Future of TV Briefing: Overheard from the Digiday Future of TV Week Town Hall

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The key hits:

• Buyers are still struggling to measure the value of CTV advertising.
• Traditional TV buyers need to study up on the nuances of CTV.
• CTV may hew closer to the traditional TV buying model than the digital one, though maybe it shouldn’t be an either-or situation.

To kick off this week’s Future of TV Week, Digiday hosted a virtual Town Hall session on Tuesday during which ad buyers exchanged insights into the challenges they continue to face in the CTV ad market. The conversation was conducted under Chatham House rules so that Digiday could share what was said while maintaining participants’ anonymity. Here is a sampling of the discussion. 

For more of a look into advertisers and agency executives’ minds on the state of the broader TV and streaming ad market, tune into the Digiday Business of TV Forum virtual event on Thursday where I’ll be interviewing buy-side executives on everything from the surplus (or lack thereof) of ad-supported streamers to advancements in streaming ad targeting and measurement.

The measurements that matter

“How do you bring it all together from a measurement perspective? We’ve all kind of swallowed the pill at this point that the social channels are going to be kind of separate to some degree. But still bringing the rest of it all together and ideally we’d like to crack YouTube if nothing else.”

“[A challenge is] select your currency, select your view — what was your cumulative reach across all?”

“The notion of a panel is changing, and so participation in those channels is also changing. The emerging currencies are reason for optimism that the connected TV as a data source can be part of the solution.”

“From a measurement perspective, the big debate, of course, is are you talking gross rating points? How do you convert that to eyeballs and then impressions? And what does that really mean, and which one is really fair?”

“The takeover of Nielsen into a private firm now and so much transition happening there — and knowing that the currency is going to change — will help that playing field. But until that all gets smoothed out, it’s still kind of a gray area.”

“As I present to my C-suite what the plans are for next year and how these allocations go and how I’m representing those, there’s always a discussion about [the value of different measurements].”

CTV’s share of spending

“It’s often questioned, ‘Why is the investment level staying where it is or not coming down as fast as others think that it should in linear TV?’ And then, adding in connected TV and looking at display on top of that, [this person’s company leaders] are going, ‘It doesn’t look like we’re transitioning the budget quick enough over to the digital footprint.’”

“When you talk about the mix modeling, most of that is founded on what has worked historically and then making projections on the future based on that. So as CTV is growing, it’s still a question of how much historical data do we really have out there to model against. Therefore, is that moving fast enough, or is that showing a big enough increase to help aid us in moving those dollars around?”

The CTV learning curve

“Who I now work with from a TV buying perspective has no clue about buying CTV, and she was very upfront in telling me that when we had talked about it.”

“I find that the digital buying side of the platform is usually better equipped to have those conversations and be more agnostic when looking at CTV as a whole and how to best use it, how much to allocate and even in reporting back. They seem a little bit more fluid than a linear or traditional TV buyer.”

“I have linear TV buyers who are buying linear TV for 30 years, and they don’t speak this language [of CTV] at all. They’re learning because of the shifts that Nielsen is making right now and the impression models that they’re going after.”

“There’s a huge set of buyers that need to be retrained [for CTV]. And that’s a lot to ask in terms of changing a skill set so dramatically.”

“It would behoove the traditional and linear buying teams to get more involved and become more versed in crossing between those two different worlds because they are blurring more and more every day. It really does make sense for linear TV buyers to wrap their arms around TV as a whole and be able to plan and maneuver through those different shifts.”

“At its heart, TV and CTV to a certain extent are still falling into the bucket of buying based on programming rather than a true audience buying model. Contextual isn’t always as important as finding that audience.”

Is CTV considered TV or digital or both?

“Nine times out of 10, the CTV buying falls into the digital buyers because audience buying is a language they understand. It fits into the mold of the way they operate. But I can’t say that’s the right way to do it.” 

“In many cases all a client sees is they’ve got a linear pie and they’re trying to figure out how do they use CTV to capture the eyeballs they’re losing in linear. So to them it naturally fits into a linear TV buy structure.”

“[CTV] does fall into the digital realm, but I don’t know if that’s the right place for it to live exclusively because it’s being delivered through a traditional box, so to speak, for most advertisers.”

“I hate to say it because I would have my linear buyers be really annoyed with me, but do I think [CTV] belongs in a little bit more of a traditional TV model? I think it does. That’s the delivery mechanism.”

“There’s a huge dynamic at play in terms of the chipping away that all the [streaming] services are doing to linear TV viewing. And so I do feel like it does fit better in that [traditional TV] model.” 

“When we think about budgeting and we think about some of the other issues, hopefully if [CTV] fits into that [traditional TV] model, maybe we can get better at managing some of the cumulative reach issues and the frequency issues. Because it’s all coming through that same kind of delivery system. Maybe that gets us there.”

“We actually had a client. They were buying the Red Sox game, and they were buying it in linear, and why can’t they get exactly the same places in all the streaming sources that this program is carried through? So it’s definitely more program-centric, which I think linear buyers are more attuned to.”

“Brands are caught in the middle of hearing this debate, both internally at some agencies and across agencies, about does [CTV] look like linear [or] does it look like digital? Who should buy it? Brands hear all sorts of things about the right way to do it.” 

“What’s really awesome about streaming is it’s democratized the TV screen and has brought in brands that were never linear advertisers. Brands and agencies that have been linear-centric for decades, they want to capture lost rating points and make streaming look like TV. But there’s many other brands — some of who were in linear and some who weren’t — who are approaching it from a completely different angle. Budget for them is coming from traditional display buys and social buyers. Some really don’t have an understanding of GRPs and how they relate to their business.”

“It would be great to get to a point where we accept that it doesn’t have to be one-size-fits-all.”

What we’ve heard

“[Adding an ad-supported tier is] something we’re looking at now, we’re trying to figure out over the next year or two. But think of us as quite open to offering even lower prices with advertising as a consumer choice.”

— Netflix co-CEO Reed Hastings during the company’s Q1 2022 earnings call on Tuesday