By Jay Prasad, Chief Strategy Officer, LiveRamp
Over the last few years, TV and video has arguably been one of the most rapidly evolving areas of advertising. The past six months alone saw major changes to long-standing measurement methods, as well as the introduction of new currencies vying to measure the future ecosystem. Further complicating matters is the continued expansion of viewer touch points, such as streaming and mobile video, that continue to explode in the marketplace.
Today’s media buyers and sellers require holistic and automated approaches to reach these fragmented target audiences and gain actionable insights that will transform how campaigns are designed and executed across all screens and streams. When buyers and their sell-side partners can collaborate, activate, and quantify across linear, digital, and streaming inventory, these outcomes become attainable while consumers benefit from more relevant advertising, no-cost access to content, and valuable brand experiences. If powered by authenticated first-party data and identity, every touch point then remains privacy-first, secure, sustainable, and scalable.
Start with collaboration
The industry has identified a growing need to securely collaborate across partners and customers, operationalize consumer insights, perform analytics, and plan and transact across all media types. As companies harness the power of consumer data, being able to do this across clouds is fundamental to protecting and driving value to be truly useful between parties and partners. Data collaboration empowers participants to build, act, and drive value to collaborate, activate, and measure—in a privacy-first manner.
The use of privacy-enhancing technologies—such as federated learning or differential privacy in this equation—is becoming more mainstream to ensure data governance for all parties and empower many-to-many collaborations. With these controls in place, brands and media sellers can safely connect cross-screen data, such as website visits or advertising impressions, and open the door to advanced business applications, including closed-loop measurement and collaborative analytics.
When tapping into these data streams with trusted partners, new use cases are unlocked, customer insights unveiled, revenue streams obtained, and partnerships like the Upfronts are brought to the next level in terms of value.
Activate to improve addressability
If the mass exodus away from third-party cookies and device IDs tells us anything, it’s that high-value addressability is the key to unlocking greater ROI with the least amount of waste. A people-based identifier is necessary to create addressable audiences across fragmented TV and video screens to improve activation and measurement.
Authenticated identity makes it exponentially easy to effectively define audiences across screens. When activating on enhanced first- and third-party insights obtained through privacy-first data collaboration, CTV publishers can plan audience-based campaigns holistically across linear and streaming, and brands and agencies can more easily discover and access premium video supply that’s already been deduplicated and forecasted against strategic audiences beyond age and gender.
In short, campaign planning and optimization becomes much efficient and faster when there’s more direct communication between buyers and sellers. Both parties can more effectively power cross-screen, custom audiences and achieve greater addressability at every touch point. Context and audience can now be forecasted on with identity, and there are seamless flows to programmatic and the Upfronts, opening up the capabilities for cross-screen and making it a reality—not just wishful thinking.
Quantify to improve the bottom line
If all TV buyers and sellers had to rank their list of priorities, improved measurement would surely top the list. The reality of today’s ecosystem is that participants need to be able to quantify multiple methods of measuring audience reach and frequency and tie them to actual business outcomes that both buyer and seller can agree to.
Now that adequate collaboration, activation, and cross-screen data are possible at scale, the accuracy of measurement is greatly improved, enabling media owners and advertisers to define metrics that prove value for their business, whether that be for strategic audience reach product sales, application installs, website visits, or other real-world outcomes. Buyers and sellers finally meet their shared goal that every dollar spent is both accountable and addressable.
Going forward, the TV marketplace will demand solutions that enable buyers and sellers to plan, activate, and quantify audience-based campaigns across all touch points. Powered by a best-in-class identity solution, LiveRamp and Data Plus Math are among those working with leaders across the TV sector to make this a reality today.
Those who participate in a balanced collaborative ecosystem will be able to grow addressability across video and TV environments, create new and high-value first-party audiences, and overcome historic silos between linear, digital video, and CTV to measure and value holistically and at pace with modern viewing habits for the first time.
