There’s No Time To Waste With Always-On CTV Monitoring
Opinion from Watching That CEO Cameron Church:
A standing start
Omnicom Media’s Kelly Metz was right when she told the Prog I/O audience that TV measurement is nowhere near as messy as it was just 12 months ago. But that’s not saying much; that was a standing start, and there’s still a long way to go.
Measuring and monitoring CTV campaigns is tricky because of the sheer volume of vendors, platforms, and channels involved. Bringing that data together to find out what was actually watched is proving harder than it should be. Yes, progress is being made, but too slowly.
The CTV space is not the place for slow movement. Audiences are jumping supplier quicker than we can adapt our revenue models. And with TV devices being always-on, it’s high time we moved to always-on measurement so we know live what’s being watched, by who, and where.
This is vitally important, because media buyers aren’t waiting until after the fact to decide what to pay. They’re buying in real-time, and so we need to be watching in real time, too.
Number crunching
I was amazed to learn that some CTV Publishers are still reporting weekly on the success of their ad campaigns.
They’re downloading raw log file data from ad exchanges, and crunching the numbers themselves. Exchanges, SSPs, DMPs and DSPs are simply not investing in the kind of tools that enable revenue operations teams to act immediately.
If your creative stops delivering in the middle of a prime-time show, you want to know where it’s happening, so you can fix it right there and then.
In dealing with missed revenue opportunities, we’re looking at a problem that stretches into tens of billions of dollars annually.
But revenue teams are often so under-resourced that they spend their time making sure campaigns go live, integrations are functioning, or reporting is ready. They don’t have time to be optimizing, or digging down into various data dimensions and metrics to spot which particular combination of seller, device, programme and creative is causing an error.
Platforms of the future
The outdated business intelligence tools of old are built to report on aggregated, historical data. The platforms of the future will no doubt be predictive, spotting errors before they occur. But we’re not quite there yet. In the meantime, we can hope for tools that show us – and notify us – of real-time anomalies.
When it comes to selling media, time really is money. The value of our data
decreases by the second if we’re unable to act on it. If a campaign isn’t delivering we could be looking at millions of dollars revenue loss per minute. No publisher can afford that.
There’s simply no winner if ad campaigns don’t load. Switching our mindset to one where we’re always on means delivering on the promise of digital advertising. And there’s no time to waste.
Would you like to discuss? Then drop me a message.
