CTV programmatic

CES this year was a petri dish of news and gossip (and hopefully not COVID) among the CTV ad industry.

NBCUniversal is kicking off the new year with a programmatic progress report during CES in Las Vegas this week.

Broadcasters and brands love the idea of applying digital targeting to CTV ad campaigns. But there are still roadblocks stopping CTV advertisers from fully embracing programmatic, including price and transparency (or the lack thereof).

Transparency is making its way into CTV bid requests, including supply source, content genre and, increasingly, show-level transparency. According to Rob Hazan, senior director of streaming TV product at Index Exchange, the right amount of transparency could make the open exchange a viable place for CTV ad budgets.

CTV advertisers are enamored of programmatic because of its digital-like ad targeting. But programmatic CTV is far from perfect and rife with fragmentation.

MadHive, the CTV ad buying platform, announced a $300 million investment from Goldman Sachs. Now, the company is turning its attention to measurement and attribution companies that might make lucrative acquisition targets.

Automation is also making its way onto TV advertising with a heavier focus on programmatic buying and better content recommendation algorithms.

Despite the benefits of addressable TV, advertisers haven’t been taking advantage as much as one might imagine.

Despite transparency woes, programmatic buying on CTV is evolving. M&A is helping spur maturation in the market. Tremor International, for example, is a “much different business” now that it has integrated Amobee’s tech into its stack, said Chance Johnson, the company’s new chief commercial officer. The next step? Getting more data to plug into those programmatic pipes.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Has Lifetime Value Timed Out? It was the best of LTV, it was the worst of LTV. In mobile marketing, lifetime value (LTV) has long been considered a key metric for many data-savvy marketers. But times are changing, writes Eric Seufert at Mobile Dev […]