The Connected TV Opportunity

Elise: Hello, and welcome to the Loop Marketing Podcast. I'm your host, Elise Stieferman, Director of Marketing at Coegi. Let's get started. Ryan: Hi everybody, I'm Ryan Green. I'm the VP of Marketing Innovation at Coegi, and we're excited to have our Coegi Conclave today on Connected tv. Really great panelists that are gonna share a lot of background on inventory and measurement and best buying practices. With everything that has changed with Connected tv, certainly in 2020, continuing into 2021 we thought it was gonna be helpful for our agency and our clients to learn about what the future holds and how we can make the most of the opportunities and challenges that Connected tv brings to us. So we have Jake Richardson, who's the director of TV partnerships at the Trade Desk. Jake, thanks for joining us today. Jake: Absolutely. Happy to be here. Ryan: Tiffany Lemos, who is the Regional Vice President of Midmarket Demand at Mag Night. Tiffany: Hi everyone. Ryan: Emily Wood is the VP of Business Development at Ispot tv. Emily: Yeah thanks, Ryan. Ryan: Let's start with, I think the elephant, the room, what happened in 2020. Covid, the mass migration that users took to cutting the cord, leaning into streaming. Jake, I'd love to start with you. What trends have you seen, both of what happened in 2020, but have that’s happening right now too? The big movement that we've seen and time spent with streaming, has that continued today as things start to open up a little bit more in the real world? What patterns have you seen as it pertains to the TV landscape over the last 18 months? Jake: Yeah, it's a great question. I think last year we did a lot of this conversation, right, which is, Oh my gosh, what's going on? The world's upside down. Everyone was really moving to streaming and that was the narrative. So at the start of 2021, people kind of were thinking, Okay, there's vaccines and things are gonna go back to normal. Does that mean we're gonna see a contraction in the CTV market, the CTV supply side, and also, the result of the demand side? And it's been the opposite, I think the way that we think about it internally at the Trade Desk, but I think just generally as an industry, we should think about it as we started along that sort of, if you think of the adoption curve, for a long time we were in this small tail at the front end where there was a lot of early adopters, people that were figuring out how to navigate a connected TV landscape only, or figuring out how to do both linear and connected, and now we've hit that sort of really steep part, and we expect some of the surveys we've done at the Trade desk, and I think a bunch of industry surveys show that, that we expect that the trend we saw last year is actually going to accelerate this year and next year. We're really starting to get to that bigger part of the bell curve, which is when the majority of people end up streaming mostly, or streaming in addition to linear, and indeed, if you look at ACR surveys, it's about a third, a third, a third. You've got one third of people streaming, only, one third of people only consuming on linear, and then one third of people doing both. If you had to guess just sort of intuitively the way we think about this, that probably lines up with very young, sort of young and relatively old for streaming, both, and linear. Ryan: Yeah that's interesting, cause I think the way that we've thought about it too is that streaming is younger, traditional linear is older, and then there's this mix in the middle, but that's not the only signal from research that I've seen of predicting who's gonna be a streaming user or not. Is there other lifestyle patterns or urbanicity or anything else demographically of trends over the last 18 months, who's really leaning into streaming, versus maybe who was an early adopter? Jake: Yeah, I think early adopters tended to be very young across the board, and I'd love to hear from Emily and Tiffany as well, what they're seeing. But early adopters tended to be younger across the board, and now it's really like, I mean, my parents call me, right? I think all of us have that experience of, Hey, can you show me how to work this Hulu thing? How do I switch from my cable? So it's much more across the board. Now, I will say that time spent on linear is still relatively much higher than time spent on streaming. We expect that to change as those people that spend a lot of time on linear start to move into more of a streaming or a dual modality. It's really from where before, it was really mostly millennials were streaming and everyone else was watching linear cable or maybe dabbling in streaming, now it's kind of across the board. It's millennials, it's boomers, it's Gen Z, everyone is streaming, and it's not really quite as easy to pigeonhole that audience into, Hey, this is one age demographic, or this is one interest set that they have. It's kind of across the board, I would say, sports is still kind of something that we're figuring out. I think the way that people consume sports is also changing with the way that consumption is taking place. So streaming and video on demand has meant that people sometimes now are consuming sports, maybe not as live as they used to. People still tune in for the live stream, but people are also just as content to watch a sport a little bit delayed and just watch on demand the Olympics were a perfect example of that. Tiffany: Jake, I can jump in too, just to echo what you were saying about how the early adopters were that younger crowd. We actually did a research study with Mintel Research last year. It was actually called CTVs for Everyone, and we researched the entire industry. I think it was something like 2,500 different panelists, and we found that the average age of the CTV consumer is now 46, which I was shocked by, I know a lot of our clients were shocked by, but we were able to break it down into every generational segment and all four almost consume CTV synonymously now, which is just wild to me. Ryan: Emily, is that what you're seeing as well? That it's an older skew when you're