will bring an influx of new DTC, digital and social (local ad spend could migrate from social to CTV quickly) advertisers to TV for the very first time. These advertisers will be testing, learning & ultimately establishing if they can pull budgets from social UGC environments or smaller digital screens to secure ads on the device that has thus far remained elusive to many advertisers, the big screen television in the family living room.
The measurement debate will continue and I fully expect to end 2022 with a lot of advancements in this space that will untimely enable traditional TV advertisers to target and measure their TV audiences where they are increasingly engaged, on FAST & AVOD services. I also predict the influx of political ad spend on TV in 2022 will be one of the main catalysts that drives innovation in CTV measurement next year.
