2021 has been another unpredictable year as COVID-19 and constantly shifting lockdown restrictions have continued to wreak havoc on the world economy. For the advertising industry, there have also been twists and turns, from continued strength in the CTV sector, to Google delaying its scrapping of third-party cookies.
2022 looks to be just as unpredictable. VideoWeek asked eight CEOs to give us their predictions into what they believe the new year will hold. They made predictions ranging from what the year ahead holds for TV advertising to how the ad tech industry can focus on environmental issues in 2022.
Michael Barrett, CEO, Magnite
“In recent years, consumers have embraced CTV and digital TV, which has led to increased investment on the part of advertisers. However, advertisers have been slower to adopt live CTV given the challenges that can arise when executing campaigns in this environment. As audiences flock to streaming services, and global sporting events like the Olympics draw record viewership numbers, I predict that more live CTV/live sports will be transacted programmatically in 2022. Leveraging programmatic can help through real-time insights and troubleshooting, which is particularly helpful during unexpected spikes in live inventory. Looking ahead, I expect we’ll see a continued migration of live content to CTV, opening up more possibilities for advertisers to position their brands alongside premium live TV inventory with programmatic efficiency.”
Arnaud Créput, CEO, Smart
“CTV viewership will continue to grow and we should see more newly formed content platforms enter the market in 2022, increasing differentiated supply competing for viewer attention. Dedicated vertical channels, aggregating specific audiences, will allow advertisers to reach high value customers at scale. The market will also see broadcasters investing in CTV-specific branded networks, distribution and advertising technology, while traditional digital media publishers migrate toward CTV platforms. Combined, this will create substantial viewer choice while expanding the addressable audience for targeted advertising.
The opportunity is for tech players to meet these needs and to create efficiency through vertical integration by optimizing the value path, both for content and rights owners and advertisers. Curation of specialty audiences,as well as innovation in contextual targeting will be key to this effort. Cross channel measurement and attribution models must evolve in order for the market to capture the value for advertisers and publishers.”
Karen Nelson-Field, CEO and founder, Amplified Intelligence:
“If 2021 was the year when advertisers started to take attention seriously, then 2022 will be when they (and publishers) start to use it seriously. As early adopters have spread the word and application products are now available, the uptake of attention measurement across adland will continue to gather pace. Every agency holding group, most publishers and many large brands are actively investigating or integrating attention data into their 2022 plans. We have entered the age of human measurement at scale. We know that device metrics are failing us. Up until now, ad tech has been able to collect everything about everyone. And yet, they find themselves with a mountain of data that doesn’t tell them what they need. The early attention adopters are now astute users and will help the industry discern between the good and bad vendors that will flood the market. Remember, advanced viewability dressed up as attention is still just viewability. To avoid the problems of the past, the ad industry will need direction on how to choose and use gold-class attention metrics. In 2022, three attention application verticals will start to take shape in the ecosystem — planning, buying and measurement. And the scope of this is phenomenal.”
Rich Raddon, Co-CEO and Co-Founder, Zefr
“Marketers will no longer need to use open-web tools to solve their video platform suitability and safety standards. Brand suitability in video will become much more transparent and aligned to the standards set by the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), overcoming the barriers to precision and accuracy that have plagued keyword and semantic approaches. The growth of platforms like TikTok, and the continued importance of YouTube and Facebook, is requiring marketers and advertisers to rethink the tools they use for brand suitability and safety for video – which will lead to a new paradigm in both targeting and measurement in 2022.”
Kai Henniges, CEO and co-founder, Video Intelligence AG:
“We’re going to see more data and targeting solutions enter CTV. It’s going to really hot up, and should be an exciting ride. 2020 saw a lot of first-movers in Europe as vendors capitalised on the increase of AVOD viewership. Those who don’t invest in CTV will quickly fall behind.
In online video we’ll see a battle of quality. Most publishers by now have some kind of video solution, most likely contextual. But the quality of the video content varies. Users will recognise poor content, and lean towards sites who deliver quality and relevance.