looking at measurement and what you're seeing in iSpot? Emily: Yeah, thanks, I was just gonna piggyback off that. I can tell you all that iSpot works with over 325 brands directly, and it is very rare that any of those brands, regardless of who their target audience is, are not talking about, or curious about, or already advertising heavily across connected tv. So, to echo what Jake said in the beginning, streaming makes up 30% of viewing and less than 10% of advertising. So the shift is happening, it's only gonna continue because the eyeballs are there and they're not going anywhere. Ryan: That's really interesting. Emily, why do you think there is still that difference in consumer habits, versus where the spin is coming from? Is that an arbitrary situation now where advertisers could take advantage potentially of the lack of competition there? Or, are there other things at play that we should be considering? Emily: I mean, it's been amazing in the last year, through the pandemic, what iSpot has seen has been incredible, but I would say the year leading up to this, so many of our brand customers are coming to us saying, I think I should be advertising on connected tv, but I don't know how much, and I don't know where, and it all came down to the measurement aspect being a black box, and that is just no longer the case anymore. So brands are able to understand reach and frequency over linear. They're able to understand net new audiences, they're able to measure business outcomes against connected TV buys. So that unchartered territory is now very clear with clear ROIs and, it all comes down to measurement. So brands now have the actual data that they need to invest heavier in streaming. Before it was just kind of a, I think I should be spending here. So here's some money on this publisher, now they know exactly what's working and they know what's a compliment to linear. They know what would be great on its own. So I think the unknown is now a wide open opportunity. Ryan: It is for some, but I know I still take challenging questions from my brands on how much we should be spending, how are we really making an apples to apples comparison. So where are some starting points as far as measuring linear versus connected that we can start to look at to find signals of which of those are more effective, and when and where and why. What are some initial steps that brands and agencies can take when they're trying to unify their measurement across both a linear and connected world? Emily: Sure, it's not the sexiest answer and everyone loves to talk about business outcomes, and especially a lot of these direct consumer brands that were born in digital and now they're buying connected TV and it's comfortable for them, but I would say measuring incremental reach and frequency over linear is the best place to start. Because when you've got a heavy media buy on the TV side, and then a fraction of that on the connected TV side, your net new audiences reached are probably gonna be small. So understanding like you just said, it's not apples to apples. So you're already going in kind of apples to oranges and how can you have a clear picture of driving more of that investment in a smarter way. I would say just understanding the reach and frequency of that net new audience is the best place to start. Jake I would agree with that, Kate, and I'd say to your point, both to that question and the question prior, which is why are budgets under indexing audiences? I think there's this big white space, which is now connected television, or it was five years ago,10 years ago, and brands are trying to tackle that the way that they've always tackled linear, they're trying to park their budgets across 2, 3, 5 partners that they've always worked with. But those partners don't own the ecosystem the way that they own linear, and those partners are great partners of ours, right? They're great partners of Tiffany’s at Magnite, but they don't own the entire ecosystem the way that they used to. I think brands are sort of reticent to jump in and say, Well, let's just go all in on this connected television thing, let's work with a Pluto, let's work with the Hulu, let's work with as samba some of these direct to consumer, first streaming platforms that may actually control a really large audience because it's not familiar, because I can't buy This is Us the same way I can if I just go out to dinner with someone from NBC, and we talk a lot, a lot about how I'm gonna buy This is Us, and so I think that's part of why there's this under indexing problem. It's these old legacy behaviors trying to be transposed on connected television. Whereas to Emily's point, what you can really do is, you can buy incremental audiences in places that they're not being seen, right? As opposed to, hey, if someone is going from linear to digital and I'm just tracking them from NBC here to NBC there, or CBS here to CBS there, again, great partners of ours, you're missing out on an audience that may never have watched that show and may never end up watching that show. And because they have alternatives, they can now stream free movies from the early thousands on Samsung's free app, they're gonna go consume content that way. That's an audience you'd be missing out on and an experience that's really premium, but it's just taking time to get socialized that way across brands, because brands are made up of people like us, that sort of consume content the way that we consume content, and don't necessarily think about how maybe people outside their bubble are. Tiffany: I was also gonna say one other thing on that, and I think it speaks to the slowness and the shift in budgets is just the sheer comfortability. I've been in rooms with TV buyers and they're like, But I don't stream, right? Or they don't think they stream, and then once you can kind of get them to understand, oh, well maybe I do, and they're just not realizing it. I remember this back from when digital video first came out, 12, 15 years ago, getting a buyer or a brand to really understand what it was when they were used to seeing their movie ad on the side of a bus