Prog IO Las Vegas: Measuring CTV Requires A New Mentality

By Allison Schiff

As broadcasters do their best razzle-dazzle routines at the upfronts, streamers and MVPDs alike – including Roku and DirecTV – are busy building programmatic ad tech stacks.

Because, eventually, TV buyers and sellers are going to embrace programmatic more fully – and not just for the scatter market.

"Our philosophy is that every ad impression on TV, at some point, will be streaming," said Adam Markey, director of product management for Roku's ad platform, speaking at AdExchanger's Programmatic IO event in Las Vegas earlier this week.

Sounds like just the sort of thing someone who works for a streaming platform would say. But it's also probably true. Traditional linear television doesn't have to die for streaming to represent the majority, if not all, of ad impressions.

TV and digital

Automated TV buying methods, such as data-driven linear, are gaining momentum, and most linear entertainment is also available on demand not long after being broadcast.

Although not every impression will likely be biddable, there's no question that programmatic will continue to grow, said Matt Van Houten, SVP of product, ad sales and business development at DirecTV Advertising.

The ambition is to let advertisers buy inventory however they want to buy it, Van Houten said, whether that's regionally, nationally, locally, programmatically or "over a martini lunch in New York City."

"We want to do all of those things for all inventory types," he said. "It's not TV or digital – it's TV and digital."

Working on a new GRP

Regardless of how and where inventory gets sold, whether through a private marketplace or during a booze-and-schmooze session on Madison Avenue, advertisers want to measure their media.

The fact that TV is becoming more impression-based opens the conversation beyond traditional gross point ratings (GRPs) and basic reach and frequency to measure exposure, Van Houten said.

"Nielsen obviously recognizes that and they’re bringing big data into the panel," he said.

Although not in time for this year's upfronts, because Nielsen needs more time to develop the product.

TV buyers have been using GRPs for decades, which involves measuring reach multiplied by frequency divided by audience to determine the impact of a campaign, usually on ad recall.

But there's a long way to go before the ad industry figures out what the "new GRP will be inside the connected TV world," said Roku's Markey.

With GRPs, he said, "you lose an important part of what programmatic brings to TV," which is the ability to optimize the number of impressions for a given household.

Under the impression

By the same token, programmatic advertisers need to chill a bit when they buy connected TV (CTV). The performance metrics they’re accustomed to on other digital channels don't immediately translate to measuring a CTV experience.

Although there are companies making progress with performance-based CTV measurement – AppLovin, for example, recently started offering the ability for advertisers to buy campaigns on a cost-per-install basis – viewers will almost always convert on devices other than their TV.

Which is why buyers shouldn't expect CTV to deliver the same sort of gains as search, social or retargeting.

"Think about CTV in a different context of the funnel, as in, who am I getting and what is the cost of getting them?" Markey said. "CTV is a great reach mechanism for finding new people."

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