Multicurrency, Personalization, and Consumer Privacy in the CTV Ecosystem
This year’s upfronts and IAB Newfronts revealed the rapidly changing landscape of TV advertising and its increasing reliance on highly targeted data for the most optimized returns on investment while maintaining brand safety.
An Insider Intelligence/eMarketer forecast published in early 2024 projected that combined CTV and linear TV ad spend would approach $100 billion by 2027. But more importantly, the numbers confirmed what most of us already suspected: CTV is projected to account for all of the growth, with overall ad spend slated to increase by $5.5 billion year over year in 2024 alone.
As CTV is pulling in more advertising dollars and viewers than ever before, it’s crucial for advertisers to ensure that they are optimizing their reach with the best-targeted data to represent audiences and outcomes, all while respecting data privacy laws and individual rights. What are the most significant challenges surrounding data, identity, and the privacy economy in today’s CTV advertising ecosystem? How can content owners and platform providers supply advertisers with the user data that will maximize growth without violating personal privacy or privacy laws? And how might the idea of “TV” itself be redefined in an era when multiscreen use beyond the living room is so prevalent?
The Multicurrency Data Revolution Is Here
Leading CTV ecosystem analysts agree that perhaps the biggest obstacle to delivering CTV ads that satisfy stakeholders and consistently convert is the lack of common measurement standards. This becomes particularly critical as data measurement complexity increases and the FAST (free ad-supported streaming TV) field becomes more crowded and competitive.
VideoAmp CMO Jenny Wall declares that it’s high time the industry embraces this complexity and finds a way to harness it and translate it into usable data. “The revolution is here,” she says, “and we are ready to live in a multi-currency world. A lot is moving from demos to advanced audiences and outcomes, meaning we’re trying to hold what we buy accountable. It just takes brave people to actually make that change because when you look at it, it’s pretty obvious that we need to live in a multicurrency world and that we need to use big data to better represent this.”
"The revolution is here, and we are ready to live in a multicurrency world.”—Jenny Wall, CMO of VideoAmp
Wall goes on to argue that the players in the advertising space need to unite and work together to achieve standards that can be used widely to help improve the overall transparency of data acquisition and measurement. This unity is crucial for the industry’s progress.
One organization that’s poised to help move the needle is the Joint Industry Committee (JIC). Formed in 2023, the JIC is an international organization of television programmers, media measurement providers, and others who have banded together to try to break Nielsen’s perceived monopoly on audience measurement and work toward establishing standards that more accurately reflect the multiverse of contemporary media and providing currencies for making media transactions. The mission of the JIC, according to a January 2023 Broadcasting+Cable article on its founding, is to “certify multiple currencies from multiple providers and promote the use of the programmers’ first-party viewer data as a foundation for measuring streaming as part of multi-screen campaigns.”
OpenAP, which works to accelerate the transformation of TV advertising by removing the silos across publishers, screen types, and currencies, is closely involved with the JIC and has published a white paper on baseline requirements for cross-platform video currencies. OpenAP CMO Brittany Slattery says that her organization’s involvement with the JIC has reinforced the need to work to- gether. Countering Rudyard Kipling’s soloist maxim, “He travels fastest who travels alone,” she says, “If you want to go far, go together. And that’s really what we’ve been focused on: How do we come together, create some common standards that we can scale, making it easier for buyers to reach their audiences, whatever platform they’re reaching on or consuming content on.” She asserts, “Content is king, and you need to focus on the audience and getting the message in front of the right audiences wherever they’re viewing television or video data.”
“If you want to go far, go together. And that’s really what we’ve been focused on: How do we come together, create some common standards that we can scale, making it easier for buyers to reach their audiences. …”—Brittany Slattery, CMO of OpenAP
Slattery notes that media measurement and optimization software companies VideoAmp and Comscore have been awarded certification by the JIC for providing accurate and census-representative datasets. As the industry moves closer to ensuring that a more stan- dardized measurement system is in place, she says, we can start addressing other issues. “How do we make it easier so that we’re no longer nec- essarily having the currency conversation,” she asks, “but instead we’re talking about the outcomes and the business impact that we’ve been able to deliver for advertisers?”
