Shaping the future of CTV advertising

“We predict that connected TV ad spend is going to reach £3bn by 2028, according to IAB Compass”, explained James Chandler, IAB UK’s CMO, opening the morning. Kristie Naha-Biswas, Head of Insight at IAB UK, put this growth into context by outlining how audiences are shifting from linear to CTV - time spent on the latter is 2 hours 90 mins a day for the average UK adult (an increase of 36 mins vs 2014). She explained that there is currently a gulf between the amount of time spent with CTV and the proportion of ad spend that it attracts, suggesting that advertisers aren’t yet fully capitalising on the opportunity to engage viewers. 

The appetite for collaboration 

Brand safety, shared standards and facilitating more transparency for the buy-side are all areas where more cross-industry work is needed to advance CTV, but while “there is an appetite for collaboration” according to NBCUniversal’s Pippa Scaife, it’s not a simple task route forwards: “There is a lot of walled gardening happening in CTV at the moment… Everyone has developed their own USP and is selling in a different way, which makes collaboration very difficult - even with the best will in the world.” 

It was a point echoed by KINESSO’s Nathan Taylor Billings, who pointed out that while there are many silos to navigate within CTV, it’s also good that there is diversity and autonomy in the market. In his view, education about measurement is essential to establishing common practices: “So many KPIs and metrics are meaningless today… [Measuring] viewability should just be standard in CTV.” Looking to the future, PubMatic’s Tim Willcox said that the development of CTV markets around the world gives him hope that the UK market is heading in the right direction, while Rakuten Advertising’s Dory Tse said that new players entering the space are driving innovation forwards. 

Tools to use today 

Progress in CTV measurement was the focus of an update from Anthony Katsur, CEO of IAB Tech Lab, who ran through the frameworks and tools that Tech Lab has developed to help standardise the CTV market. For example, the Video Ad Serving Template (VAST), which provides a framework for structuring ad tags that serve ads to video players, and the Open Measurement Software Development Kit (OM SDK), which facilitates third-party viewability and verification measurement. Meanwhile, the Ad Creative ID Framework (ACIF) - awaiting its final release - establishes a persistent identifier for ad creative at every phase in the video advertising supply chain. As Katsur put it: “This is a way to see how registered creative travels through the ecosystem.”

Do we need to drop the C & just talk TV? 

“As soon as you put ‘connected’ in the name, it becomes different [to TV] and you get silos,” explained Vevo’s Richard Brant, while MiQ’s Stephen Emsall added that “this fragmentation evolves into agencies”. However, OMG UK’s Mel Clow pointed out that specialist teams are needed to deliver CTV effectively - such as programmatic skills - but that they should be well integrated and working hand-in-hand with TV teams. 

In Brant’s view, a more holistic approach to CTV would help measurement get to a place where “you have that one reach curve”, rather than fragmented audiences across different outlets. Progress is being made with “Nielsen and Audience Project now having integrations with Google Ad Measurement… so I can now de-dupe my whole network”. 

So what’s in the pipeline for CTV in the next three years? Nexxen’s Hilary Goldsmith drew attention to the need for “some level of brand safety advancement” in order for transparency to be embedded into the supply chain. Meanwhile, Clow said that effectively solving challenges around frequency capping should be prioritised to help improve the audience experience. 

With thanks to our sponsors for this event PubMatic, MiQ and Vevo. 

Interested in more? Find out about joining our Connected TV Working Group here.