In this week's member-guest blog post, we hear from Rachel Gantz, General Manager, Activation at Comscore as she shares why brands should consider contextual solutions not just to solve brand safety problems but for CTV and audience targeting as well.
Recently, the IAB Europe issued a summary of brand safety solutions in the modern era. With GDPR, cookies being deprecated in just 200 days (!?!?!), and CTV on the rise there is a strong argument to be made for why brands should take a second look at contextual solutions to solve not only their brand safety problems, but their CTV targeting and audience targeting problems as well. There was much discussion amongst the brand safety providers about what the future of contextual targeting should be. Can we move the industry to one where publishers see value in monetising their ad-supported CTV programming with contextual categories? Will advertisers one day be able to apply brand safety applications that have been tried, and true in web to CTV live streaming news or sports?
The discussion of the future of contextual CTV targeting mainly consisted of two key topics:
The discussion argued that brand safety for CTV needs to evolve beyond basic metadata processing to include frame by frame and second by second audio and visual processing to give advertisers a more complete brand safety picture. It also argued that for a transparent ecosystem, efforts will need to be made by publishers to better categorise CTV content (including live streaming) in a standardised way.
Well friends I have great news, the future is now.
From methodologies that include frame-by-frame video and second by second audio applications to patent-pending brand safety for live streaming solutions, Comscore is evolving how the CTV landscape thinks about brand safety. With an increasing percentage of eyeballs focusing on video content and ad-supported CTV becoming mainstream, these technological evolutions are critical to giving advertisers the tools needed to make informed choices. However, they are also critical for publishers and when done right, give publishers the ability to monetise more of their content, not less, by offering more contextually relevant moments for advertisers to take advantage of.
In addition, we are partnering with SSPs, DSPs, and publishers to ensure standardisation within the bidstream so that advertisers can apply brand safety, contextual categories, or even Comscore’s new Predictive Audiences, our contextually driven audience targeting solution, at scale. This standardisation is critical for better monetisation and better scale for advertisers.
In summary, while there will always be future evolutions that will make the market better, Comscore is doing a lot of the ‘future of CTV’ now. Come talk to us, we’d love to tell you about it.