Addressing the Need for Privacy and Real-Time ID Validation
As Slattery’s comment on moving beyond the “currency conversation” suggests, standardizing currency is only one problem facing the CTV ad ecosystem and its data-gathering apparatus. Chris Pfaff, CEO of Chris Pfaff Tech Media, notes that it was not very long ago that the idea of “privacy by design”—which is essentially “data protection through technology design”—was a relatively new concept. But today, he says, designing technology that protects its users is especially crucial and potentially troublesome “because we have so many different devices across so many different networks.” Jesse Redniss, CEO and co-founder of Qonsent, a self-described “consumer-first platform for dynamic consent” that helps consumers maintain direct access and control of their personal data, believes the industry is only “in the very early stages of deploying privacy by design. Both sides—from marketing and advertising to publishers, data owners, and controllers—are taking all the necessary steps to start transforming their data infrastructure.”
“If you can aggregate audiences and you have an authentic relationship with them and you can actually get permissions to use that data for the purposes by which you want to use it in an authentic, trusted way, the value of that audience on your platform is far greater than other places that don’t have that proof of provenance.”—Jesse Redniss, CEO and co-founder of Qonsent
Redniss warns that this transformation won’t happen overnight. “You can’t just go from legacy to net new without disruption and bumps in the road. So the collaboration and aggregation that I think we’re seeing in the space … it’s a really good start. Everyone is aware of the issues at hand and starting to prepare for the future with AI. How do we start really thinking about what’s going to come next in regard to collaborating, aggregating, using, and leveraging data clean rooms or federated learning networks to start respecting people’s identity, respecting their privacy rights and still driving real currency transactions and value for all sides of the equation?”
For those who are unfamiliar with the term, data clean rooms, according to Databricks, “provide a secure environment where multiple parties can collaborate on sensitive data without compromising its confidentiality or integrity.” The Trade Desk, which specializes in real-time programmatic marketing automation technologies, products, and services, is working on specific solutions to enable data clean rooms. According to Ian Ivins, The Trade Desk’s senior manager of CTV partnerships, “We’re seeing increased adoption of our Unified ID 2.0 solution, which allows media owners, buyers, and marketers with first-party data to collaborate using IDs in a privacy-safe way. … You can then add a random code so you can’t reverse-engineer back to the original identifier. But that allows for monetization across CTV and every other media execution so that we can understand the full flow.”
“We're seeing increased adoption of our [Unified ID] 2.0 solution, which allows media owners, buyers, and marketers with first-party data to collaborate using IDs in a privacy-safe way… [and] allows for monetization across CTV and every other media execution so that we can understand the full flow.”—Ian Ivins, senior manager of CTV partnerships at The Trade Desk
Universal ID, which is a unique user ID that allows ad tech companies to identify us- ers across different websites and devices, is also a key factor in ensuring data integrity. The Trade Desk has developed Unified ID 2.0, which “provides holistic targeting and mea- surement for an internet that’s becoming more privacy-conscious.”
Dan Rosenfeld, DIRECTV Advertising’s SVP of data analytics and insights, identifies several “intersecting trends” and developments emerging from this year’s upfronts around the data-privacy issue. “The Unified ID 2.0 fits into it, the multicurrency fits into it, and privacy fits into it, which means the whole world is getting better with data,” he says. “Marketers are using data in bigger ways than ever before, and consumers and governments are now caring about privacy and data security more than ever. All of these developments that have been happening are coming to a head.” This has yielded two new intersecting trends: “Let’s use data to be really smart in delivering ads, and let’s preserve the privacy of customers and consumers—which is hard and has not been done in a credible way previously. But now all these solutions are coming out for us to do that better, measure it, and try to make all the constituents within the ecosystem happy, including consumers,” according to Rosenfeld.
“Let’s use data to be really smart in delivering ads, and let’s preserve the privacy of customers and consumers— which is hard and has not been done in a credible way previously. But now all these solutions are coming out for us to do that better, measure it, and try to make all the constituents within the ecosystem happy, including consumers.”—Dan Rosenfeld, DIRECTV Advertising’s SVP of data analytics and insights
The Shift Toward CTV and the Advantages of Better Targeted Advertising
With the rapid collapse of cable and the rush to create more streaming platforms using the original Netflix model, there has been an accompanying industry-wide realization that the old subscription-only model has run its course and that leaning into highly optimized advertising will prove a more fruit- ful approach.
