NBCUniversal had two marquee events in February 2022, the Winter Olympics and Super Bowl, that still maintain power to generate viewer and advertiser interest, despite changes in consumer behaviors. But figuring out exactly how many people are watching the games — and the ads — across its portfolio speaks to ongoing issues with measurement the company and other media conglomerates are looking to solve as the video landscape becomes more fragmented across platforms that include broadcast, digital, CTV and beyond.

"These media conglomerates are all saying at their upfronts they want to sell [from] one media buying platform," said Chris Kelly, CEO of brand analytics platform Upwave. "As media buying has changed, the measurement needs to change."

Despite a large swath of the TV advertising market questioning its long-running faith in Nielsen for accurate measurements, industry sources expect a very small percentage of ad deals in 2022 to use alternative ad currencies. But by 2023, a new measurement could be in place, which suggests the pace of experimentation, M&A and changing alliances could be dizzying.

"This year, maybe 10% — some fairly small percentage — of deals will probably be done on some form of alternate currency," said Jane Clarke, the outgoing CEO of the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM). "There's a lot of testing and vetting that will go on in the next year, and then probably by the 2023 upfront, everything could be on a new measurement."

To get to that point, all the alternative services will need to be tested by all the networks, along with blind tests by groups like CIMM, in addition to getting accredited by industry watchdog Media Rating Council (MRC). The fact that media conglomerates are incentivized to solve the measurement problem by integrating services could help the process along.

"They don't win if they have to use 16 measuring partners on a campaign, and those measuring partners don't talk to each other or integrate," Kelly said. "There's billions of dollars on the line from bad measurement."

As part of its moves to avoid jeopardizing ad dollars, NBCUniversal began 2022 by planting its flag on alternative measurement, naming iSpot.tv as a preferred measurement partner in a multiyear pact that touches across its One Platform portfolio. The results of better measurement speak for themselves. Despite having a 14% lighter ad load, the Olympics has delivered 247% more ad impressions per unit than the other three broadcast networks, per data NBCU emailed to Marketing Dive. Since the start of the Olympics, NBCU has delivered more than 2 billion impressions, with strong measures of engagement, brand recall and message memorability.

Other media companies have begun their own tests and experiments, with the upfronts serving an opportunity to present some of these alternatives, and have an incentive to coalesce around a few options. In kind, advertisers are looking for not just accurate measurement of eyeballs but also of outcomes — more akin to what they receive from the duopoly of Google and Facebook — and are pushing media giants for necessary changes. But even with various stakeholders aligned, the future of measurement is still fuzzy, even if the end goal is clear: accurate measurement, at scale, without the type of siloed dashboards advertisers are used to.

"Television measurement is really quite complicated," Clarke said. "People act like this isn't rocket science, but it's getting close."

Identity and other challenges

Key to measurement is identity, especially as data privacy rules and regulations continue to tighten what information advertisers can gather from browsers and mobile devices. For media conglomerates, this solution could look like NBCUnified, which — as its name suggests — brings together first-party data from across the company's portfolio of TV networks, streamers, theme parks and beyond. When ID graphs are in place and interoperable, media companies and marketers can match data sets, providing advanced audience data that can help refine targeting and attribution measurement.

OpenAP has worked to bring the media conglomerates together around its OpenID, which counts NBC, Viacom and Discovery (and Warner, if the latter's merger is approved) among adoptees, with Disney a holdout that Clarke expects to join up at some point.

"The TV ecosystem is pushing slowly to try to get all the networks around a common ID space, and some common definitions and a set of vendors that they all can align around," she said.

After solving for identity, the media companies and other players would act not like the "walled gardens" of the duopoly but "gated communities," that allow for privacy-safe transmission of data. Clean rooms that provide for this type of exchange have seen increased interest, although the refusal of Google and Facebook to return any form of identity in data matches is a limit on efficacy that groups like the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) are working to solve. The situation could be further complicated if federal data privacy legislation is passed.

"I would expect every senior marketing leader to have their future measurement strategy," including clean rooms, Kelly said. "One of our predictions for 2022 is those conversations will pick up and people realize that user-level [identity] is going away, let's be prepared for privacy friendly, consumer friendly measurement."

