Authored by Industry Leaders from Across Europe
Provides Valuable Insights, Key Considerations, and Best Practices for Programmatic CTV in Europe
29th April 2021, Brussels, Belgium: IAB Europe, the leading European-level industry association for the digital advertising and marketing ecosystem, has today released its ‘Guide to the Programmatic Connected TV (CTV) Opportunity in Europe’ to help planners and buyers of media understand and navigate how CTV can operate programmatically.
Following on from IAB Europe’s Guide to Connected TV that was released in June 2020, the new guide takes a deeper dive into this emerging channel, providing a European-level overview of the CTV programmatic supply chain and the programmatic buying options available to advertisers. The guide also addresses the challenges that planners currently face, with some key considerations and best practices to ensure programmatic CTV investment is being optimised and used effectively.
The European Connected TV (CTV) market has skyrocketed in recent years. Where the worlds of TV and digital have been gradually merging over time, more and more consumers have been tuning out of traditional linear TV options and moving into online streaming, paving the way for the CTV phenomenon. In Europe, CTV presents a huge opportunity for advertisers to reach engaged audiences with the right message. Recent findings from Magnite’s ‘CTV: The Future Forward - EU5 consumer research found that 71% of viewers prefer streaming to broadcast. However, the European CTV ecosystem is a diversified collection of markets all at different stages of CTV growth. Each country has its own unique definitions, group of CTV apps, plus differing offerings from broadcasters. For the CTV market to reach its full potential in Europe scale is key, and for that to happen programmatic CTV needs to be adopted.
Commenting on the role that programmatic advertising can play to help scale CTV across Europe, David Goddard, Chair of IAB Europe’s Programmatic Trading Committee & Senior Business Development Director at DoubleVerify said “Programmatic ad selling has numerous advantages, such as offering a centralised approach to CTV buying, providing scale, and a unified view of data in real-time. However, buyers and publishers need to firstly understand how it operates in order to capitalise on the programmatic opportunities for CTV in Europe. The guide, written by experts from across the programmatic CTV landscape, perfectly describes the market setup, key stakeholders and operations. It focuses on what industry standards should be adopted in order to enable scaled CTV monetisation and advises how to tackle industry challenges such as: fraud, viewability, brand safety and how demanding greater transparency is critical to support future investment and ROI on this emerging channel. We encourage all industry stakeholders to read this guide to help maximise their opportunities”.
Austin Scott, Head of Video Market Development at Xandr echoed these comments saying “CTV has the potential to achieve reach on par with traditional TV but offers efficiencies and relevancy that is associated with programmatic when it comes to planning, audience-based targeting and measurement. As with anything new, there are challenges to be solved alongside the opportunities, so brands and agencies need to understand how to navigate this landscape to capitalise.”
Also commenting on what buyers should consider for their programmatic CTV campaigns, Jaidev Kakar, Director, Advertiser Solutions CTV / OTT (EMEA) at PubMatic said “CTV is an important part of building brand awareness with new audiences and driving performance with target consumers. In many of the European markets, the education and awareness piece still needs to be worked on. The technology really must work seamlessly and provide a TV like experience which is important to the consumer, the publisher and the buyer. Think about the technological solutions that you will need in the future and start building now. Choose partners with a heritage in the programmatic space, as this is where the market is moving.”
This guide has been developed by experts from IAB Europe’s Programmatic Trading Committee. Contributors to the guide included Criteo, Didomi, Finecast, Google, IAS, Magnite, Oracle Data Cloud, PubMatic, Rakuten Advertising, SpotX, IAB Tech Lab and Xandr. Commenting on the importance of the guide Glenn Perera, Director, Product Strategy EMEA, Integral Ad Science (IAS) said “With CTV in more homes than ever before, we are witnessing a huge growth opportunity of programmatic advertising within these environments. IAB Europe’s Guide to the Programmatic CTV Opportunity in Europe is a vital resource that identifies the growth of CTV programmatic advertising, best practices and how marketers can tap into these opportunities. We’re excited to have contributed to the guide as there’s a huge appetite for CTV related education and awareness in the market along with honing the standardisation and unified measurements of ad campaigns so that marketers can continue to invest with confidence.”
Steve Wing, Head of EMEA at Magnite also commented on the guide's importance saying, "Europe is undergoing a seismic shift in how its people are consuming content - CTV growth trends have accelerated through 12 unique months, and this presents a rich advertising opportunity. IAB Europe's Guide to CTV is built on the collaborative intelligence across some great companies, and is a fundamental piece to gaining an understanding of this exciting area and how to harness the power of CTV."
2021 is a key moment for the industry to reflect on the past decade of digital advertising and channel lessons learnt into the development of the CTV ecosystem. A call for action within the guide is for transparency, measurement and brand safety to be prioritised and for all players to be accountable and responsible for building on these principles in the future. IAB Europe will continue to work with their members in 2021 to uphold and build on these principles.
Download the Guide here
In this week's member guest post, we hear from Edouard Lauwick, Senior Vice President, Southern Europe at Rakuten Advertising,as he shares his views on the importance of context and creating the right 'moment' in advertising strategies.
Imagine that you’re settled on the couch in front of an exciting movie, glass of wine in one hand and popcorn in the other. You’re enjoying a night at home after a long week at work, in a moment of pure escapism. The break arrives and an ad for a sporty new car captures your mood perfectly…the one for the toilet bleach less so, even though you’re only metres from your bathroom. You’re not in the mood to think about cleaning.
For the advertiser, both of these ad placements might cost the same, but one was almost certainly more effective than the other. As a ‘data point’, the individual on the couch is the same, but the context makes all the difference. As such, while demographic is an essential factor in planning an advertising strategy, it shouldn’t always be the sole dictator of it.
Advertisers need to understand where their audience is throughout the day, understand them as a person and consider the context they’re in when they want their message to resonate.
Weaving this into an advertising strategy involves elevating them to a concept – the Moment – which encapsulates the role they play. In understanding Moments, budgets become vastly more effective, and the resonance increases significantly. They’re ignored at peril.
