With Google and Meta swallowing up small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) ad budgets, CTV needs simplicity to acheive its full growth potential, writes Andy Jones, VP of Broadcast and CTV, EMEA at PubMatic.
The expansion of CTV has caused an explosion of supply. However, while this increase in quantity and formats creates a raft of new opportunities, it has also made the buying experience much more complicated. In the linear era, there was only one way to get onto the big screen. Now, there’s a dizzying array of devices and platforms, with buyers navigating acronym-dense messaging around who has the best pipes and placements between supply and demand.
For buyers, the pipes don’t really matter; they just want a simple buying experience. I don’t need to know the ins and outs of international financial trading to buy stocks and shares, or the route and vehicle the driver used to deliver my online supermarket order. Both marketplaces work not because of their complexity but because they’re easy to access. All that matters is the security of the transaction and the guarantee of delivery.
Likewise (and showing my age here), while I knew people were ferrying around videotapes back in the pre-digital days of linear TV buying and selling, that’s as far as my knowledge extended – and I didn’t need to know any more. Today, trying to find the best way to trade advertising on CTV can feel like taking a crash course in ad tech just to understand the basic pitch.
Failure to launch
This steep learning curve often acts as a barrier to entry. People with their nose to the industry grindstone can forget that not every planner can double as a technologist. Instead of dedicating their efforts to bringing a brand’s story to the living room, agencies become bogged down in troubleshooting before they even hit the launch button.
That’s not to say there haven’t been important technological advancements in the CTV supply chain. The push for optimisation, efficiency, reduced waste; these behind-the-scenes improvements are immensely valuable, but they are exactly that: behind-the-scenes. They won’t move the needle for buyers, who simply need a straightforward way to put ads on the big screen that their target audience is likely to see.
By keeping the back end where it is, buying platforms can focus on delivering a front end that is intuitive or, dare I say, even enjoyable. AI certainly has a role here, transforming complex dashboards into chat-based interfaces that allow buyers to manage reach, relevance, and outcomes through natural language prompts. After all, language is our most widely shared and accessible interface.
A wider net
By simplifying CTV advertising, we can widen the net to bring in buyers who previously found the channel inaccessible. Take independent agencies, which are currently in the middle of a growth spurt in the UK; growth that would be incredibly valuable for broadcasters and streamers to capture.
The challenge is that many smaller players either cannot afford or don’t possess the know-how to support the complex tech stacks required to fully leverage programmatic marketplaces beyond simple and streamlined Big Tech buying interfaces, let alone one as fragmented as CTV. The same goes for in-house brand marketers, who are often working with a fraction of the resources of their agency counterparts.
Then there’s the lucrative long tail of buyers that take the self-service route. According to IAB UK, almost half of the UK’s digital ad spend comes from SMEs, most of which is funnelled through Google and Meta. For CTV to achieve its full growth potential, it must be able to attract spend from my local Italian restaurant as easily as it does from McDonald’s.
CTV has long promised to be the best of both worlds between digital advertising and traditional TV, and certainly has the technical capabilities and shoppable formats to provide the performance-focused advertising that is most valuable to smaller businesses. But unless these businesses can buy ads in a few clicks, their performance credentials will remain untested, and a large proportion of the market will continue to be unserved.
Broadcasters are certainly aware of this. Just look at the recent joint effort between Sky, ITV, and Channel 4 to make big-screen advertising more accessible and scalable for smaller-scale buyers who would typically default to search and social. That these competitors are willing to set aside their rivalry to simplify buying shows how massive the opportunity is from unlocking the performance market.
One thing we must make sure we protect as the CTV market expands and simplifies is transparency. Otherwise, we’ll be left with a selection of black boxes that allow platforms to mark their own homework. The perfect balance is a marketplace that rightfully keeps its technical complexity beneath the surface, but keeps log-level data accessible for auditing purposes. It’s the same fundamentals as every mature market: maximise the potential trading volume while protecting buyers and sellers. Now let’s bring this story to the big screen.
Follow VideoWeek on LinkedIn.