While NBCU and some other conglomerates have announced some developments already, 2022's upfronts could be the next opportunity to stake a claim to the future of measurement, resulting in what CIMM's Clarke calls a "jump ball" situation.

"Each of the networks is going to mention one, two or maybe three certified or semi-certified vendors that they feel comfortable that they could trade on, and that they're going to offer in this upfront," she said.

At the upfront, media companies could detail their tests of alternative providers as they work to triangulate different data sets and find out which works best; the resulting group could include ComScore, VideoAmp and iSpot along Nielsen, with Oracle and 605 on the outside looking in (it's not yet clear how Innovid's acquisition of TVSquared could complicate the landscape).

However, buyers will be limited by ad buying systems that can only buy using Nielsen gross rating points (GRPs) and need to make technical adjustments to buy against alternative currencies, the way that Mediaocean can accept ComScore data, for example. The technical difficulty creates a chicken-or-egg problem that must be solved before alternative currencies can be fully adopted.

Nielsen must change

The opportunity for better measurement comes in the wake of challenges to the power of Nielsen, which was stripped of accreditation in 2021 by the MRC for undercounting viewership during the pandemic. With this serious blow to the dominant player in TV measurement for decades, media companies and the advertising industry have a chance to meaningfully change how measurement is done.

Nielsen has faced complaints about the size of its panel and compliance with its tools for several decades, and has previously worked to address issues. A major change came more than a decade ago as time-shifting viewing on DVRs altered measurement. Now, buyers and sellers want to deliver addressable advertising in the national network inventory, which is impossible with a panel and more resembles digital ad impression management. But the last few years have provided an opening for change.

"It wasn't really until Nielsen not only had all the issues that they had during the pandemic, but also it became clear that even if Nielsen stays a dominant currency provider, that they have to change," Clarke said.

Despite criticism and accreditation issues, Nielsen's status as the dominant player in measurement is not likely to change overnight. Even as they seek to experiment with alternative measurement currencies, media companies have been hamstrung by how much they pay to and rely on Nielsen. But moves like NBCU opening its RFP — while not closing the door on Nielsen — could help other companies.

"It is definitely a good step in providing more transparency to advertisers by adding an additional layer of transparency outside of Nielsen," Bryan Karas, CEO of performance and creative agency Playbook Media, said in emailed comments.

The future of measurement could be clearer if iSpot.tv proves more accurate than Nielsen, but the company could have trouble unseating Nielsen if the differences between the two are less clear. The promise of alternative currencies could be undermined as CTV grows to the point where programmatic sources end up driving the majority of ad inventory, Karas explained.

For NBC, using iSpot.tv will at least help the network deliver ad exposure data to marketers much faster than is currently available. Marketers can get automatic content recognition (ACR) data from smart TVs almost immediately, compared to TV data that takes about eight days, and are looking to close the gap.

"NBC is very keen on being able to compete with Google and Facebook, as are the other networks," Clarke said. "They want to be able to offer that data back to the marketers immediately so that they can do in-flight optimization and all the things that they do in digital media."

As it stands, TV and digital have practically opposite approaches to measurement. In TV, 90% of energy, spend and bandwidth is spent on counting eyeballs, with only 10% measuring effectiveness and outcomes; in digital, the percentages are the opposite. Developments in measurement could help shift those numbers as upstarts like iSpot, ComScore and TVSquared (which was just acquired by Innovid) get a larger seat at the table, Kelly explained.

"All advertisers are not going to only want counting. They're going to want more than that from a measurement standpoint," he said.

The streaming wars of the last few years have entered a new phase, as formerly ad-free platforms prepare to open their walled gardens to advertising and smaller players consolidate, creating new avenues and opportunities in a surging over-the-top (OTT) ad market that reached nearly $1.3 billion in 2021.

In early March, Disney+ announced it will launch an ad-supported tier in late 2022, while Netflix CFO Spencer Neumann noted that while ads are not in its current plans, "never say never." Discovery a week later revealed, as part of its upcoming acquisition of AT&T's WarnerMedia, that Discovery+ and HBO Max will eventually be combined into one streaming platform.