Context makes the Moment
We’re all different people at different times of the day, and our emotional (or rational) state reflects this. This can be kicking back with a coffee, taking a walk, or staring out of the window wondering what to buy your partner for their birthday.
However, each of these can also involve media consumption: watching the rolling news with that coffee; video calling a friend during that walk; and browsing online for that birthday treat. They all, therefore, become Moments, none of which are actually momentary.
A Moment doesn’t have to be fleeting. It’s how long and how deeply we are involved in an act over a period of time.
The opportunity in advertising strategy
Advertisers need to be part of these Moments alongside the audience because brand loyalty is increasingly driven by a shared set of values. Brands must demonstrate how much they align with their audience’s lives – be they professional or personal.
Connecting with the audience in the context of the Moment multiplies the impact of the message. It brings emotional understanding to what would otherwise simply rely on broad demographics – a depersonalised and detached approach to recognising individuals as people.
We’ve created a new report which helps advertisers understand the concept of Moments, and how to use them strategically in campaigns. The report examines the different Moments that occur across Rakuten Advertising’s media properties, and how brands and agencies can utilise them to reduce wasted ad spend. ‘Connecting in the Moment: A guide to key media ‘Moments’ and how advertisers can use them’ can be found here. Never be in the wrong Moment again.
In this week's member-guest post, we hear from Igor Gubin, Region Manager Europe at Admitad Affiliate Network, as he delivers his views on big data and why we need to find more ethical and legal approaches to it.
Why Data is Key - the Past, the Present, the Future
To discover what lies behind the growth, it's key to consider the dynamic. Historical data is quite insightful to see how your brand is evolving over time. The context is essential too, as it provides perspective and allows you to make strategic decisions. Lastly, to complete the story and add depth to your context, you have to consider the current climate.
However, as the amount of data becomes overwhelming, new challenges arise — are the data bearers happy to share what they do, online and offline? How can one make sense of this much information?
Online marketing is unthinkable without “big data” these days — the large data sets are used to discover hidden trends and patterns. Or in behavioural marketing, to analyse the customer journey from exploration to sale. Cookies played an important role too as this journey became “restorable” and trackable thanks to the cookie files dropped by various sites to the user's browser.
The Limitations
The pre-GDPR market was a primordial soup of data where next to anyone could recover a user's route without their consent. It wasn’t just every website you visited that had access to some of the browser history — it could be anyone they shared it with, knowingly or not. It took a few major data leaks to make governments realise the progression of disaster. Hence, privacy laws and browsers blocking third-party trackers.
Tracking, the bread and butter of affiliate marketing, has undergone significant changes in both strategic approach and practice of how to use collected third-party data to run affiliate businesses. As you read this, tracking links stop dropping cookies to the affiliate network via redirect sites used to traverse from publishers to advertisers. Browsers detect attempts to record non consented cookies and prevent them. Best case scenario? Advertisers can’t trace orders back to publishers. Worst case — the users don't even get to the store in the first place.
What Browsers Do
Firefox and Safari already block tracking cookies by default, and not only has Google's Chrome browser joined the third-party-cookie-blocking fray, the search platform keeps announcing that it will not roll out alternative user-level ad identifiers to replace third-party cookies. The big question on all our minds is what marketers and advertisers will do without third-party cookies?
Early March 2021, Google provided the long-awaited answer: the replacement for third-party cookies is first-party data. Google announced that it will not implement alternative user-level identifiers to replace third-party cookies. Surely, Google has a wealth of first-party data, or data it collects from users directly, to target ads on its own publishing platforms. This is great within the walled gardens of Google, but other publishers may feel left out.
What Does This Mean for Advertisers and Publishers?
Today, brands have a plethora of data on each customer — purchase data, email engagement, device information, etc. Not just historical, but also real-time behavioral data regarding interaction with websites, carts, products and categories visited while browsing. Failure to track customer choices could lead to incorrect assumptions about customer behavior, and thereby cause badly targeted marketing campaigns, wasting budgets and frustrating users.
What both brands and consumers really want is a balance between personalisation and privacy. A Harris Poll survey revealed that 63 percent of consumers expect personalisation “as a standard of service.” But they also deserve to have the choice to be tracked or not, to get a personalised experience or not, and to see ads or not.
If marketers focus on making advertising more relevant and less invasive, consumers will likely see the value of it and choose to allow it in their digital lives. No one wants to see frustrated users seeing the most irrelevant ads. But even less people want to be asked every time they search for their grocery supplier next door or read their favourite online media, whether they accept cookies.
For the last 25 years, Marketers have relied on third-party cookies to track consumer behaviour online. Nearly all AdTech and MarTech platforms use cookies for targeting, retargeting, display advertising, and behavioral marketing in general.
But now, that’s all changing.
Smart cookie-blocking technology led by Apple’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) and Firefox’s Enhanced Tracking Protection (ETP) now block third-party cookies by default.
2020 then kicked off with Google announcing that it intended to change the way ads are targeted online. Its goal of making third-party cookies "obsolete" by 2022 subsequently brought about one of the most significant shifts for the online advertising industry.
Now one year on, there is still much debate around how the ‘post-cookie era’ will affect future business models in the digital advertising industry and what alternative solutions are being developed.
IAB Europe released a guide back in May 2020 to help brands, agencies, publishers and tech intermediaries navigate the shifting landscape. As solutions have evolved over the last twelve months, the Guide to the Post Third-Party Cookie Era has been updated to provide the most up-to-date guidance.
We caught up with some of the contributors of the guide to find out what the biggest developments are to date, to understand what the market alternatives to third-party cookies are, and what the future holds for a post-third party cookie world.
Q1. Since the first guide was released in May 2020, what changes have you seen, and what have been the biggest developments?
“Some of the most significant changes have come via Prebid.org with the launch of SharedID.org as an open-source, public first-party ID and the assumption of the PubCommon identifier, folded into the SharedID footprint.
