As one of the latest buzzwords floating around the video industry, connected TV (CTV) is where a great deal of viewers are these days. More and more people have jumped on the bandwagon due to the sheer convenience this way of watching TV brings. Brands are following in the same footsteps, creating tremendous media buying opportunities.
Connected TV has proliferated during the pandemic, with 90% of viewers saying they own a CTV device. In parallel with the rising popularity, ad spend is rising too, with a massive 97% of brands aiming to spend on CTV by the end of 2020 and one-third believing they are investing too little at the moment.
But is the supply meeting this expanding level of demand?
Not exactly, and this is where we @HRVST step in.
Filling the market gap
At the moment, there aren’t enough publishers who can meet halfway all the advertisers and brands who want to shift their ad spend from linear TV, web, in-app, and so on to OTT and CTV. They are willing to make the transition because of two things:
CTV ads are unskippable;
Users are willing to watch those ads as the CTV share of digital ad video impressions is holding steady.
It’s clear that TV is handing off the torch to its non-linear successor in a bid to become a significant part of the future of video advertising. However, the fact is that CTV fill rates are fairly low. As a smart TV network that connects premium content creators to smart television broadcasting platforms, we know how to increase them and help brands engage and efficiently monetize the fast-growing CTV audiences.
We build CTV channels for content creators such as YouTube influencers and aspiring filmmakers on two top OTT services - Roku and Amazon Fire TV that hold two-third of total CTV viewership. At the moment, we have more than 90 VOD channels across various genres under our roof and the second-largest channel network on Roku. Perhaps more importantly, we do almost all of the heavy lifting: user acquisition for the channel, brand promotion, and finally - monetization.
Now, why am I saying this?
Because we understand the supply side to the core as we are the supply side for content creators. Thanks to all the work we do, we also assume the role of demand partners for brands and act as a publisher. Well, more than a publisher as we can help brands grow in this new environment for them.
That’s another great side of HRVST: we connect content creators directly with SSPs. In turn, this ultimately creates a perfect ecosystem: SSPs connect with DSPs, who in turn, will be connected to the direct advertisers. Everybody wins!
Having a dependable partner is half the job
So, not only is OTT and CTV content the future of advertising but platforms like HRVST are the ones that will usher the advertisers into that future.
You see, the boom in streaming over the past couple of years yielded a new breed of media professionals who are leveraging their digital video and OTT experiences into powerful platforms that provide the necessary tools for effective ad placement and monetization. As such, brands no longer need to think about a variety of challenges such as the right technology for the job, proper AI algorithms, third-party data, ad fraud, and so on - they can simply choose a platform to do their bidding (both figuratively and literally).
What’s making the job more difficult
CTV has its fair share of challenges. I’ll name the three main ones:
Ad fraud
Lack of standards
Phasing out third-party cookies
Ad fraud hasn’t spared the CTV, increasingly becoming a problem that might take a higher toll if the entire publishing and advertising industry doesn’t step up to solve it. From our side, we continually monitor numerous signals for every bid, factoring in crucial information such as available headers, supply source ranking, Sellers.json data, and more. Together with solutions from our external partners, our anti-fraud system ensures brands can operate in a safe environment without worrying about spending their ad dollars on false results.
But it’s not just ad fraud in its original sense. Right now, CTV advertising lacks standards and guidelines for smooth implementation. There are very few legit CTV publishers out there who are fighting off their peers who don’t bring any added value to advertisers. Tracking the frauds is a big challenge. Take Roku, for instance: it has about 10,000 channels but if you take a closer look, you’ll see that most of them are poor quality, sometimes even misleading and downright false. For our part, having exclusive rights for most content from our channels largely mitigates this risk but the danger of ‘too good to be true’ is still out there.
Thanks to privacy regulation, the elimination of third-party cookies might prove to be an even bigger challenge. However, a significant change in how ads are bought and sold also brings a significant opportunity for CTV-minded publishers. The advantage CTV ads have is not relying on cookies, which means CTV-minded brands can lean heavily on contextual buying to engage their audiences in a safe and compliant way.
There is a lot of untapped potential
Despite the current challenges, great things are on the horizon for CTV advertising, where the rise of intent-based targeting via platforms like HRVST will make it easier to optimize a brand’s ad campaign. The entire CTV industry is still in the early stages but thanks to a combination of detailed analytics, granular targeting capabilities, flexible budgets, and estimated growth, CTV is getting closer to fulfilling its full potential for the advertisers with each passing day.