or the billboard right outside of their house, and getting them to shift that mindset to go, that's great for you, but what about what's great for your consumer? What's great for the person or the group of people that you want to either buy your product, your service, come see your show. And I think it's just a comfortability thing, and I'm seeing that start to shift, but I would say it's still somewhat pervasive across the brands that are very entrenched in traditional. Jake: Yeah. And there's a vanity component for sure. Like, if you're a cmo, you wanna see your ad, I want my ad somewhere, and thinking about the fact that I may never see that, cause I don't consume that way, it's a hard chasm to cross, but it's an important one for marketers. Ryan: That's been something we've been trying to answer programmatically, where my ad is going to show and why the bus wrap that goes by the CMOs house still gets on media ties. Ed Anderson asks a really good question, and this comes up certainly for us on the agency side. When you're looking at creative, is there better quality creative that's needed for CTV versus maybe a digital pre-roll that you would run programmatically or is there an increase in video production that's needed? I know nobody here's a creative on the phone, but Jake you may have some experience when people are floating in ads into the Trade Desk, are the most successful campaigns really shooting for the same broadcast HD quality? Is there a difference when you're looking at digital? Jake: Yeah, well any of the traders from my company that are on the call are probably slacking me right now, stop, take your foot outta your mouth, but I would say to my understanding, which is I'll be it limited compared to some of the traders at my company, we do have creative standards that will be in excess of, of just an OLV campaign that you're going to run, right? You are running on a big screen, no supplier wants to run pixelated ads on their inventory, and I think that's been a lot of the pull push that's been going on. Which is suppliers wanna withhold that and say, we're only gonna do this direct because we want to control the ad experience for our users. That's probably going to remain for a long time, but to that earlier point about some of these upstarts and these direct to consumer streaming apps that have been born and raised on the internet are on the connected television, I think they'll start to maybe relax standards a little bit. I don't mean in the sense that you can upload a fuzzy video that you make on your iPhone, but rather that the content doesn't need to be a $70 million campaign that you're running for a national auto brand. It can be for a qsr, it can be for a small local brand that is trying to reach an audience in a targeted way, but on a bigger screen. That is definitely going to change, and it already has. You can buy Hulu, for example, which is one of the, sort of the creme de-la creme in digital. You can buy that on a local basis, whereas you could never buy Fox or CBS on a local basis. You'd only do that if you had a national budget. Ryan: Tiffany, do you see differences in performance of bearing creatives on the supply side? At least from my agency's point of view, I think the barrier to entry to get to 4K and to get professionally shot has decreased. I'm shooting right now in 4K on a second video or on a camera here that costs $800, right? So it's not like on the creative side there's not this big production barrier that there used to be. But at least for Coegi, we partner with such great creative agencies and when we, um, have a seat with, with the strategy there and can kind of combine the storytelling prowess with the data and measurement that we bring, that's where we see the best campaign, it’s when the right and the left brain are working with each other. Do you guys see that as well? Tiffany: Yeah, I would say from the supply side too, what's nice about what Magnite does is because we're the technology, Jake, we can be that gatekeeper for the publisher, to say, hey, if this publisher doesn't want to accept that type of creative, we won't let it through. We won't let it through the pipes. So that's one of the nice things about the publishers being able to transact programmatically through Magnite. Ryan, to your point, me personally, when we're running campaigns across our team, I see the better performance with the better story versus the higher end creative. So I think it's way more about that storytelling nature. There's a lot of different ways you can slice and dice things. You can start sequential messaging and really continue telling that story. So there's a lot of different things you can do on Connected TV that you've never been able to do before on television, or you did it on television before, but didn't, to Aaron's point or Emily's point, there wasn't a way to ever measure it. So now it's more about the storytelling nature versus I would say that everything needs to be 4k. But yes, if you're running on a big screen, you definitely don't want it to be pixelated because as a consumer, I don't wanna watch that either. Emily: I deal very little with the creative on the measurement side, but iSpot acquired ACE metrics in December of 2020 when the world was shut down, we were doing that. So we now do full funnel measurement, and one thing I've learned since working with the ACE folks is that creative matters so much more than I would've ever realized. This is more your forte, of course, Ryan, but we see creative driving business outcomes, whether it's for CPG or auto, like the slightest variation makes a difference on both the linear side and the connected TV side in terms of driving efficacy. So, just an observational point for me that it's definitely important. So I don't see why that wouldn't become more of the conversation, especially when talking about TV share shift from linear dollars to connected tv. Like what does that actually look like in terms of the creative? Ryan: And I think the addressability needs to filter down to the creative and the message too. We really are proponents of microtargeting strategies