Apart from Prebid.org, there continues to be significant movement within the W3C groups debating Google Chrome's Privacy Sandbox proposals. Several AdTech companies have contributed counter-or-complimentary Sandbox proposals, all of which have been discussed at length within the W3C. Among these proposals, the acknowledgment on Google's part of the necessity of a server-side trusted third-party entity within the Sandbox environment is most notable, as this is a meaningful departure from the original tenor of the Sandbox proposals.
The recent announcement of the Fledge testing framework for TURTLEDOVE is being followed with great interest by all stakeholders.” Garrett McGrath, Vice President of Product Management, Magnite
“We’ve really seen an acceleration of so many of the topics discussed in the guide, most notably the introduction of authentication-based solutions like Unified ID 2.0. These solutions will be absolutely critical in helping publishers monetise while continuing to drive results for advertisers in a post-cookie world.
Google also made a recent announcement highlighting their response to other industry efforts to replace the third-party cookie. The announcement certainly has a direct effect on every aspect of the advertising ecosystem, but our primary focus remains to ensure that whatever replaces the third-party cookie improves consumers' privacy protections.” Sara Vincent, Senior Director of Strategic Partner Development, Index Exchange
Q2. In the new edition of the guide, the number of solutions to the third-party cookie has quadrupled. What is your take on what the industry has developed over the last six months? Are we any closer to having it all figured out by 2022?
“While it is certainly true that the time is now to be actively building and testing solutions for a third-party cookieless future, I think it is important to note that we don't view January 2022 as a drop-dead moment in time.
That being said, we've certainly seen an explosion in the number of "universal" ID solutions. Many are purpose-built for specific demand, some address authentication, some certain regional attitudes, and many are attempting to simply be a cookie replacement. Overall we believe that identity in the new internet should be a community asset, completely open and transparent, and not run by a for-profit entity.
By 2022 and beyond we'll no doubt have a (hopefully relatively small) variety of solutions that collectively should address authenticated users, non-authenticated/first-party identifiers, and the eventual production inputs from the Privacy Sandbox proposals.” Garrett McGrath, Vice President of Product Management, Magnite
While it is certainly going to take a lot of work and industry-wide collaboration, I do think the industry will eventually be prepared for a world without third-party cookies as it continues to prioritise addressability, measurement, and consumer privacy. We know there is not going to be a singular, catch-all solution for successful monetisation in a post-cookie world, but I’m encouraged by the general direction of the industry and the solutions that have emerged to date. Sara Vincent, Senior Director of Strategic Partner Development, Index Exchange
“In recent months we've seen a wave of innovation as the industry has looked to build new Unified ID solutions to make up for the loss of third-party cookies. However, the issue remains that outside of first-party cookies there hasn't been a viable solution for the non-authenticated, "open" web.
I think many in the industry will look to telcos as a solution to this challenge, as telcos' networks provide a rich source of information that publishers can use to verify their users securely and safely. Enabling first-party identifiers that are verified on a per publisher basis in this way will strengthen the case for them to be used as a long-term replacement to third-party cookies.
However, it is important that data is not then distributed down the bidstream and tied to session-based identifiers, as doing so would only lead to exponential data growth or the survival of the fittest. It's therefore important for first-party data holders to agree on a dynamic ID for data activation. This would address the challenge of scale by enabling a standardised taxonomy across publishers that are activated on a per-publisher basis.” Tanya Field, CPO, Novatiq
Q3. There has been an influx of ID solutions coming to the fore, how can stakeholders identify and select partners?
“Identifiers need actual adoption by buy-side platforms; the degree to which this is true today varies greatly. Publishers should focus on how identifiers are generated and what level of control they have over them, with a special note to pay attention to the use of fingerprinting as not acceptable, i.e. the use of browser/device signals to infer linkages between first-party identifiers.” Garrett McGrath, Vice President of Product Management, Magnite
“Since thriving in a post-cookie world is going to require a multi-pronged strategy, publishers should be asking themselves who are the buyers that they trust and what are the Identity solutions and partners they’re leveraging.
Publishers have to understand what works for them, what works for their readers and users, and then experiment with different ways to earn their audience’s trust and obtain consent and authentication from there. They must think about the various touchpoints for their audience — newsletter subscriptions, comment pages, etc. — and think about how they can use this information in a way that’s going to resonate with and benefit the end-user.” Sara Vincent, Senior Director of Strategic Partner Development, Index Exchange
“There are a growing number of IDs on the market. My view is that no one solution will offer a panacea to the digital advertising industry's needs. Rather, it is likely that the industry will coalesce around a mix of solutions that will jointly provide the capabilities publishers and brands require ahead of the 2022 deadline.
In my view, it's likely that first-party IDs, owned and maintained by publishers, will emerge as the primary means for achieving audience addressability at scale, with Unified IDs playing a significant role in measurement, attribution and other areas of the value chain. First-party IDs make sense for audience addressability because they give publishers complete control of their data and consent management. This data can then be activated using a transient ID in collaboration with telco partners that ensures no data is distributed in the bidstream.
Stakeholders realise that the writing is on the wall for browser-based or device-based signals, as the expectation is that anti-fingerprinting measures will increase. Verification seems the right path forward as it's highly secure, consent-driven and pseudonymised. As a key part of a broader ID ecosystem it will have an important role to play.” Tanya Field, CPO, Novatiq
Q4. In terms of contextual solutions, what developments and adoptions are we seeing in this space?
“There are a number of interesting developments that can be seen with contextual targeting capabilities. There is now the ability to use data integrated into programmatic buying platforms to not only avoid bidding on fraudulent impressions and target more viewable impressions but also to avoid unsuitable content and target towards brand suitable content. Contextual targeting allows advertisers to reach their desired audience without the use of third-party cookies.
Contextual targeting will achieve scale for advertisers in 2021. We are already seeing a pick-up in the adoption of contextual targeting as it does not require any heavy underlying tech on the DSP or Publisher side.