While details about the proposed offering are scarce, the new platform will immediately become one of the bigger players on the streaming landscape, one that offers a larger reach for advertisers on its ad-supported video on demand (AVOD) tier.

"By bringing together Discovery+ and HBO Max, the combined channel will be able to deliver audience at scale to meet almost any advertiser target. That positions the firm well against even the largest competitors, including Disney+ and Netflix, both [of] which have signaled they may start accepting ads," Todd Krizelman, CEO and co-founder of MediaRadar, said in emailed comments.

Two great tastes, together

Discovery's $43 billion acquisition of WarnerMedia, which will create Warner Bros. Discovery, is expected to be completed by the end of April, sources told Variety. Discovery investors voted to approve the deal in March, and it has already been approved by the Department of Justice and both company's boards of directors.

While Discovery+ and HBO Max will likely be offered as some sort of bundle in the short term, Discovery anticipates a combined platform being available not in weeks or years but in several months, after it clears technical hurdles. Currently, Discovery+ accounts for the bulk of Discovery's 22 million worldwide customers, while HBO Max and HBO neared 74 million subscribers in 2021.

Both Discovery+ and HBO Max offer ad-free and ad-supported tiers, and while it is unclear how those tiers would be priced in a combined platform, the company expects big things from the offering, explained Discovery CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels, who broke news of the company's plans on March 14 during the Deutsche Bank 30th Annual Media, Internet & Telecom Conference, Variety first reported.

"I can't wait to see the first combined direct-to-consumer metrics because, in theory, the acquisition power of HBO Max, combined with the retention power of the Discovery content I think is going to make for a blowout DTC product, and that should certainly drive very healthy revenue growth for years to come," Wiedenfels said.

With their different audiences and approaches to content, a merged HBO Max-Discovery+ could help advertisers reach a larger, more four-quadrant audience than the individual platforms can. HBO Max's audience is about 50-50 male to female, and is more likely to be under 45 years of age than the Discovery+ audience; Discovery+ audience skews more than 68% female and is more likely to be over 45 than that of HBO Max, per an analysis AI company Helixa shared with Marketing Dive.

"Discovery and HBO Max have likely done significant audience overlap analysis and determined that combining the services into one platform will likely lead to higher recurring subscription revenue. This implies there is relatively low subscriber overlap today," Krizelman said.

What advertisers want

Merging HBO Max and Discovery+ into one service could also help its corporate parent pull away from competitors including Peacock and Paramount+ — and gird itself against Disney+ and possibly Netflix — as a better destination for advertisers by doubling down on a better ad experience.

While consumers report seeing more ads on Discovery+ (50%) and HBO Max (42%) than other platforms, they also find that amount of ads reasonable (60% and 55%, respectively), according to Hub Entertainment Research's "TV Advertising: Fact vs. Fiction" report. Plus, consumers report paying attention to most or all of the ads and promotions on Discovery+ (39%) and HBO Max (38%), outpacing other platforms. This well-regarded ad experience — in addition to its expanded content play — could help raise both the number of ad-supported user and advertisers.

"For consumers eager to simplify their stack of SVODs, a combined Discovery+/HBO Max will cover all the bases: premium TV shows from HBO, movies from Warner Brothers, unscripted TV from Discovery+," Jon Giegengack, Hub's principal and founder, said in emailed comments.

"Viewers who can't tolerate ads will still be able to watch ad-free," he added. "But the merger will also give HBO Max more content to attract ad-supported users, and in our research the ad-experience on Discovery+ consistently gets among the highest ratings."

At its second annual Tech & Data Showcase on March 3, Disney Advertising laid out an ambitious plan that spans its portfolio and capabilities and aims to address advertiser concerns as the measurement and data privacy landscapes continue to shift.

Along with providing statistics and findings gathered since its first such showcase, Disney used the opportunity to announce a variety of plans, detailing its vendor-agnostic approach to measurement, providing an update on its clean room initiative and opening its self-serve platform to more agencies.

