Rob Beeler
Thanks to our friends at GeoEdge, we hosted a dinner with a great group of publishers and partners to discuss elevating the viewer experience on CTV. Over introductions, we asked everyone to name the best recent show on CTV. There were a lot of opinions, but I let people know the right answer (Paradise) before moving into our discussion.
Yes, we touched on some standard CTV themes, but focusing the night on creative was refreshing. Expectations from audiences are high of a good visual experience, and it wasn’t lost on this group that the ads are an integral part of that experience. CTV is a shared screen watched by families. Operations cannot settle for serving any ad; it has to be the right ad of the highest quality. This quality control portion of their jobs is traditionally a manual process, which adds to costs and limits the amount of advertising one can accept. What would a smarter, scalable approach to ad quality and creative review look like in the age of CTV?
Let’s dive in:
CTV has a lot to lose and a lot to gain. Gain part first: Consumers are moving faster and faster to CTV environments (SVOD, AVOD, Live, etc.), but advertisers are not coming aboard as quickly. This creates quite a conundrum, as you want to maintain the high CPMs while trying to fill every impression opportunity. Display caved to bad ads and bad ad experiences. CTV is trying not to fall into the same trap. Every creative needs to be reviewed.
Not everything is up to spec. Keeping a high-end viewer experience is difficult. Our dinner group wasn’t concerned as much about security on CTV yet and more that the ads they see today meet their quality standards. Still, some were surprised that QR codes can be fraudulent and deepfakes and other fraudulent offers can appear through programmatic channels on CTV. Fraudsters attack CTV differently than they do display, and vigilance and education are just as important in a streaming environment. From offensive ads to low-quality creative, you have to watch for it all.
Tried and true broadcast advertisers know a thing or two about providing quality advertising assets, but to grow revenue, we need more advertisers coming into the space. That’s when things get dicey. CTV has a lot to lose, remember? Accepting ads that aren’t broadcast quality can reflect poorly on all involved.
Pushing back is necessary. One of the SSPs attending asked the CTV publishers in the room if they push back on the quality of the ads coming through programmatic channels. They do and spend a lot of time reviewing the creative. Smaller advertisers also want to buy smaller deal sizes, and the manual work involved in QAing all the ads makes this difficult.
AI lights the way. While manual review remains, using AI at the SSP level and the publisher wasn’t a foreign concept. Live streaming – especially of a popular sport or event – requires a whole new optimization level to maximize yield. If you’re looking to fill every opportunity, manual creative review isn’t going to cut it.
Following up after the dinner, we agreed there was more to discuss: the number of topics around CTV is keeping up with the pace of viewer adoption even if advertising isn’t. Since we kept circling back to the user experience, it seems like AI will help deliver on CTV’s promise of a well-lit advertising environment. Thank you to GeoEdge for helping us see this future.