The technology relies on sentiment and emotion analysis done by ML/AI and is also independent of audience tracking data such as cookies. Hence, it allows a smooth and easy transition while still being effective on ROI of campaigns and aligned to brand safety & suitability priorities.” Nick Welch, Programmatic Director, Northern Europe, Integral Ad Science
"In the last year, there have been many developments when it comes to context, transforming it from its more traditional form based on keyword relationship to more advanced solutions for targeting purposes. For example, we’re quite excited about video content recognition which opens an even broader landscape of targetable inventory. On top of that, there is definitely more maturity when it comes to marrying both contextual and measurement technologies, or what some people call contextual analytics. In many cases, this convergence can lead to new discoveries – such as insights that uncover surprising contextual environments that ultimately deliver performance compared to the more obvious, standard segments. This combination offers a fertile ground for strategies for both prospecting and conversions." Carlotta Zorzi, Enterprise Brand Partnerships, Oracle Data Cloud
Q5. What are your predictions for the future and how do you see solutions developing over the next 12 months?
“While the transition period will no doubt be a little rocky, we should focus on the truly unique opportunity to re-make not only our industry but the entire internet into a more effective, privacy-forward, and most especially user-centric system. These changes should be seen as a very positive opportunity.” Garrett McGrath, Vice President of Product Management, Magnite
“I think we’re going to continue to see the rise of a few prominent solutions that buyers and publishers have been willingly testing in recent months. I’m hopeful that we’re also going to see greater collaboration across the board, as well as industry adoption of authentication-based solutions.” Sara Vincent, Senior Director of Strategic Partner Development, Index Exchange
“Looking to the year ahead, the industry needs to focus on the resurgence of publishers - and that means cracking the delivery of first-party data to the ecosystem. I believe this need will drive engagement by telcos to help deliver a verified ID solution. Telcos have the network view to enable cross-device audiences on the open web, and have every reason for wanting to take part, given the significant benefits that would accrue to both the industry and their businesses through offering such services.” Tanya Field, CPO, Novatiq
There’s a learning curve as the industry moves away from cookie-based solutions, which we see as an opportunity for us all to refocus on what matters - trust and transparency. As we move forward, we believe contextual solutions play a crucial role in a diversified portfolio approach to consumer-centric identity. Education and cooperation, like the IAB Whitepaper on Understanding the Post-Third Party Cookie World, are crucial to achieving our key goals:
In general, when it comes to context we want to encourage everyone to be curious and ask questions. The context-focused industry is growing rapidly so it’s the perfect time to have these conversations with platforms partners. There is a rich future for cookieless solutions and we believe that EMEA will lead the way”. Carlotta Zorzi, Enterprise Brand Partnerships, Oracle Data Cloud
In this week's member-guest post, we hear from Mia Sari, Manager, Solutions Consulting at Xandr, as she shares her thoughts on the 'free internet' and why she prefers to see highly relevant ads.
Mia is a Solutions Consultant at Xandr, where she advises traders to yield optimal results for their programmatic campaigns. Before joining Xandr, Mia worked at a Berlin-based start-up Retail Media Group where she built the company’s programmatic infrastructure from scratch. In her spare time, she writes about all things programmatic and she works on her passion project where she builds mobile games to inspire girls to reach their full potential.
With no end to the pandemic insight, I turned to bingeing TV shows and films for comfort, like countless other people who found themselves stuck at home. One of my favourites is "This is Us", which I streamed on Amazon Prime.
After I gloriously completed watching three seasons in a row, I got stuck. The only option I had to continue watching season four was to pay. And this was the moment where I thought to myself, "I wish there is an ad-supported option, instead".
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The old adage "nothing is for free" is correct. For every unpaid piece of content we receive on the internet, we give away a bit of our personal information. It could be our age, our holiday destination, or even our favourite sports. Much of this data will be collected from cookies downloaded onto our computers. Cookie data allows web publishers to track our online journeys and observe the actions we take on different websites.
If used for good, the data can improve the quality of the ads we see. We no longer need to see the ad that is not relevant to us. This can be beneficial as we only see products that are aligned with our interests. Long gone are the days when we had to endure watching diaper ads despite not having any babies in the family.
On top of that, advertising can help us discover new products that we would have otherwise never come across. I could share my recent decision to continue my study as an example. After reading a lot of online content about Artificial Intelligence (AI), I received a highly relevant ad of a higher education program on the subject. It was what I needed at the time and I wouldn't have found this program any other way. You could call it luck, or perhaps karma. As a matter of fact, it is only a smart algorithm on the back-end.
Nevertheless, as big companies are collecting data about their customers from nearly everything they do on their platforms, there is concern over ethics of tracking and using consumer data without consent.
As a result, a few policies have been created in order to regulate data protection, like GDPR in Europe and CCPA in California. Since the policies came into full effect, the total sanctions for data violations count to date reaches more than $330 million in Europe.
The same concern also triggers the rise of subscription-based models. Netflix, The New York Times, Spotify, and the other content players have shown that users are indeed willing to pay for digital content to remove ads.
Soon enough, we find ourselves overwhelmed by digital media subscriptions. We have multiple TV streaming services, music services, news subscriptions, app subscriptions, and software subscriptions. It's like an infinity buffet, for those who can pay.
But the excessive amount of options has a downside: 47% of consumers are frustrated with the increasing number of streaming services, according to the 13th edition of Deloitte’s annual Digital Media Trends survey. We may be entering an era of ‘subscription fatigue’.
And the more we subscribe to consume media content, the higher the recurring cost we have to pay. Research found that Europeans spend at least €130 per month on subscription services. Every year, 350 billion euros is spent in Europe on these types of purchases.
Appropriately, when Hulu and Spotify provide the option of an ad-supported plan on their platform, a lot of people jump on the bandwagon. Hulu says 70% of its 82 million viewers are on ad-supported plans.
This could be the idyllic middle ground we seek out: We see non-intrusive and relevant ads by default, and we have the option to remove them by paying a subscription. In this way, consumers have a choice between both extremes.
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As I write this, I already have subscription plans on Spotify, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Masterclass, Amazon, Netflix, and Disney+. The latter I just added recently only to see baby Yoda. "How many subscriptions is too many?", I asked myself.
