Why Programmatic Signals Are a Hidden Growth Engine for CTV

You don’t need more stats on how connected TV (CTV) is a major area of focus for any brand, agency, or publisher. Given the trajectory of consumer adoption, new creative toolsets, and streaming services, a divide among buyer types will grow as well. For the market to truly mature, buyers and publishers need to find solutions to what signals are needed for buyers and look where the spend is coming from.

Today, there are effectively two CTV markets. One is for large upfront commitments where linear and CTV are bundled together. If that’s what your budgets can afford, you likely care about performance, ROI, and transparency in where your ads actually run. Or at least you should.

Then there’s the other market, and they also care about those same things, even though these are performance-based, scatter, or spot buyers. It’s here we see the real growth potential, and it requires an entirely different strategy. The end goals may be the same, but the rules of engagement are not. This segment of the market is underserved and underoptimized for now, but growing, because quality CTV inventory is absolutely available to them.

Think small

The bad news is the buy-side of the programmatic CTV market needs easier ways for buyers to find the inventory they want—and fast. These buyers have budgets (not in the multimillions) that are likely for campaigns focused on performance, testing, or simply for advertisers that aren’t big enough to do upfront deals. For these buyers, what matters most is being able to find the target audiences on more focused inventory versus the broader inventory pool that is available to upfront buyers. 

In the current CTV ecosystem, smaller buyers face challenges because of limited signals that should be readily available about the content of programs available. Usually, this inventory is unseen to the channel, service, or app. This means a missed opportunity for buyers to find and discover inventory that would be good (or bad) for their campaigns.

Signals for motivated publishers

There is a tension underneath this. Program-level signals are closely guarded by publishers that don’t want advertisers cherry-picking shows.

But the reality here is this legacy thinking is disconnected from where the market is moving. The numbers speak for themselves: more than 200,000 streaming programs, thousands of streaming services, and billions of dollars moving into the CTV market. Just as programmatic offers more efficient buying across digital media, serving the market for CTV buyers requires giving them the necessary information for making informed choices—and that gets down to the programming level.

Program-level signals for buyers will be a main driver of growth for the non-upfront buyers. A subdivide here is viewers using FAST services, accepting the trade-off of ads for content. And these publishers are highly motivated to demonstrate how CTV advertising on these platforms can be just as efficient and performant as the CTV walled gardens. Without a comparable set of content signals as other media, publishers are going to miss the opportunity to prove their premium content works.

Getting aligned

Buyers expect transparency in targeting and reporting placement. They move quickly, and this won’t go away with more dollars; it will only increase. There is a mutually beneficial payoff for buyers and publishers to align on signals so buyers can accurately reach their audiences and publishers don’t miss out on opportunities to fill space and generate revenue.

The solutions are already available to buyers—if they know where in their buying platforms to look. Category options are available for channels, genres, and even program-level controls that can be combined to create strong safeguards for content placement.

While it’s tempting to assume smaller buyers will call out reporting gaps and push platforms to advocate on their behalf, the reality is different. Most buyers will simply shift their budgets toward platforms that provide the data they need without the back-and-forth. Publishers need to make program-level signals available in the bid stream before buyers put their spend into the content that meets their needs.

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Mario Diez is the CEO of Peer39, the global leader in contextual suitability and quality solutions. Since 2019, he has transformed the company into an independent powerhouse trusted by tens of thousands of advertisers and agencies worldwide.

Original article source: https://www.adweek.com/sponsored/why-programmatic-signals-are-a-hidden-growth-engine-for-ctv/