By Vinod Kashyap, Chief Product Officer, Digital Envoy
As marketers shift more budget into connected TV (CTV), identity continues to be the biggest success hurdle for the channel. In simple terms, the current focus on measuring household activity using device-level IDs just doesn’t fit with real audience behaviour, especially the common tendency towards co-viewing.
Overcoming this issue means thinking differently about how campaigns are delivered and measured. To be more specific, industry players must better harness one of the most overlooked but effective keys to solving identity for CTV: the IP address.
Just like a TV connects the entire household to content globally, an IP address connects all devices within that household to the internet. Crucially, unlike device-centric IDs, IP addresses provide a consistent signal across disparate environments that is exactly what’s necessary for targeting TV viewers in the right way.
The CTV Challenge: want versus need
Fast-growing investment in CTV is outpacing the evolution of measurement and identity approaches. In a nutshell, the core problem is that identity frameworks have been designed for individuals, but CTV is inherently a shared experience. So, while marketers might want household and individual-level precision, current solutions tend to fall short.
Device-specific methods, for instance, work best when they can link one user to a specific screen. But in the CTV sphere, content can be consumed by multiple people across a range of devices that have varied manufacturer IDs: including TVs with built-in connection or set-top boxes (STBs), mobile phones and tablets, and even refrigerators. Additionally, since many households own TVs from multiple brands, any TV brand’s ID will likely provide a fragmented picture of viewing interests. All of which results in a lack of standardisation that makes device-based identity patchy, incomplete, and impossible for advertisers to comprehensively measure.
The simplest way around this challenge is to recognise that CTV can’t be treated as a one-to-one environment. Following the same model as traditional TV, content consumption is an exercise in collective viewing with many people, on many devices, watching together. Treating it like a personal screen used by singular viewers limits both targeting and measurement.
Once we’ve accepted that truth, it then becomes clear that what marketers need is the ability to identify households, not individuals.
Rethinking identity starts at home
IP addresses are a natural match for TV. Tied to the home, instead of unique users or screens, they provide a stable, privacy-compliant identifier that encompasses all viewing activity and behaviours within a household. In effect, this means they can offer the connective tissue that manufacturer and device-specific identifiers can’t: just like a TV connects the household to content, IP connects all devices within the household to a collective digital identity.
Fundamentally, this is exactly how conventional TV advertising has functioned for decades, with measurement focused on households since the invention of TV ads. Today, the value of being able to reliably reach a specific household arguably still outweighs the theoretical benefit of possibly identifying a specific viewer, with often questionable accuracy. Moreover, modern measurement has moved beyond and significantly improved on mostly probabilistic and panel-dependent conventional methods, now providing a much more addressable household identity.
Instead of sticking with old techniques or aiming for person-level perfection, the smart and practical way forward lies with looking for better, workable options. IP addresses have been around for a while and have been successful up to a certain point in AdTech. The best way to unlock CTV’s full potential is by reapplying IP-powered household-based identity as a unifying signal that can be mapped back to desired audiences and provide a true unit of audience engagement.
Or, in other words, solving the CTV challenge starts with accepting that this environment requires a different kind of identifier. We don’t need a new signal; we need to rediscover a proven one. The combination of IP household identity and traditional TV ad measurement will give advertisers the foundation for effective, scalable, and privacy-safe ads that bridge the gaps in fragmented CTV ecosystems. And most importantly, it will ensure efforts fuel viable returns on accelerating investment.