Therefore, when Amazon prompted me to pay more to continue watching season four of "This is Us", all I want is for them to show me a few short but highly relevant ads instead.
In this week’s member guest blog post, we welcome Alex Hole, VP Samsung Ads Europe, as he shares new exclusive insights into how Samsung TV audiences embraced TV streaming during 2020.
Last year was a disruptive year for every industry. TV was no exception. Despite video on demand (VOD) platforms having been in existence for nearly two decades, the last 12 months have seen an unparalleled rate of growth across all TV consumption but in particular OTT content.
At Samsung Ads, we use ACR (automatic content recognition) on millions of Samsung Smart TVs across Europe to gain insights into how Samsung TVs are being used, and which services are most popular. In our new report, ‘Decoding the on-demand TV landscape’, we reveal just how much those viewing habits changed on those TVs over 2020.
In January 2020, we began the year with an almost even split between linear and streaming viewing time on our Smart TVs across Europe (51% and 49%, respectively). By the end of the year, the balance had tipped in streaming’s favour, with streaming viewership time increasing by 5% to account for 54% of total TV time. Whilst this shift towards streaming on our TVs is not unexpected -- it is a significant increase in just 12 months.
Looking more specifically at streaming, we saw some interesting trends emerge. There was strong growth for subscription video on demand (SVOD) services, with viewing time across SVOD showing significant increase, particularly in Italy and the UK, growing 47% and 43% respectively. It’s likely this increased demand was fuelled by the continued growth of services like Netflix and Amazon Prime, and also the launch of Disney+ in Europe last year. The latter is on a rapid growth trajectory, with some estimating it might surpass Netflix in subscription numbers in just three years!
While SVOD services accounted for half of the total viewing time of VOD services on our TVs across Europe in 2020, ad-supported video on demand (AVOD) services also grew their share from 25% of viewing time in January to 31% by December. Spain was a particular standout, with AVOD viewing time growing an incredible 95%. Italy and Germany also saw strong demand here, with a 78% and 73% increase in AVOD viewing time respectively.
This is an emerging trend for advertisers to watch. AVOD, while still relatively new, is showing promising growth numbers. Advertisers who have watched the rise of SVOD with some concern around how to reach ‘streamers’ can now see the potential opportunity to reach these audiences in ad-supported OTT environments. Audiences today increasingly split their viewing time between linear, SVOD, AVOD, BVOD (and more!) giving advertisers plenty of opportunity to connect with them, if only they can follow the data.
Indeed, the evolution of TV viewership is incredibly complex, and audiences are becoming increasingly fragmented as their choices multiply. As viewers have grown used to choosing what they want to watch, when they want to watch it, advertisers have an opportunity to evolve and shape strategies around these choices. There are promising new opportunities opening up within curated streaming environments, enabling advertisers to reach highly engaged viewers once thought of as ‘lost’ to streaming.
The audience habits that emerged over 2020 reinforces that TV is undergoing continual change and is evolving quickly. Viewers are being provided with new services and ways to interact with content they want on the biggest screen in the home. This, in turn, provides new opportunities for advertisers to reach new audiences and complement their existing Linear TV Schedules. As content options grow and technology improves, the industry will evolve alongside viewership trends. This is an exciting time for advertisers looking to connect with viewers on the biggest screen in the home.
This week, we caught up with Emmanuel Josserand, Senior Director Agency, Brand and Industry Relations at Freewheel and Lead for the Freewheel Council for Premium Video, Europe on the programmatic paradox of premium video.
Like so many journeys of innovation, the programmatic evolution has been a complex progression of developments on both the buy-side and the sell-side. In an ideal world, this evolution would eventually lead to a solution that works for everyone, but in the case of premium video, the promises of programmatic have not yet delivered their full value. This is the programmatic paradox.
Overview of the paradox
It would be easy to explain the disconnect between sell side and buy side by saying the sell side wants a high value for its inventory, while the buy side wants to drive prices down. But this – of course – would be too simplistic.
When media agencies first emerged and began buying TV inventory, we saw the emergence of a ‘winner takes all’ approach, using the upfronts to buy as much volume as they could at the best possible price to resell to advertisers. The advent of programmatic theoretically enables a similar approach, just with easier trading mechanisms, better access to inventory at large, and more data. This saw the rise of a number of tech platforms that intended to concentrate demand. However, with so much competition and inventories it proved very complex for traders and DSPs to consolidate demand, innovate and deliver for their buyers, while guaranteeing the best prices for publishers.
Programmers, on the other hand, need to find a balance between the advertising their audience is willing to accept, and the value they need to create from impressions. There are only so many viewers, and time to consume video, so programmers need to make the most of every impression. They cannot simply add more units to a page or move audiences to additional pages as often happens with display – where inventory is plentiful and easier to target. This situation is complicated by the disparity between players where, in many European markets, some programmers will have masses of inventory, enabling them to accept lower prices than smaller premium video suppliers. The latter may offer better value, with audience targeting and niche inventory, but delivery can be an issue in addition to the inability to push prices beyond the psychological threshold set by the market leader. These obstacles, along with concerns around the impact on customer experience of opening up inventory to unknown buyers, mean premium video suppliers are being cautious and methodical about moving into programmatic.
Working around the programmatic paradox
As the TV and premium video industry tries to work around the programmatic paradox, there has been a significant increase in adoption of programmatic guaranteed. This model enables programmers to reserve specific inventory for buyers with value added through efficient delivery via a DSP, and to charge a pre-agreed price. It allows premium video providers to maintain control and almost replicate the direct sold model by prioritising programmatic guaranteed and pushing inventory through that business channel first before moving on to others, should inventory remain unsold. For smaller broadcasters this helps to deliver volume, while market-leading programmers can seek guaranteed value.
While programmatic guaranteed has some important upsides, it is a step on TV and video’s programmatic journey, not an end goal. There is no one-size-fits-all solution, so the industry should aim for a comfortable mix of channels including direct sold, programmatic guaranteed, Private Market Places (PMPs), open market and inevitably other options that have not yet emerged. To keep moving forward it is critical that both sides of the industry expand their knowledge of the other, as well as increase their understanding of the programmatic processes in premium environments.
