Closing the Connected TV Gap Between Ad Buyers and Publishers

Businesses want the process of buying ads on connected TV to mirror the advantages of buying linear, with the added efficiency of digital trading. But technical challenges exist around transparency, brand safety and the nature of the content.

At Adweek’s NexTech 2022 summit, Isabel Rafferty, CEO at Canela Media; Alex Stone, svp of advanced video and agency partnerships at Horizon Media; and Ryan McConville, evp of advertising platforms and operations at NBCUniversal, sat down to discuss how buyers and sellers are meeting in the middle to tame the Wild West of CTV. 

Creating shared understanding 

According to the panelists, the first step in closing the gap between buyers and publishers is creating a shared understanding of priorities and challenges from both sides of the equation. 

“It’s really honesty and open communication between the buyers and the sellers in terms of what challenges we’re facing, whether it’s, ‘Hey, we’re really having a struggle with your premiums that you’re attaching to targeting.’ Or whether it’s sellers saying, ‘We have to do this because of the limited inventory we have,’” Stone explained.

“Just that shared understanding so that we can better educate our advertisers and better educate within the agency what restrictions and challenges each advertiser may face when moving from a world of linear to either streaming direct IO or streaming programmatic.”

Keeping up with a shifting landscape 

With CTV constantly evolving, the role of a traditional video investor is also changing. The panelists agreed that education plays a pivotal role in keeping up with these fast-moving changes and ensuring all parties are on board. 

“At Horizon Media, we’ve set up pretty aggressive training regiments with different DSP partners to make sure it’s not just the digital investment team that’s trained up on how to buy, but it’s also the video investment team,” Stone said.

At Canela Media, Rafferty said her team takes education just as seriously, providing dedicated internal resources to ensure clients understand the CTV buying process. 

“We see two types of clients—the digital buyer and the television buyer— and each needs different hand-holding to understand the best way to purchase,” she said. “Being the Hispanic marketplace, we’ve always been in a role where we have to teach because a lot of people don’t understand our audience and how to reach them. We feel similar with streaming; we have to say, ‘This is the best way to purchase this.’” 

McConville said NBCU is pressing full steam ahead in the space as it prepares to launch its own self-service ad platform, Peacock Ad Manager, later this quarter. 

“This will allow marketers of any size to log on in a self-serve way to transparently see the content they’re running on, use advanced targeting, get advanced measurement,” he explained. “They can download an attribution pixel and track visits to their website, checkouts, app downloads—a lot of what you’re used to getting from Facebook and Google in terms of attribution in real time is now available in streaming television.”