Together, the announcements — plus news that the company will introduce an ad-supported tier on Disney+ later in 2022 — demonstrate how a conglomerate like Disney can bring together first-party data, a variety of broadcast, cable and streaming channels, and its tech acumen and industry partnerships to help advertisers plan, execute and measure campaigns that promise to meet consumers where they are and how they behave.

"It's a big fire hose worth of hyperbole this week," said John Rood, CMO at media company Impact Theory who previously ​​served for more than a decade at both Disney and Warner Bros. "I pity the ad platform that's not in a conglomerate that can deal in scale as well as Disney can."

Not 'scoring players' in measurement

In the wake of challenges to Nielsen due to undercounting during the pandemic and preexisting concerns over its utility in the cross-platform era, media companies are expected to start looking for new solutions around measurement and currencies in 2022. While NBCUniversal has started working toward a post-Nielsen future with its selection of iSpot.tv as a preferred measurement partner, Disney is casting a wider net for partners, working with nearly 100 vendors as it looks to better serve specific client needs.

"We're not in the business of score-carding vendors, but we are in the business of ensuring that the right KPIs that map to our portfolio, and our diversity of audiences that we reach, is reflected in the measurement partners we choose," Lisa Valentino, Disney Advertising's executive vice president of client solutions and addressable enablement, said during the tech showcase.

Among the partnerships, Disney is working to bring Samba TV's True Reach and Frequency (TRF) measurement to agencies and holding companies with which it works. Disney has also begun working with Comscore and Omnicom Media Group, and has not shut the door on Nielsen: the company is taking the lead on the development of Nielsen One, a forthcoming cross-platform solution. Publicis Media will work alongside Disney on both the Nielsen One and Samba TV implementations.

Closely tied to both measurement and increasingly crucial first-party data is Disney's clean room solution, which it launched in October 2021. Built in collaboration with data technology companies Habu, InfoSum and Snowflake, Disney's clean room is now ready to move from testing to implementation. Disney has tapped Horizon Media as a collaborator and is exploring a path to activation with The Trade Desk.

However, while Disney is boasting about the number of partners and tests it's running, this could be a red flag for advertisers looking for simpler solutions.

"They said, 'The good news is we have over 100 vendors,' and I'm like, that's good news? I'd rather have three trusted vendors," Rood said.

Results after year one

Powering Disney's ad-tech solutions is Disney Select, its library of first-party segments spanning its streaming, entertainment and sports properties. Since launching in March 2021, Disney has nearly doubled the number of audience segments to more than 1,800, which are built on more than 100,000 audience attributes that fuel its audience graph. This type of first-party data is increasingly important as the third-party cookie and mobile identifiers face extinction.

"Disney's audience graph is carefully cultivated, it is not bought or rented. We saw match rates three times that of third parties when running a data match campaign. This is what we mean by unrivaled data," Valentino said during the showcase.

Disney Advertising reports it has seen a 70% lift in the number of campaigns that leverage these segments, and is seeing campaign results across categories. Disney Select helped one home furnishings brand drive nearly twice the awareness and 50% higher consideration than third-party data, while a quick service restaurant was able to use an attribution model that leveraged geolocation data to drive 39% more visits among consumers exposed to an ad versus the unexposed group.

"They can really create a robust targeting scenario for their advertisers," Rood said of Disney Select.

Also celebrating its first birthday in March is Disney Real-Time Ad Exchange (DRAX), the company's programmatic platform. Since launching in 2021, Disney Advertising has increased biddable transactions 70% and executed more than 8,000 video campaigns of various sizes, scopes and industries. Now, the company is making Disney Select available in the biddable marketplace, enabling first-party data at scale programmatically.

"Our promise to advertisers is to provide ultimate choice and control, simplicity and most importantly — drive outcomes — as the marketplace pivots to automation," Matthew Barnes, Disney Advertising's vice president of programmatic sales, said in a statement.

As part of the push toward automation, Disney Advertising is also opening access to its self-serve platform, Hulu Ad Manager, to small- and medium-sized agencies through a pilot program that will tap 25 local, performance and independent agencies during the spring of 2022.