Considerations for the sell-side
Programmers understandably want to sell their high-end inventory, but it is necessary to recognise that not every buyer has the budget to buy these high-value placements and will be looking for cheaper alternatives. By driving impressions in a way that works for advertisers, DSPs are simply fulfilling their mission.
In addition, it is important to understand that the TV and video business is very cyclical – much like many other businesses – so offers must be regularly revised. Impressions that are considered premium one month may not be the next, as new shows are launched and audiences fluctuate. TV and video buyers are incredibly sensitive to the latest trends and even minor shifts can cause significant price erosion in a way that is not often seen in digital display.
Reflections for the buy-side
From the buy-side perspective, the idea that programmatic is only used for unsold and low value inventory is long gone. This may have been true in display some years ago, but it is no longer the case, and never has been for premium video. Any inventory can be made available through programmatic pipes, so ideally buyers need to structure the way they do their buys and decide early on what to deliver through direct, and what to deliver through programmatic, finding the right balance to meet their/advertisers’ goals.
The media industry is complex, and more needs to be done to bring clarity to the world of programmatic, particularly for premium video. For instance, there is a lot of discussion around supply path optimisation (SPO) which attempts to minimise intermediaries and ensure the most direct path to publisher inventory. While this might make a lot of sense in the world of display, it is different and hardly applies to premium video. Indeed, with many broadcasters and premium video suppliers operating private exchange models to avoid diluting value by spreading their inventory around, buyers are already enjoying an almost direct relationship. When a private exchange is set up, a dedicated agency seat via a DSP is created, drawing a direct line between the buyer and the seller. This can then be used to effectively operate models such as programmatic guaranteed or private marketplace and set up one-to-one arrangements.
The idustry is currently at a crossroads where the knowledge and skills of TV and digital, on both the buy and sell sides, need to be shared as a matter of urgency to avoid greater confusion. There is an opportunity for buy-side partners like DSPs to achieve higher performance against their client’s advertising goals by further investing to include premium video audiences. To respond to advertiser’s needs DSPs should adhere to specific broadcasters’ standards that articulate particular processes and unlock access to these desirable and highly engaged audiences. The uncertainties created by programmatic which led to the paradox itself has been temporarily answered by programmatic guaranteed, but to use this channel in a more permanent way, and further move forward with the programmatic journey, all parties need to be more open to learning, sharing and understanding. The industry can choose a path that takes the premium video ecosystem beyond the programmatic paradox, but it will require patience, transparency and collaboration to reach the final destination.
In this week's member guest blog post, we welcome Tamara Nordberg, Product Marketing Manager at Didomi as she explores the growth of Connected-TV (CTV) and explains why privacy is so important in this channel.
The digital advertising industry is widely considering “connected TV” advertising as the next big growth driver. In North America alone, the OTT market is expected to double over the next 5 years, growing by over $94 billion, according to analyst firm Digital TV Research.
Various players, from streaming platforms to telco providers and publishers, are all racing to build the best possible data and technology stacks to attract advertising dollars. The money will indeed flow for those who can offer the best audience solutions across devices and platforms. Dexter Goei, the CEO of Altice USA has recently declared that “everything is going to the OTT world over broadband.”
But what do consumers think about it? Do they share the industry’s enthusiasm? It seems so.
A European-level survey conducted by Magnite (which has recently completed a strategic acquisition in the CTV and OTT ad market) indeed concluded that consumers are eager to see targeted advertising on TV, seeing it as an improvement over the current model of linear TV advertising.
When asked about what type of ads are acceptable to them, it revealed that 71% of Europeans would accept targeted ads that are relevant to their interests, with country-level variations between 65% for Germans and 80% for Italians.
The survey even showed that, on average, 57% of Europeans would likely consent to ads that would be tailored to their online browsing behavior. Again, the lowest approval rate was among German consumers (46%) and the highest among Italians (67%) and Spaniards (65%).
Based on these findings, after briefly stating that “consumer privacy remains top of mind for advertisers and consumers,” the survey concludes that “there is a disconnect between the concern for privacy and the acceptance of [CTV] advertising” and that “consumers are willing to sacrifice some level of privacy in order to watch ads.”
I think we should approach targeted advertising on CTV in a different way.
Privacy should be at the core of this new model, otherwise, consumers will not trust it. This is why Didomi has launched its CMP on connected TV this week.
Consumers should have the right to accept or refuse this paradigm, and decide for themselves whether or not they want TV ad personalisation. You should collect consent before serving personalised ads, and allow them to update or revoke permission easily, at any time. Because let’s not forget that the model is based on personal data, collected through identifiers specific to each OS and platform.
In Europe and under the GDPR or ePrivacy frameworks, this requires consent.
Not providing a clear, transparent choice to CTV consumers before serving personalised ads would give the impression that advertising technology forcefully enters living rooms and pockets, which will not be accepted and could, in the worst case, lead to consumer backlash and lawsuits across the globe.
It’s a matter of both trust and compliance, which are two sine qua non conditions to make this new model sustainable.
Eric Schmitt, a research director and analyst at Gartner (not the former CEO of Google), agrees with that point-of-view. He told Adexchanger that “it seems likely that we will see a privacy reckoning in streaming TV as CTV and OTT scale and intersect with privacy regulations.”
Let’s be clear: we will all benefit from a growing, innovative global connected TV ad market. The opportunities are massive for advertisers, vendors and consumers alike. Magnite’s survey showed that 71% of consumers already prefer streaming over traditional broadcast, and up to 74% consume ad-supported video-on-demand services on a weekly basis.
But the adtech industry should place consumer permission at the core of the new OTT model. That’s the only way to have long-term, sustainable growth that respects consumers’ ability to choose their CTV experience.
In this week's member guest blog post, we welcome Igor Gubin, Region Manager, Europe for Admitad, as he shares key insights into shopping habits during lockdown in Europe.