“I believe advertising will save TV again, and if we get it right, it’ll be good for the consumer because you won’t see the same ad repeatedly, and it won’t be brand damaging,” says VideoAmp’s Wall. “It’s estimated [that] $130 billion is wasted every year because we are not reaching the right people. And if you can get these match rates and get first-party data and actually reach someone who wants to buy an SUV, then you can [spend] less money [getting] to the right people, and you can reinvest that money.” OpenAP’s Slattery points to the rise of shop- pable media as evidence of TV’s increasing alignment with performance marketing chan- nels. “You’re seeing the introduction of new shoppable media, being able to scan a QR code, and then buy exactly what you saw on that ad. That’s the future here,” she contends. “And I think we have more technology at our fingertips than we have ever had, and I believe we’re at an inflection point. But we have to keep the consumer experience paramount in all of this and keep them in mind. Obviously, we want this to be profitable, but it comes down to the consumer experience.”
Paul Kontonis, CMO of Revry, a global streaming network that focuses on LGBTQ+ content and creators, highlights his company’s strategy of gaining specialized knowledge of its audience through creating programming that aims to best serve its viewers. “It’s all about developing content, producing content, [and] distributing content for and by the community, which affords us knowledge of the community,” Kontonis says. “It gives us insights into consumer behavior and also into which devices the content is being viewed on, enabling us to power through our first-party data and ad network, allowing us to have diversity at scale.
“It’s all about developing content, producing content, [and] distributing content for and by the community, which affords us knowledge of the community.”—Paul Kontonis, CMO of Revry
The challenge has been that major companies talk about making diverse investments in their advertising, yet they don’t do it because the agencies and networks out there that we can buy from programmatically don’t allow for scale. We’ve now managed to unlock that and demonstrate during the IAB Newfronts that this can all be done at scale.”
Building Audience Trust in TV Today
The idea of TV as not simply a single linear point of viewing but rather as a more diffused, multifaceted, and multidevice “experience” is one that many leaders in the industry are now embracing. And this new definition of the TV experience bears significantly on the relationship among content owners, programmers, and advertisers and the consumers they serve.
Noting that 50% of all YouTube—not YouTube TV—viewing happens on CTV screens now, VideoAmp’s Wall says, “We need to redefine what TV means” today because it’s so much more than linear programming or OTT channels, and so many different types of viewing are converging on the same device. “I get into arguments with people who say, ‘You need to say “video” because the kids will kill you.’ I’m like, ‘No, we need to redefine what the word TV means because it’s such a different experience.’ TV’s an experience.”
Overall, with the ubiquity of second screens and viewing options, the user interface and user experience are what matter most, with discoverability remaining the most important challenge in the overwhelming glut of content. Kontonis notes that the average time spent per day looking for programming can be up to 30–40 minutes, which is a major issue for retaining users on a platform and ensuring that their data preferences can be optimized.
“I sincerely hope that we don’t make the same mistakes within this new world of video TV,” Slattery says. “I think we are going to erode the consumer experience and trust so much,” as the industry continues to focus on finding “the next shiny thing that we can get inside of the homes to try and drive impact. There’s such an opportunity here. Let’s not ruin it.”
Pfaff notes that good user experience and user interfaces—especially ones built into OEM environments—are essential. “What I love about the EPG look of [something like] Pluto TV is that we know what that is,” he says. “And maybe watching for 30 seconds instead of searching for 20 minutes is good. Certainly, if you’re an advertiser, it is. I just think that the carousel needs to be reinvented. We have to have something that’s hipper. And I feel like that’s the next thing. And it’ll probably evolve from consumers, frankly—maybe from an influencer.”
“Provenance is going to become a huge com- ponent of where we go in the future,” says Qonsent’s Redniss. “If you can aggregate audiences and you have an authentic relationship with them and you can actually get permissions to use that data for the purposes by which you want to use it in an authentic, trusted way, the value of that audience on your platform is far greater than other places that don’t have that proof of provenance.”
The key question, he insists, is, “How do we set standards around identity? Those that have proof of provenance—and the permissions to use the data the way they want—are going to win.”
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