Disney+ adds ads

Disney's Tech & Data Showcase highlighted a wide world of capabilities across much of its portfolio. Absent from the discussion was Disney+, the company's subscription video on demand service, that — while expected to be a driver of the company's future growth — does not currently run traditional ads. That is set to change: Disney announced on March 4 that it will offer an ad-supported subscription in the U.S. later in 2022, ​​with plans to expand internationally in 2023.

"Since its launch, advertisers have been clamoring for the opportunity to be part of Disney+ and not just because there's a growing demand for more streaming inventory," said Rita Ferro, president of Disney Advertising.

While details will likely be scarce until the company's upfront in May 2022, the potential for an ad-supported tier of Disney+ is certainly attractive to advertisers — especially in tandem with the wealth of targeting and measurement capabilities unveiled during the showcase. The ad-supported tier could help Disney boost not just ad sales but users, as it targets 230 to 260 million Disney+ subscribers by fiscal year 2024. While 33% of U.S. consumers use Disney+, price is more important when choosing a streaming service than lack of commercials and advertising, across all age demographics, according to data shared with Marketing Dive by media and marketing services company Engine.

"As streaming evolves to mainstream, offerings such as Disney+ and Peacock have found a balance that some ads are okay when they're thoughtful, relevant, and combined with the option of a subscription model, allowing them to appeal to the largest audiences possible while funding broad appeal content," Scott Schiller, global chief commercial officer at Engine, said in emailed comments.

"Just as HBO Max surprises the industry with advertising on streaming, we will continue to see the same for Disney+ and all businesses that have a history of respect for great content and consumer experience," he added.

Connected TV (CTV) continues to gain strength as an advertising channel, with ad spend forecast to reach $14.44 billion at the end of 2021, up nearly 60% from 2020, per eMarketer. This surge comes as CTV seems poised to help advertisers address some of their marketing challenges while still enabling them to get in front of consumer eyeballs, with penetration plateauing at around 85% of U.S. households.

Despite issues with fragmentation and measurement, CTV platforms are ramping up their ad offerings, especially around identity as advertisers grapple with changes to internet identifiers and prepare for the death of third-party cookies. One such platform is FuboTV, a sports-focused virtual multichannel video programming distributor (vMVPD) that markets itself as a cable TV replacement for cord cutters.

"One in five TV dollars are now going to CTV, and I just think we should expect that trend to continue," said Diana Horowitz, FuboTV's senior vice president of advertising sales, citing a GroupM study. "At this point… you will literally not achieve your goals [without CTV]."

FuboTV has seen growth as consumers and advertisers flock to CTV, with subscribers up 108% and revenue up 156% year-over-year in the last quarter of 2021. Still, in such a highly competitive space, there are questions about the platform's long-term profitability as it burns through capital, with its stock losing about half of its value since its previous earnings report.

The platform is working to differentiate itself from other vMVPDs operated by major players including YouTube and Hulu, while the growth of the vMVPD market has slowed and consumers experiment with a mix of over-the-top (OTT) solutions, whether subscription video on demand (SVOD) or ad-supposed video on demand (AVOD). To make its platform more attractive, it has made deals that make its offering more attractive to both consumers and advertisers.

Identity solutions

CTV and over-the-top (OTT) providers are well-suited to help advertisers target and track consumers in a post-cookie world, as cookies are not particularly relevant to how they serve content and ads. Nearly all (94%) of FuboTV's viewership is on a CTV device versus a laptop or mobile device, which is why the platform has taken a forward-looking approach when it comes to identity.

"Anything we can do to improve targeting, improve the ability for advertisers to reach their audiences and improve privacy [is a priority]," Horowitz said.

FuboTV was the first CTV platform to support Unified ID 2.0, the open-source identity solution created by The Trade Desk that has emerged as a leading replacement for third-party cookies and other identifiers. UID 2.0 has shored up support with agencies, ad-tech providers and publishers, and is starting to make its case to marketers, and could help FuboTV enhance its targeting capabilities and deliver more relevant advertising.