that aren't just to reach them, but to reach with a different message, right? So that's going to resonate with somebody who's a yogi, maybe different than a message that would resonate against somebody who's a CrossFitter, for instance. If we have that signal and can measure against that and can reach them, let's talk to them differently. I bet that's what you would see, Emily, when you were taking a look at the effectiveness of a campaign. So I'd like to talk a little bit more about inventory too, because I think at least the early days of programmatic from a display side, to the video side, there's this remnant inventory discussion. The equality of not being able to buy against programming still is a challenge I think for some brands that wanna still have that control. So Tiffany, I'd love to hear from you what you've seen in the last 18 months as far as the inventory availability that's coming through the programmatic pipe, and if there has been a shift because of the movement of consumers towards streaming, if there's also been a shift from the supply side of the higher quality inventory that's coming through, is that something that you're seeing? Tiffany: Yeah, I mean 110%, right? So we look at it from two different angles. So, to your point, the consumers, we look at it on a DNA by DNA basis. How many CTV households are in that market now compared to how many TV households are in that market? In the last 18 months, we've seen every single DMA go up anywhere from 10 to 30%. That's a huge growth, so you're looking at 40% penetration now up to 50 or 55% penetration of actual CTV households. So that's the first side, there's just a lot more consumers in the space consuming the inventory. Then on the other side, I think there was a thought maybe 2, 3, 4 years ago that there were these streaming wars and someone's going to win. Someone has to win because there has to be like a top five or the top 10 players in the space. What we've seen is those top 10 players are all still here and growing, and now there's 50 more. I'm not even exaggerating when I say there's 50 more. Even if you look at this year, they're huge high end brand name apps like Paramount Plus, and Peacock, and there were so many more players that entered the space even this year. They're acquiring more market share, and because more and more consumers are moving over and there's more and more households, the inventory is following. So we are seeing major growth in both premium supply as well as some of those longer tailed names that you don't necessarily know, but all still premium supply. What's nice in the CTV space, for the most part, it's either live streaming. So think of your virtual MVPD, like Sling and AT&T Now and Hulu Live and YouTube Live. Most of it's on demand, so it's someone actually sitting down in front of their TV selecting exactly what they want to watch when they wanna watch it. So it's not just what we've always thought of the 2:00 AM remnant DR TV running in the middle of the night. It's actually someone, any one of us sitting down actually selecting something, whether the advertiser deems what I'm watching quality inventory or not, I'm still watching it. I'm still a valid consumer. So that's what we've seen across the entire space. Consequentially because of that too, we've also seen a lot of the premium media owners, like the biggest broadcasters across the globe, they're starting to compete all their Drexel inventory with programmatic demand as well. They're trying to maximize the value of every single ad impression. Because it is 100% addressable, to your point, reaching a yogi versus reaching a CrossFitter is a different type of message, different type of creative, and now they can do that. So we're actually seeing publishers and media owners optimize their yield that way as well using the programmatic ecosystem. Jake: Yeah, that's a big theme going forward, and part of this is training the marketers the same thing, which is, as a marketer they really balk at, hey, this is a super low CPM that I can get from a and e, right? Or fx and if I come to you, I'm paying between two and three and maybe even four x that, which seems really expensive. If you take into account the fact that it's a very apples to orange comparison because you're buying one out of every five impressions that you would've bought on linear, right? With linear, you don't have a choice. You're serving on a DMA that's a hole in one for advertisers, right? You're now able to just pick and choose the ones that you want to work with versus the audience you wanna target versus the audience that you don't. To Tiffany's point about the amount of people entering the streaming game, Paramount Plus Peacock, Discovery, who's now Discovery Time Warner, they're also all competing with Silicon Valley and those are bottomless pockets. I don't think we're anywhere close to the end of this sort of, more and more content for content's sake. Tiffany: I don't either, and by the way, as a consumer, I dig it. My husband and I are like total TV junkies, so this is awesome for us. Jake: Totally. There's a podcast that I love, by Scott Galloway and Kara Swisher and he makes the point, like it's a billion dollars of content per subscription fee that you pay, something like that. There's some calculus that you do where you're like, that's insane. Every dollar you spend gives you a billion dollars worth of content. That's wild. Ryan: Yeah, just to sum that up, not every impression is the same, right? And depending on who's on the other end of the targetability of that, but to that point too, not every connected tv impression is served in the same manner. I was looking at some data on the opening ceremonies from the Olympics and out of what came through streaming channels it was on six different devices from gaming, to mobile, to desktop, to connected tv. And that could still come through on the DSP side as a signal of streaming connected tv. So, how do we reconcile, not only what we're buying, where we're serving into, but where it is being served, and is there any price fluctuation or difference in buying techniques