The advertising industry has become increasingly dependent on data to make informed decisions on consumer choices and market predictions.
Retailers and brands have considered data analytics for a long time but only a few truly understood the full impact of it. Prominent examples such as Amazon and Farfetch have introduced personalised search options to adapt offerings for each customer, indicating that data-driven fashion is not a trend, but a significant industry shift toward data mining and a more customer-centric approach.
Data is now available not only from consumers' search histories but from websites, social media, and apps. The amount of data available from non-sales-related sources has increased dramatically in the last couple of years. Retailers have been using cognitive computing to discover more about what customers might want in order to deliver desired experiences. So what is next?
When lockdown became the new normal, consumer’s shopping habits shifted, and we observed tendencies where basket value and shopping activities, in general, decreased for some brands. But context is key to having a true understanding of the bigger picture.
For example, even with more restricted rules in many EU countries, e-commerce turned out to be a large opportunity for many booksellers. When the lockdown was imposed for the second time in Europe, Admitad Affiliate Network recorded double the number of online orders for books, especially in Germany, Italy, and the UK. This included new formats such as audiobooks, films, and online games - everything that helps to make everyday life a little different and allows leisure time to be used for entertainment and education. Given the pandemic's restrictions, this is a noteworthy outcome.
In several categories, the increase in orders placed was quite impressive: work and education-related purchases increased massively, followed by computer and software ( 285% YoY increase in the European region), furniture and household goods (108% increase), tools and garden equipment (by 78%.), and beauty ( by 47%). At the same time, there was a decrease in online orders for tickets and travel, medical supplies and groceries, and clothing and footwear.
What is the lesson here? Data analysis is a strategic and at times challenging field, but there are always some insightful learnings that can be used. It's important, however, to try and not navigate a million data points at once, but instead, direct your attention toward the KPIs that will allow you to extract valuable insights and conclusions more easily. You could also sort the data sets by ranking the importance of users’ attention or the number of orders per season— but even so, this only tells part of the story. As data grows in volume, more challenges appear.
As consumers spend more time online and engage with more brands, there is a large amount of data available — the question is how to make sense of it. It is time to uncover the mystery and examine the practical implications of technology-driven solutions. Data is not something we should be afraid of; strategic decision-making in navigating your brand through uncertain times depends on it. In the rest of our blog series, we will look into big data, consumers’ concerns and changing behaviour, as well as privacy issues and solutions on how best to keep the balancing between the willingness of brands to sell and users’ ability to agree on how transparent their searching history should be. To be continued.
In the meantime, if you’re looking for more data-driven shopping insights, you can read more about Black Friday, Single’s Day, and Valentine's Day shopping statistics on the Admitad blog.
It’s impossible to think of the programmatic supply chain without thinking of transparency. No matter which stakeholder group you are in, supply chain transparency is one of the biggest impediments to programmatic investment and one of the main issues that the digital advertising industry has to resolve.
If the industry is to increase investment from the buy-side and to continue to benefit consumers through personal, timely, and relevant content, then maintaining transparency is essential.
To help establish such an advertising environment, IAB Europe’s Programmatic Trading Committee created the Supply Chain Transparency Guide. Now in its fourth iteration, the guide provides a mechanism by which industry players can gain transparency in the key areas of data, cost, and inventory source. Available in an interactive or PDF format, the guide lists the crucial questions stakeholders from each digital advertising category should ask at different stages of the supply chain.
David Goddard, Chair of IAB Europe’s Programmatic Trading Committee and Senior Business Development Director, EMEA at DoubleVerify, explains “for this latest edition of the guide, we have introduced a whole new set of questions in the area of audience data, for stakeholders to ask Identity Providers. As we transition into a post third-party cookie era, identifying ID solutions to test and work effectively with, as well as considering the case for contextual targeting, will become ever more important for all stakeholders, and ensuring transparency in this area is critical. The Committee’s work ensures that the guide reflects the state of the industry today, that it is as complete as possible, and that it paves the way for future programmatic investment. We believe this best practice guide will help create a transparent industry for all and will help drive the future of programmatic forward.”
Commenting on the additional questions for Identity Providers that have been added to the guide, Jamie Penkethman, Senior Director, Product Marketing, MediaMath said "A brand’s choice of first-party ID(s) generally sits at the intersection of regional availability, type of first-party data activated, and complementary data services related to the ID. The questions in this guide should lead brands toward the right partner(s).”
Combating stakeholder concerns around quality and transparency is vital to the work of IAB Europe in 2021 and beyond. This is why, under the guidance of the Brand Advertising Committee, we established a dedicated Quality and Transparency Task Force last year. The aim of the Task Force is to mitigate these apprehensions and address the challenges that the industry is facing in order to fuel consumer trust and brand investment in the digital advertising and marketing ecosystem.
With the advertising sector increasingly complex and competitive, the need for transparency is now more pressing than ever before, and the collaborative work of these groups is essential to driving transparency across the digital advertising supply chain.
IAB Europe members can join any of the aforementioned groups – Programmatic Trading Committee, Brand Advertising Committee, or Quality & Transparency Task Force. Please contact Lauren Wakefield (wakefield [at] stg-iabeurope-iabeuropeold.kinsta.cloud) to find out more.
Access the Supply Chain Transparency Guide here.
Ryan Martin was elected as the Chair of the Brand Advertising Committee on 17th February at the first quarterly meeting of 2021. Replacing Clementina Piazza (Automation Lead, Spotify), Ryan was elected to lead the committee’s work to drive brand investment into digital by providing Brand Advertisers with a reliable and trusted Brand Advertising Framework for converging digital and traditional media environment. The Framework is composed of a set of initiatives designed to be compatible with global programmes.
