Earlier this year, eMarketer predicted that year-over-year growth in U.S. CTV media budgets would reach 17%, surpassing $33 billion, with the acceleration in ad spend finally exceeding the increase in time spent with CTV (7%).
However, while advertisers begin to catch up with viewers’ eyeballs — that’s more than 70% of the population, according to eMarketer — there are still numerous sticking points to resolve if marketers are to feel they’re receiving value for their investment, with audience measurement and pricing transparency being the most common complaints.
Last month, tensions flared between TV networks and Nielsen over its new “big data plus panel” measurement system. Networks — especially smaller ones and those with multicultural audiences — say fluctuating metrics are hurting their businesses, compared to Nielsen’s legacy system. Despite concerns, the new methodology is expected to become the de facto standard for upfront deals, prompting fears that it could unfairly influence future TV and streaming ad pricing. VAB organized the meeting after repeated complaints.
Meanwhile, at Digiday’s first-ever CTV Ad Strategies event earlier this month, townhall discussions — conducted under the Chatham House Rule — focused on challenges in CTV advertising, particularly pricing, fees, and the difficulty of achieving consistent reach and frequency measurement across platforms.
Several participants mentioned the lack of transparency in fees, noting that marketers often don’t understand how they are precisely calculated, with supply-side platforms, agencies, and other ad tech players sometimes equally ignorant of the market forces at play.
“They [clients] may not be used to seeing every layer of the ad tech fees,” observed one participating media agency executive. “You have things like data, supply, and other ad tech fees, and it just gets compounded… and can be upwards of 15-to-40% of your media when you use certain platforms.”
Meanwhile, a second participant recounted an instance when clients insisted they only run ads on premium CTV properties, such as Amazon Prime and Hulu, etc., with a subsequent RFP returning alarming discrepancies in quoted pricing, particularly in how tech platforms’ prices compared to direct buys.
“We did individual RFPs to understand what their [the streaming services] CPMs were, and individually, they came back with prices in the range of $20 [CPMs], and with all the targeting you want,” explained the participant. “But then the ones with the DSPs came back, and they were between $45 and $55 [CPMs]. How do we justify that to a client?!”
Meanwhile, several additional townhall participants mentioned the challenges of sell-side players often finding ways to make margins without “getting caught,” with overstretched buying teams often lacking the time to interrogate such tactics.
“The brands are putting in dollars, but they expect outcomes,” noted a separate agency executive, alluding to certain sell-side tactics that are increasingly raising the ire of the industry’s buy-side. “Meanwhile, there are a lot of games being played that extract high-margin fees.”
The townhall session also heard testimony from participants claiming that some demand-side platforms attempt to offer better accountability.
“There are certain DSPs, like The Trade Desk [even with its well-documented fees] that offer some additional measurement to help better quantify if you’re driving incremental reach, and manage frequency holistically,” added one. “I don’t think it’s a perfect science, but sometimes having a third party measure that out helps you understand where the duplication is.”
The debate further turned to why reach and frequency challenges persist, despite omnichannel campaign management being a long-standing issue in the sector. “If you’re operating on multiple platforms, different DSPs can give you different outputs at different times. So it’s tough to get the holistic picture,” observed one speaker. “That’s going to take time to prove that, and you can have different methodologies across the different platforms, too. So it’s just more logistical gymnastics.”
Participants often credited this ongoing challenge to the inflexibility of large platforms, which are seldom willing to abandon their walled-garden strategies. “Until such point that there’s one holistic seismic point where there’s one DSP that has access to everything,” noted a separate participant, “that’s just going to be the challenge that the agency faces.”