that we would wanna implement based on the device in the way that it's coming through? Jake: Yeah, I would say that that's a big concern for marketers as well, and we hear that time and time again, which is that we at the Trade Desk consider CTV to be the large screen in the house, which is a household level device. It is the biggest thing that you can transact on. Then we have tons of other grains against which you can measure, seeing gaming inventory. I think some of those problems solve themselves, which is that we don't see a ton of inventory coming from gaming. That's such a small inventory skew that's usually pretty reserved and bought almost exclusively on direct. So that solves that, but what we do see a lot is FEP being sort of masqueraded as CTV because it's a great CPM if you can sell like FX and you wanna sell Dave and you wanna sell that on all of the devices, but you don't really have enough inventory to just sell a CTV skew at the CPM you want, you're gonna try and do what the linear networks have been doing forever, which is bundle a bunch of this and have it all sold at the highest price, right? That's the same thing, you go cut a deal with ABC and they're gonna say, well, you're gonna get a bunch of the Bachelor and Good Morning America, and what you really get is a really small sliver of Good Morning America, which is what you're paying for, and a really long, like Tiffany said, 2:00 AM whatever it happens to be they're airing on that channel. But all that is to say within any DSP platform, but specifically I'm speaking about the Trade Desk, there is as many grains as you want to go, as deep as you want to go as a trader, you can go that level. What we've seen a lot of, a lot of the value of working with a platform and transacting, even though you might be transacting on Hulu inventory or transacting on CBS inventory, transacting via a platform provides this third party measurement. I know Emily does the same thing with iSpot, you have this third party who is able to say, well, you promised us that we were gonna run on a $30 CPM against exclusively CTV inventory during this time, this day part. And what ended up happening is we ran against a lot of FEP and tablet and that's not really what we agreed to. It allows advertisers to go back and say, the next time we do this, you're gonna give me a make good against that, and you're not gonna do the same thing again. Whereas in the past, you kind of just had to take it on faith that you served on what you said, because no one's gonna sit there and watch every single commercial that airs. That would be an awful job. Ryan: That's really intriguing. Do you see measurement then, maybe the traditional lens of checking the inventory quality and being able to go back and get, make goods against direct buys or PMPs? Is that something frequently that we're seeing agencies probably leaning into as a potential added benefit of the transparency that you get from going through digital channels? Jake: I wouldn't say that's the core value proposition. We definitely don't market that as our core value proposition, we’re your double checkers. I think it's more around consolidated buying. So, if you park money with the major networks that you work with, and then you add on perhaps Hulu and Samsung and Visio and some of these newer upstarts, crackle, some of the DDCs that also advertise in this ecosystem. If you buy with each of them in a silo, hell's going to freeze over before those folks are gonna get in a room to make sure that you as an advertiser, no matter how big you are, you could be Home Depot. Hell's going to freeze over before they're gonna get in a room and make sure that your audience overlap was new. Whereas, when you buy in a consolidated manner, when you buy in a measurable manner, you're able to look and see, okay, well it turns out that this one may have performed well on its own, but it didn't perform well in comparison to the other places where I could have got that inventory either cheaper or in a way that perhaps reached the consumer and they were more likely to work their way down funnel. I'd say that's the primary use case that we have for that measurement. But we have had, in the past, Ryan, we've had cases where our client will come, they will run against some form of inventory and they'll have been promised one thing, they'll see that they got another in reporting and they'll go back against that. That's getting better and better. I mean, content signals will be coming out over the course of the next 12 months. That'll be another place where we'll be able to do just the same thing. You said, I was gonna run an ad and it's only a live stream, or you said I was gonna run against only the OD and it looks like I didn't. More and more transparency for advertisers is a great thing because right now, especially in the TV landscape where there's so much leverage concentrated around the suppliers, the publishers, that's starting to change with a lot more publishers and a lot more granularity. So, advertisers can really squeeze and get what they want out of their campaigns. Ryan: Emily, I had a question for you in relation to statist significance. So, I think you were touching on if you had a hundred percent linear buying, and you wanted to test connected, but if you're only putting 2% of the the buy towards that it's hard to really find statistical significance, just the effectiveness. Is there any best practices that advertisers should think about with a minimum media mix to be able to compare linear versus connected? What best practices would you suggest for anybody who's trying to take a look at the efficacy? Emily: Yeah, that's a great question. I grew up in Linear, which used to not be the cool kids and now TV's of course this device in the room and,everyone talks about TV as though it's digital medium, which it of course is. For me it's been really interesting because a lot of my friends and partners on the digital side have no real knowledge of tv, of linear. So, coming in with a test buy on connected tv, that's 2 million impressions like that is just not gonna give you any statistical