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As a veteran ad executive once said, "Where there is mystery, there's margin."

Since its 2021 introduction, Google’s PerformanceMax (PMax) has aimed to drive ad performance by modeling historical performance data using Artificial Intelligence models. As an automated ad product, it appeals to those who want to "set it and forget it." Sounds great, right? Well, maybe.

Upon further inspection, the tradeoffs for the marketer emerge, particularly regarding transparency, autonomy, and brand suitability. Some recent findings from Adweek highlight this: Advertisers discovered that Google placed a significant portion of their PMax YouTube ads in the open web – not quite the premium placements they were expecting.

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Our industry loves to talk about the “streaming wars” and speculate on which of the big names out there—Netflix, Disney, Amazon, Apple, and so on—will ultimately “win.” This speculation has reached a fever pitch recently as more players have moved into ad-supported models (and Netflix has started gaining important traction in this regard). But here’s the thing: We don’t need to crown a winner. There are plenty of victories to go around when it comes to the immense opportunity of advertising within premium streaming environments.

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CTV is garnering industry headlines and M&A attention right now, with many industry observers happy to declare that “the year of CTV” has already come and gone. But the reality is that we still have a long way to go to achieve the full potential of CTV for advertisers.
 
For brands and agencies, the need to calibrate expectations, while still positioning themselves to unlock the tremendous potential of the CTV space, should be a top priority over the next 12 months. Here are five key areas where we still have a lot of work to do to integrate and elevate CTV to its proper place within the marketing mix.

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In 2022 we saw the biggest shift yet in what marketers want  (by which I mean “need”) from Connected TV (CTV). It should be no surprise that this shift happened. In addition to the ongoing decline of traditional TV, prevailing economic concerns and a stronger understanding by agencies and brands of CTV’s capabilities, the spotlight has been been forced to broaden from focusing on “checking the brand awareness box” to including measurable outcomes that make a more noticeable (and attributable) difference to a brand’s bottom line. In other words: performance.

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While not all that surprising in hindsight, a recent study uncovered a minor bombshell in CTV advertising: brands are throwing away more than $1 billion a year in advertising spend due to the fact that their commercials are playing on streaming platforms even while TVs are off.
 
How is this possible? Viewers don’t always exit or pause the streaming app they’re using before hitting the power button on their TV; the shows (and the ads) are still running in the background. About 17% of ads on TVs connected through streaming devices are playing while the TV is off, and being delivered to no one at all.
 
What makes this revelation all the more astonishing is the fact that today’s CTVs are digital and connected to the Internet, which is home to the most trackable, measurable media in our world’s history.
 
Yet, while CTV brings a lot of promise to targeting a growing number of consumers, measuring what and when those individuals are watching is still too hard. For CTV to realize its full potential – and justify ad spend from brands – we need to treat it like a true Internet-connected medium. Let’s look at three steps the industry can take to move in the right direction.

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As TV and digital advertising converge, it’s become even more evident how different the ways of buying and selling media are in each ecosystem. This reality has created some key challenges for both brands and media owners who seek to operate across platforms, and these challenges will only inhibit the free flow of money if they persist.

Advertisers generally want to deliver targeted impressions across a mix of programming, irrespective of whether that content is delivered on a set-top box or an IP-connected device. However, each of these environments offer vastly different capabilities and operates on different protocols. The resulting asymmetry, as you might imagine, often leads to frustrations and hurdles.

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In today’s fragmented media landscape, one of the key questions I am regularly asked as the Chief Marketing Officer of the largest provider of independent first-party TV audience data is how advertisers can find their most desirable TV audiences at scale. With viewers cutting the cord at record rates, it’s essential for advertisers to lean into programming that their target audiences have demonstrated interest in, so they can reach them where they are today vs. where they were before.

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The drivers behind the expansion of the connected TV landscape are many. What started with the rising cost of cable and technological advancements in the delivery of content slowly gave way to new players in the space, mergers and acquisitions and content wars. Add on top of that a two-year pandemic and the rising challenges of inflation, and the groundwork has been laid for continued growth (and monetization) within the incredibly dynamic and ever-evolving CTV landscape.

Today, the CTV revolution is upon us. For advertisers and publishers alike, there’s no denying or controlling the significance or pace of consumer viewing shifts into streaming channels. Rather, the real question that companies must consider is this: Do they have the insights needed to stay on trend?

As companies chart their path forward with regard to the CTV opportunity, here are the key market realities that should be guiding them.

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