Contextual data will be combined with first party data to very powerful effect, creating an increasing segment of hyper-premium inventory, that advertisers will clamour for. The noise around zero-party data will increase, although I’m waiting to see how this is a scalable solution.
No doubt that the NFT trend will find its way into the video content market. But don’t ask me about that!”
Amy Williams, CEO and founder, Good-Loop:
“There’s going to be a lot more focus on cutting Adland’s significant carbon footprint. There’ve already been some encouraging signs that the industry is finally starting to get its act together and acknowledge it needs to do more to address the negative impact it has on the environment, and in 2022, that will mean the launch of a range of new sustainable solutions designed to help brands, publishers and ad tech companies cut CO2 emissions significantly. The internet is responsible for around 4 percent of global CO2 emissions — the same as the airline industry — a sizable chunk of which is taken up by digital advertising, particularly data-rich formats such as online video and CTV. With the rise of programmatic advertising, we not only need to factor in the carbon dioxide used to transfer the ad onto the page and display the ad to the user, but also the trillions of auctions that take place every day without any ads being served at all. Moving forward, consumers will continue to demand more action from brands. After all, the last thing we need is more hot air.”
Ben Antier, Co-Founder and CEO, Publica
“We will witness a renaissance in TV advertising in 2022, key factors contributing to this change include:
- SVOD Fatigue, 81 percent of consumers would rather use a free ad supported service than pay for TV content according to a 2021 TiVo study.
- An increase in people streaming free TV content via AVOD and FAST services driven by TV manufacturers making it easier to discover these Apps.
- Traditional TV advertisers will increasingly test broadcasters BVOD services next year as they test the efficacy and precision of buying data driven ad placements on CTV.
- New standards such as OpenRTB 2.6 and Ads.cert 2.0 will increasingly be adopted by programmatic platforms and make it much easier for brands and their DSPs to place targeted ad buys in CTV ad breaks that are free from bad actors.
- The scaled adoption of server side ad insertion (SSAI) by publishers means we will hopefully eradicate frequency issues in CTV ad breaks by the end of 2022.
- We will see DTC, social and digital advertisers who have historically been absent from TV due to a lack of data or cost barriers, now testing CTV and taking advantage of the precision in targeting available on the big screen TV in the family living room in 2022.”
Mathieu Roche, CEO, ID5
“2022 will see tremendous progress in the adoption of alternative identifiers as we near the new era of digital advertising. The testing and integration of universal ID solutions kicked off in 2021 with incredible results, as this recent case study from PubMatic, Verve Group, and Scream Malmo clearly demonstrates. In 2022 we’ll see more of these tests as more forward-thinking companies enter their preparatory stages in anticipation of the cookie-less future.
Our State of Digital Identity report published in May 2021 revealed that 43% of industry respondents were already involved with universal identity solutions, giving a positive indication around the percentage of companies that will be at a similar stage by the same time next year.
The search for better and more privacy-compliant identifiers will expand to other environments, such as Connected TV. We expect that channels will start restricting the availability of IP addresses for privacy and data protection reasons, paving the way for the deployment of alternative identifiers in this environment in 2023.”
Oliver Vesper, co-CEO, Smartclip
“Video consumption has taken off across SVoD, AVoD, and BVoD platforms in Europe. I personally see 3 notable trends in 2022:
1) The shift to a new era where addressable / connected TV plays a much more significant part in the user’s ad experience with brands. Although European TV markets operate in vastly different ways, ATV and CTV audiences have a lot in common. Both can be driven by real-time data, providing an opportunity for precise targeting at the local, household, or even device level.
2) We are experiencing a real renaissance of the living room. Broadcasters will master the digital transformation and maintain a strong position in the TV and video ecosystem. They will leverage their first-party data, which has been made usable through addressable TV, and apply it to a wider big-screen audience alongside linear television.
3) A full-stack solution for unified buying will come. The goal pursued will be a publisher-driven programmatic buying experience, granting simplified access to inventory on the supply-side. And with the entire value chain under control, the demand-side will also benefit from a new buying experience — driven by simplicity, European market needs, product innovation, and optimised services.”