Commenting on his newly appointed role and vision for the committee, Ryan said “Having worked in media since graduating, I believe we are entering a really exciting and pivotal moment for the digital advertising and marketing industry. This means that our role, as the IAB Europe Brand Advertising Committee members, will become more important than ever before. In my role at TikTok, we are all about learning and developing our practices to build our credibility and relationships. Not just with consumers and advertisers but the ecosystem too. We want to understand how we can develop brand advertising for the better. We don’t want to do things just because it’s how they've always been done, we want to help make them better and we can only do that with the support of the ecosystem. As a committee, I believe we can collaborate to drive the industry forward.”
The Brand Advertising Committee is a multi-stakeholder group, which aims to provide valuable education and guidance to the wider community.
For any IAB Europe Members who would like to get involved in the committee, please contact Lauren Wakefield - wakefield@iabeurope.eu or Helen Mussard - mussard@iabeurope.eu
About Ryan Martin, Global Business Marketing - Program Manager, TikTok
Ryan joined the industry on the agency side as a press planner and buyer and fell in love with the traditional way of working, with big media brands and titles and essentially delivering reach for brands. As the industry developed his path took him into more and more digital roles. He’s always felt his best work included multiple players from across the media landscape, working in harmony to deliver results for clients.
He joined TikTok two years ago and has helped build it into the business it is today. To work at a business with creativity at the heart makes coming to work every day for him is a joy and to showcase unparalleled opportunities to brands is a pleasure. TikTok is a platform where businesses can feel safe and confident with their brand and he has worked on multiple initiatives to prove this, such as its recent IAB UK Gold Standard 2.0 accreditation. As a leader in product, partnerships, and creative innovation he’s excited about the impact he and TikTok can have on the IAB Brand Advertising Committee.
The demise of third-party cookies has changed the outlook for programmatic advertising. Bringing both challenges and opportunities with it. In our member guest post, we caught up with Paul Farrow, Manager, Solutions Consulting at Xandr to get his thoughts on the evolving landscape of programmatic advertising and to see where he sees it going from here.
As Manager, Solutions Consulting at Xandr, Dr Paul Farrow supports major buyers and sellers in Central Europe to foster their programmatic partnerships and grow their businesses. Since 2018 one of his main goals has been to ensure that Publishers understand and correctly implement the TCF framework, thereby maintaining privacy standards whilst strengthening the advertising ecosystem.
As a biologist, I am accustomed to the concept of evolution. But even I have been astonished by the level of disruption and development in the world of programmatic advertising since joining the industry just over two years ago.
The third-party cookie is likely to disappear in the next couple of years, as browsers continue to introduce and expand controls around how and in what form information about their users can be made available. This will have, and is already having, a profound effect.
Privacy frameworks, too, are beginning to appear across the globe. The Transparency and Consent Framework (TCF) has already been successfully implemented across Europe, and we are now beginning to see similar solutions in Canada, Thailand, and Brazil on the horizon (among others). These frameworks all work to enable and facilitate interoperability and accountability across the world-wide-web.
These tools and changes will help publishers and advertisers in their mission to ensure the privacy of their customers at every stage of their web journey, and we are all excited about the developments browsers are now making to their logic, as well as the frameworks which many of our clients at Xandr have worked incredibly hard to implement, as we enter this new age.
At Xandr, we are working hard to ensure that our processes - and the processes of our partners - react and adapt to meet the challenges of the new environment and to make sure the privacy demands of our clients are always front and center.
Simple Ads
We know that the removal of the third-party cookie and an increase in privacy frameworks will change the way clients interact with their audiences. That's why we are building out a suite of products to enhance our capabilities around the following use-cases:
This suite of products will be known collectively as Simple Ads and will address some of the challenges faced in a privacy-first ecosystem.
ID-less audiences
For example, Xandr will continue to process and market impressions that do not contain cookies or device IDs. We recognise that every impression has value, and as we move into the new privacy-first era, publishers should not be penalised for putting the privacy of their users first, but rewarded for doing so.
We also know that, from a buy-side perspective, this new landscape offers opportunities to adopt other methods of reaching the same, or similar, audiences. Contextual and viewability addressing remain perfectly good options for advertisers to address their customers, and the careful curation of marketplaces is on the rise.
Privacy
On the other hand, publishers are aware that they must pay closer attention to what is happening on their properties. They know that they are the gatekeepers between their users and their partners, and they have a responsibility to control the privacy of every pixel. It is not enough to simply implement a Consent Management Platform (CMP); publishers want to know which of their partners are setting third-party cookies and - in the best case - help those partners act in accordance with legislation. With this in mind, Xandr is building out controls (as part of Simple Ads) that will allow publishers to choose exactly how restrictive to be and at what level to enforce the privacy laws of their land.
Universal Identifiers
In the past five years, we have seen an explosion of Identity solutions hit the market. At first, these identifiers were based primarily on third-party cookies and the creation of cross-party user graphs. However, reliance upon cookies is looking increasingly ill-advised, and as we edge closer to the loss of third-party cookies, the emergence of identifiers based on user logins (NetID, LiveRamp) as well as the creation of identity consortiums and initiatives (Unified ID 2.0, Project Rearc) are becoming increasingly important.
Privacy Sandbox
Also in development is the Privacy Sandbox, whose mission is to “Create a thriving web ecosystem that is respectful of users and private by default.” At present, the Privacy Sandbox is a collection of ideas (some easier to imagine than others) revolving around the removal of access to personal data for ad tech and other companies. It is unclear which of these ideas will be implemented, less so the timeline of their implementation. But over the next couple of years, browsers will develop in a direction that places them as the gatekeepers to our information.
What now?
Juggling these complementary and contradictory considerations is the principal challenge for ad tech companies moving into the privacy-first generation. And given the finite resources each company has at its disposal, as well as the fierce market competition, the stakes could not be higher.
But as the industry focuses on individual solutions, we must realise that the creation of a private internet cannot obstruct the requirements of an open internet and that cross-collaboration and communication are more important than they have ever been if we are to protect the user and the publisher within the same system.
Finding the right balance is key. But having watched the successful adoption and implementation of the TCF across Europe, and as I listen to the results coming from, for example, W3C and Project Rearc, I am optimistic about our ability to work together, and I am sure this industry will evolve into something far more fit for purpose in the coming months and years.
