Why Advertisers Must Demand Trackable CTV
Learn why the future of CTV is intrinsically connected to advertisers’ ability to track impressions accurately.
Jeremy Fain explores why now is the time for advertisers to demand higher-quality audience tracking across the CTV (Connected TV) ecosystem. Taking a deep dive into the CTV advertising landscape, he will outline how the industry can adapt to meet the full scope of advertiser’s performance and optimization needs by implementing precision tracking.
Streaming media has rapidly become an integral element of brands’ advertising strategy, making trackable CTV more critical than ever before. Currently, CTV does not allow for effective impression tracking or attribution, which makes the value of CTV advertising murky. This needs to change to make even greater strides in winning a larger share of media spend. In the past few years, it has been “easy” to earn CTV dollars, but to keep spending accelerating online, the industry has to focus on attribution. The future of CTV is intrinsically connected to advertisers’ ability to track impressions and attribute them to resulting conversions accurately. Those looking to maximize ad investment, track brand lift, and devote dollars to the right audiences must demand trackable CTV to measure their efforts accurately.
CTV’s Measurement Conundrum Has More Questions Than Answers
What makes this space remarkable is that we are still learning how to reach the full potential of CTV advertising. Talk about building the plane as we fly. According to eMarketer, cord-cutting households will, for the first time, outnumber pay-TV households in 2023. A record 92% of U.S. households are reachable via CTV open programmatic advertising, up 11% year over year. In 2022, CTV accounted for more than one-fifth of total programmatic video ad spending for the first time and one-tenth of total programmatic digital display. While the growth of CTV – and the associated advertising opportunity – has been consistent over the last 5 years, advertisers still struggle to measure the impact of their campaigns effectively. With CTV becoming a staple in households and its numbers predicted to continue increasing for years, advertisers should be able to execute their campaigns successfully with little to no blind spots.
There is still an inability to directly map exposures to online actions due to the complexity of linking CTV with other devices. Advertisers are left to compile fragmented, aggregated insights from each streaming platform they advertise on, rather than being able to evaluate campaign performance as a whole. As CTV impressions are sold at a premium, brands deserve better awareness of which platforms offer the top performance.
See More: How Small and Startup Brands Can Leverage OTT/CTV to Drive Sales
The challenge with CTV measurement is primarily due to two things. Successful CTV/OTT channel campaigns often result in a conversion occurring in a separate channel, such as a website. This is extremely hard to track because the largest CTV platforms do not allow cross-device tracking. Even when CTV is only used for brand awareness, everything from completion to reach is difficult to get visibility into across platforms and devices. Implementing precision tracking can help advertisers ensure that their ad dollars are reaching the best possible audience most efficiently.
Precision tracking is imperative in keeping tabs on ad spend, but advertisers must use this data to measure and determine accurate KPIs in their campaigns. This gives advertisers an optimal viewpoint to internally establish iftheir current strategy has achieved success across CTV platforms. Also, lack of measurement does not give advertisers an accurate picture of their campaign moving forward. Therefore, errors made during the campaign cannot be mended throughout the next. Marketers cannot measure their advertisements’ effectiveness without this data, leading to uncertainty and a potential decrease in Return on Ad Spend (ROAS).
CTV Advertising Can Evolve into More than a Mere Guessing Game
Attribution tracking is essential to every CTV’s campaign’s ROAS. Unfortunately, the current state of CTV tracking does not ensure that ads reach the correct audience and produce profitable results.
Delivering video ads with laser-like precision starts with tracking the data behind distinct metrics that usually pinpoint a viewer’s actions upon viewing an ad. These metrics include after-ad influence, purchases, website visits, offline conversions, foot traffic, and brand lift.
It is time for advertisers to push platforms to offer their inventory transparently with privacy-first device IDs. Advertisers have no way to track effective ad spending with a partner without a device ID. As with all media channels, full transparency or accredited third parties must be allowed to measure and attribute spend and exposure. Not only should platforms offer privacy-compliant device IDs to advertisers to measure accurate foot traffic, but these device IDs should remain the same across all platforms so marketers can track how consumers respond to ads on not just one CTV streaming service but all.
Advertisers must also wake up to the fact that most CTV platforms are not enforcing frequency caps, even within an ad pod. The experience of most CTV viewers is of seeing a CPG or Pharma ad more than once in a pod, if not in every ad pod of a full-length program. This quickly leads to brand fatigue and lower sales. Frequency capping must be applied for consumers to have a seamless ad-viewing experience, which will increase conversions overall.
When it comes to CTV (and media in general), 2022 was not only about the re-emergence of life post-pandemic but also about solidifying the digital migration that occurred. It was all about subscriber growth, total reach, and big numbers. Now, the conversation is shifting because the right questions were not being asked. Instead of asking, “Are we reaching enough people?”
We should be asking:
- Are we engaging the right people?
- Is our engagement creating impact?
- Are we finding quality moments?
- Can we show that it is leading to more sales?
- How are our current strategies resulting in conversions?
- Do we have to modify our campaign strategy to increase engagement and ROAS?
Third-party tracking will be enabled across the CTV landscape in the years ahead. Advertisers will no longer accept the lack of accountability the black box OTT providers deliver. 2023 will be the year that advertisers, and perhaps the organizations setting the industry standards, finally reassert their power over the industry they fund. Advertisers will demand trackable CTV through accessible precision tracking, an alternative ID system, and a federal privacy framework that supersedes state-specific frameworks.
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