significance. It's not gonna give you any valuable insights. So, take a giant advertiser, Jake, I think you mentioned Home Depot. Home Depot spends so much money on the linear side that it's never gonna be able to compare what you're, what they're investing on the connected TV side. I would just say going into it, knowing that you need to invest somewhat significantly, iSpot doesn't like to set thresholds because we wanna be able to work with our partners and be the third party measurement company that can send them a report and say, here's how it looks. Without saying what the threshold is, I would say that investing somewhat of a significant amount is needed to drive anything on the connected TV side, in terms of measurement and insights. I think the sheer amount of spending still going to linear is shocking to some people because it's still so high. My mom was saying to me the other day, she's like, well, is that okay for iSpot that all this money is moving to, to Hulu and to, you know, all these places? I was like, Yeah, mom, we're just measurement. Like we're just the messenger. We're not in media activation. We are following the money with measurement. We believe in measuring far and wide. So I would just say being aware that a brand is advertising on linear, the beauty of iSpot is that we can see every single dollar being spent across linear. We work very closely with our partners at Trade Desk, and we will often say, hey fyi, there's significant spend happening right now on the linear side. So that's something that we volunteer because we have direct insight into that. Jake: We talked about the problem with transposing. I think Emily really highlighted it well, which is that there are a lot of people that have only worked digital and a lot of people that have only worked in linear on our side of the business. Then on the marketing side, it's the exact same thing. If you're an advertiser, you've probably transacted on linear for most of your life and now being told there's this new thing that you don't really use, to Tiffany's point earlier. That's taking the industry by storm, it's gonna take a lot longer for you to move into that. It's also gonna take shedding some of those legacy buying behaviors, well, why don't I just park my budgets with these five companies. We talked with a major holding company last year and they sort of let slip in one of the meetings that they're still working off of an agreement they negotiated more than eight years ago. I mean, they literally just get together once a year, they cut the same deal that they did last year with all of the major networks and that's their job, and it's a great job. Like I would love that job, but like that's sort of what the digital world is fighting against in terms of how we need to sort of push marketers to think a little bit more creatively. And it's going to come from the brands themselves. It can't come directly from the agencies because the agencies are always going to be beholden to the brands. It's gonna come from the brands themselves insisting on those business outcomes that Emily just talked about earlier. We haven't really talked about this yet, but the crux of CTV is for a long time, it's been brand marketing and performance marketing for 20 years since the advent of the internet and Google ads. It's been brand marketing and performance marketing, and we just kind of assume that brand marketing over here works, right? You're telling a story, you're bringing people into the top of the funnel, you're raising awareness, it's cheap reach. I can spend between five and $15 and reach millions of people across the country on a CPM basis. Now those two connected TV sort of presents the meshing of that, right? It gives you the ability to now take what used to be only brand marketing and make it much more relevant for performance marketing. You can tie it into your down funnel strategies, but you can also measure on a one to one or a household basis. Ryan: I'm glad you said that because my chief goal is to merge brand and performance and there's ways that we can do that today. The agencies that aren't leaning into that, I think, aren't representing their clients. Sometimes the good ideas do come from the agencies, It's not always the brand push. Jake: It's not that the good ideas don't come from the agencies, it's that our hands are tied, right? Ryan: Sometimes yes, but sometimes we're the ones that are trying to push brands into the new territory too. I think we'll have time for one more question. Obviously the q and a, if anybody out here wants to ask anything, please put that in. I just wanna hear from each of you, where do you think we're gonna go from here? So much has changed in the last 18 months and has continued to change almost on a weekly basis, I feel like. What are you paying attention to when you look at two, three years into the future? We didn't really even touch on ACR too much here, or even the ability for IPD addressability from a local level that we were just talking about in our internal session. What areas do you guys see that the futurists should be focused on? Emily: You just mentioned the word, so I'll go ahead and grab it. I think we are entering into an all addressable future. I think it's gonna take a while, but buying on age and gender doesn't cut it anymore. Brands have known that for a long enough time, but now there's evidence that everyone has to change. So I think connected TV is already addressable, it's targeted media, I think it's only going to get bigger and hopefully easier, especially when you're talking about addressable on the linear side. I think everything needs to be measured and everything needs to be targeted. That's really how everyone's gonna see success, in my opinion. Tiffany: I can say from the supply side, and I've been saying this for the last five years, wouldn't it be nice if we could just transact TV on a CPM and had it be measurable and reach the users we wanna reach? I used to be laughed at in meetings when I would say that. They're like, Oh that's a nice thought, but I think in the next two to three years we're gonna start