Media Buying Briefing: How messed up is the CTV marketplace? Bad enough that efforts are being made to fix it

• Inventory standardization (getting CTV platforms to be more transparent with show, genre and placement data and involving third-party verification firms to validate the buys)
• Identity standardization (moving toward household IDs and away from IP addresses, and coordinating data clean-room usage to connect first-party data)
• Fraud prevention (introducing more transparency in the supply chain through the use of IAB Tech Lab’s ads.cert 2.0 security protocols)

OMG has lined up a mix of companies to support its initiative, including SSP Magnite, Yahoo and AMC Networks, as well as a verification partner it declined to identify, according to Eusanio. “Providing this kind of standardization and transparency around what’s being bought, who’s being reached and reducing ad waste are all things that are beneficial to the buy- and sell-sides and all the tech in the middle. This is one of those areas it’s not beneficial to be competitive in.” 

The problem of content adjacency and buyers’ lack of control to determine it is real. “How do you accurately control for those?” asked Tony Marlow, CMO of Integral Ad Science, which tackles fraud and attribution for marketers. “How do you make sure that your ads are turning up in the places where they’re going to have the greatest impact and achieve the goals of the campaign? And not turning up where they either don’t represent your brand values or just simply don’t work that well for what you’re trying to achieve. That starts to get to not just the interoperability of the audience, but being able to control the context in a much more granular way than was ever possible with linear TV.”

Jason Fairchild, CEO of TV ad-tech buying and measurement firm tvScientific, said the problem lies with the multitude of DSP cluttering the CTV space right now. “It doesn’t have to be as hard as it is. If you approach the marketplace correctly with the right technical protections and the right buying approach, which is one-to-one curated deals, then you can get around almost all the issues,” he said. 

One final issue IAS’ Marlow has with the current state of inventory management in CTV is the fact that there’s less premium inventory left once upfront commitments and programmatic deals have sucked up the best spots. “The effect that has is it locks up vast lots of the premium inventory and it constricts the availability of a lot of a lot of these impressions within the open market, and it’s still transacting this way. It means that inventory isn’t available to anyone else,” Marlow said.

Color by numbers

Tubular Labs recently calculated what it says are the first gross ratings points for the top 10 U.S. TV network-affiliated creators, based on data from September of this year. (The parenthetical number represents unique viewers across YouTube and Facebook.) They are:

• Fox News: 76.2 (28.3 million unique viewers)
• Inside Edition: 37.5 (19.1 million)
• A&E: 27.6 (15.1 million)
• MSNBC: 27.3 (9.7 million)
• SportsCenter: 23.5 (29.4 million)
• Saturday Night Live: 23.2 (10.9 million)
• Disney Junior: 23.1 (18.0 million)
• ESPN: 22.6 (20.3 million)
• ABC News: 22.3 (28.1 million)
• Love and Hip Hop: 21.7 (8.0 million)

Takeoff & landing

• Havas Media Group Canada hired both Alessia Grosso as vp of strategy from Enthusiast Gaming where she led marketing, and Scott Nelson in the newly created role of vp, investment & partnerships, from a digital investment role at Dentsu. Both report to HMG Canada president Noah Vardon.
• Mediassociates landed CompoSecure, a cryptocurrency account, for which it will help launch a new cold storage device called Arculus. 

Direct quote

“The power to make meaningful changes and how companies relate to their key stakeholders — whether that’s employees, whether that’s customers, whether that’s end users — is really around experience and not messaging. What we do has never been rocket science/brain surgery/world hunger. At our best, the marketing industry used to be a manufacturer of popular culture and a driver of behavior change — and we would do that through campaigns, through messaging. And those are not the channels that have impact anymore … Agencies have a long history of trying to fake it, and I think the things that clients need are no longer fakeable.”

— Benjamin Wiener, CEO of agency WongDoody

Speed reading

• I interviewed Acxiom CEO Chad Engelgau, who explained his support for national privacy laws to supplant confusing and expensive state-by-state rules.
• Digiday senior editor of research and features Max Willens breaks down the ad-related details of Amazon’s Unboxed event last week, including its efforts to encourage more brand-side advertising rather than just sales. 
• Digiday platforms, data and privacy reporter Kate Kaye details how Facebook (which announced a name change last week) keeps deactivated accounts alive in various forms.