getting to the space where TV is TV is TV. There is no delineation between, whether it's through a traditional module or whether it's through my mobile phone. So, I'm hopeful that that's where the mindset shift will be. I think the technology and the actual movement to that will take more like five to 10 years overall. I mean, the TV industry has been doing this since the fifties, so you're moving a big behemoth to adopt what we, from the digital side, are trying to push into the industry. So it's a big shift, but I think the mindset in terms of buyers and advertisers over the next two to five years is that we're getting to the place where TV is TV is TV, and the dollars will move the back end. Jake: Yeah, I would agree with both of those points. And I'd say to build on one of the points that Emily made around addressability, addressability is key, and it's the same as one Tiffany's making, and Tiffany knows this full well working on the supply side. For the past three years in the connected TV landscape, we've been really trying to grab some of these big rocks, major networks. Now those major networks, like Tiffany said, they've made that inventory available in platform, but they're also making it compete directly with their direct sold because they see the CPM value and the yield optimizations that they can do. There are tons of pockets of inventory that are smaller, they're not quite as easy and big of gets, that are still coming online. When that starts to happen, and you can as a marketer or as platforms, go to marketers and say, Look, if it exists, it's in platform, it's addressable that's starting to come on. Even set top boxes, these set top boxes that are being made now, those are smart set top boxes that can be transacted on a one to one basis and those are starting to come online. The other thing I see in the next three years, to your question, Ryan, is for a long time Samsung, Visio, Samba, any of the panel manufacturers who aggregate panel manufacturer inventory, those entities were sort of viewed as long tail, but they own the consumer relationship more than anyone else does because they own the class. They're the first experience that you have, and they've all seen, if you're making panels, even Samsung who sells really expensive TV panels, they're making 2-3% on a panel, and they're making 60- 80% on an advertisement. That's a business unit that each of those entities, I predict will take very seriously. They're writing playbooks for each other by going out and saying, we're gonna eat a big chunk of this CTV landscape because we see this as our market opportunity and they're doing great at it. Frankly, the other entities that could take back some of that from them aren't really interested in selling ads. You've got Apple who's not really interested in selling ads. You've got Amazon, who's a behemoth, but they're not taking their fire sticks super seriously as a vehicle for selling ads. They're using other platforms to sell ads, and then Google does, but in a very different silo. They've got Google Chromecast, the other OTT devices aren't interested in keeping them out. It's really the networks that are, but they're sort of hamstrung by the fact that their user experience is tethered to the glass itself. So those would be some of the places that I see in the future. Ryan: Couple quick questions that came in on my g chat. Will the targeting and measurement piece feed be dramatically affected by the loss of cookies? That's from Elizabeth, and I mean, we're at least on the CTV big screen, we're not transacting on cookies, but there is some streaming that is coming on cookie based or maybe there's some outcome, pixels, from measurement. How much is this a futureproof channel with connected TV as far as a cookieless future? Or are there considerations that advertisers need to think about as far as targeting and measurement? Jake: Yeah, we've obviously got unified ID 2.0, which is a big solution that we've been pushing in market. There's been a delay on the deprecation of cookies by Google. And Google sits in this, not to get too esoteric, but Google sits in this very interesting place. It's a paradigm for them where every decision that they make gets weighed against antitrust versus privacy, and they cannot make a decision without falling on one side or the other of that fence. So they said, we're gonna completely scrap this privacy, and now everyone's looking, well, you just destroyed 1500 businesses. You can't do that, right? That's antitrust, and so we're gonna see that kind of play out over time. In the meantime, you've got this entire ecosystem who's committed to creating alternative solutions to cookies, unified ideas. One of them we predict there will probably between at steady state five, maybe seven different solutions that exist out there that will create a deterministic mapping that is privacy friendly, that is federated, that allows marketers and consumers to sort of make that bargain that they make, which is, I want great content in exchange for ad supported content. However, TV itself is a little bit insulated, because it's on a device level, but that's temporary, that's medium term. It's not long before, I don't know that my grandma knows what cookies are, but she certainly has no idea that cookies and device IDs are different. It will at some point come to bear that that legislators will figure out, okay, it's not just cookies, it's also device IDs and indeed connected TV providers, the publishers themselves, have been some of the most excited about this because the measurement solutions in the CTV space are very fragmented. A cookie is a very simple singular solution that allows people to track and measure advertising behavior, and also consumer behavior in a way we all understand. It's a common language. Connected television doesn't have that, so I unified id, whether it's our solution, whether it's live ramps, whether it's some of the other solutions in market, open AP, block graph, those all present a measurement solution that the industry can rally around. So in that sense, I do see long term that it will be insulated from that, but there will be growing pains between now and then. Tiffany: Jake, you hit the nail on the head. CTV for the immediate future for anyone worried about it, CTV is a cookieless environment anyway, so it's not going to be immediately impacted. Yes, OLV will be, display will be, anything that's more of the internet based side of things. In the long term from the supply side, what we're seeing as a solution, I know you guys are working on more unified IDs from the buy side, but from the supply side, we're seeing a major push towards first party data from all the different supply sources. So, when you were saying, but the actual OEMs, the smart TV manufacturers, like Visio, and Samsung TV, they have very, very, very good first party data on every single one of the users that bought their TV, and is consuming via that manner. We're also seeing that through the broadcasters. We're seeing that through the virtual MVPDs. We're seeing that across the entire industry, and what we're able to do as that technology layer in between the buy and the sell side is consolidate all that publisher first party data and then allow people through the Trade Desk to actually transact upon that. So then there is no cookie, we're not even worried about third party audiences. It ends up becoming this really robust pool of audience data, but it is owned from the supply side and is locked down on the Magnite platform. Jake: The deprecation of cookies has been a great forcing function for that. You think when you sign in with the broadcaster, the broadcaster holds those emails, but they don't, who actually holds that is your local cable MVPD, who is using an authentication service that keeps that in a server somewhere. So this totally disjointed way of interacting and authenticating is now going to become much less fragmented over time because of what we perceive to be the deprecation of cookies. Ryan: Two more quick questions here. Tiffany, you mentioned a Mintel study. There was an ask if you'd be able to share that with participants. I don't know if that was proprietary to you or not, but- Tiffany: Not at all, it’s for everybody. I will share that out to you, Ryan, and you can send it out to all the guests. Ryan: Absolutely, we'll do that. Then, Anne asked, should creative change in order for the two to work together or not? I would say that it's certainly case dependent to some degree, but the more that we really lean into micro-targeting and being able to address audiences differently, I think there is a different mindset. That creative immediate partners can bring together at strategy to be able to take that on, and to understand that if we really take a video anywhere strategy, we're talking about connected TV, but making sure that we're shooting and vertical, making sure we're being able to look at six second clips. So I think video as a creative medium has changed quite a bit, not just in the quality of the production, but in a lot of places where that's gonna be consumed so that it looks native to the platform. Certainly social has been a good change for that. Last question, this is a broad one. Maybe I need to write a white paper on this, and we could join up here, but what can you actually measure on CTV? What are some of the signals that come out? We haven't really even talked about the region frequency yet, but we did talk about incremental reach. What are some of the other things that you're actually able to bring, especially as it comes down to business outcomes. That's likely what advertisers and brands are interested in. Emily: This is my favorite question because it's the easiest answer. We can measure everything that we can measure on the linear side, on the connected TV side, so we can measure against all demographics included. A lot of connected TV measurement used to be limited to household, that's no longer the case. Incremental reach and frequency over linear and then all business outcomes. So that could be, CPG attribution, in store visits, so location, it could be sales lift. So, the opportunities are endless and we meet and measure any KPI that the brand has. So, it's something that's been really fun to watch brands take advantage of it so aggressively this year because it's just easier now. There's no other word for it, it's so much easier. We send a report out to our friends at Trade Desk and they deliver it to their client and it's done. It's really that easy. Tiffany: For us it's legitimate data now. We used to call it squishy data five years ago, and now it's legitimate data. So, for us it's really nice to be able to present a study and be like, here it is, and we stand behind it. Jake: And it ties to your down funnel strategies. That is always the trouble, and that's how large holding companies are structured. Even some of the independent agencies are structured the same way, which is that you had TV over here, and that presents one of the biggest problems with why dollars haven't followed eyeballs. You have TV dollars over here, and you have performance dollars over here. Those don't necessarily need to be siloed anymore when there's a connected TV ecosystem that allows you to watch who sees your ad in the household and then trickle it down to the devices that they end up seeing that further downstream ad later on. Ryan: Well, that's not our agency for sure. We're going to tackle that challenge head on with the help of partners like you, and the brands and creative agencies that are on the phone with us. Thank you so much for joining. Certainly if there's any other questions to come down, I'll make sure to get you guys in touch with the proper folks. I really enjoyed this discussion. We should do it more often. So, don't be a stranger. Thank you guys. Appreciate it. Elise: Thank you for listening. Coegi is an industry leading performance marketing agency based in the Midwest. We've learned a lot since our founding in 2014 and started The Loop Marketing Podcast to share some of our hot takes on marketing trends we're following, best practices, we've discovered and actionable tips for improving your digital strategy. We'll see you next time.