Along with its support of UID 2.0, FuboTV in November 2021 announced that it was fully integrated with Dentsu's people-based, identity and data platform M1, which was created by its Merkle subsidiary. The integration will help FuboTV match its first-party subscriber data with an advertiser's CRM data as it works with Live Ramp to create first-party segments.

"It really creates efficiencies for the Dentsu client base," Horowitz explained. "They know that they're reaching the right target audiences with FuboTV, and it gives them much more opportunities to really marry that data."

AI acquisition

FuboTV can further build on this data offering with contextual targeting that allows advertisers to reach consumers bases by putting their ads in a relevant environment. The platform believes that recent acquisition of AI-powered computer vision company Edisn.ai will eventually help beef up its contextual targeting capabilities.

The promise of Edisn.ai is that it can detect different content types in programming to create more enriched metadata, whether through visual recognition or closed caption data, that is deeper than what currently exists through partners like Nielsen, Horowitz said. It could also help FuboTV launch new ad units that are well-suited for its programming, like a picture-in-picture ad unit that would help advertisers reach viewers of soccer, which doesn't have the natural ad breaks of sports like football and baseball.

Beyond just ad units, FuboTV is working on a range of interactive elements that CTV makes possible. The platform in 2021 added free-to-play games and live stats through its FanView offering, which could be extended to potentially tie e-commerce to CTV. AI can help solve a fundamental problem of advertising — targeting the right viewer in the right contextual environment with the right mindset — and serving e-commerce opportunities.

With its partnerships around identity solutions and an acquisition that could help improve contextual targeting and interactivity, FuboTV is looking to offer a one-stop shop for advertisers. The company launched a branded content studio during the 2021 NewFronts, giving advertisers the ability to create custom sponsorship and content opportunities, in addition to the data-driven opportunities it already has.

"For advertisers, [FuboTV] is the best of that television viewing experience, which we know is the optimal viewing experience for consumers, with true addressability of the inventory, which is the gold standard," Horowitz said.

Running shoe brand Saucony, a division of Wolverine World Wide, drove a lift in searches on Google and Amazon as well as independently verified sales with a December 2021 CTV ad campaign across YouTube and other platforms, according to a press release.

Saucony worked with iProspect and Pixability to leverage behavioral targeting to reach potential customers on YouTube, Roku and Amazon who had searched for post-workout and recovery products, optimizing tactics more than 143,000 times on YouTube alone.

Developed to drive results for the brand's Kinvara 12, Ride 14 and Endorphin Collection, the effort saw a 128% lift in Google searches, a 28.5% boost in product searches on Amazon.com and the Amazon app; and a 21.2% increase for awareness, consideration and purchase among Roku audiences. According to independently verified data, the campaign drove nearly 6,000 purchases, and 65% of purchases tracked on Amazon were new to the Saucony brand.

In 2020, Saucony launched its first major connected TV (CTV) marketing campaign with Pixability. The following year, the brand aimed to expand the partnership's scope to launch its new Kinvara 12, Ride 14 and Endorphin Collection and incorporate additional platforms. In particular, a focus on YouTube proved to be useful in driving results that point to CTV's ability to steer searches and sales for brands.

"Our partnership with Pixability demonstrates the reach and results that can be achieved by including YouTube in conjunction with other video platforms in a CTV-focused campaign," Grace Smith, senior digital marketing manager at Saucony, said in the press release.

YouTube represents more than 40% of CTV viewing hours among ad-supported platforms but can often be underrepresented in CTV campaigns, according to comScore research cited in the release.

CTV is among the advertising channels that have seen adoption accelerate due to the pandemic, attention that is likely to continue as the health crisis drags on and behaviors become permanent. While scale was once an issue, that's no longer the case: By 2022, there will be more than 213 million CTV viewers in the U.S. streaming over 1 billion hours of video content every week, eMarketer forecasts.

While still a small portion of total TV ad spend, CTV's growth is accelerating rapidly — along with the use of programmatic for buying it, according to GroupM. After leaping 28% in 2021 to $16.6 billion, global CTV ad spending is projected to rise another 23% in 2022, to $20.3 billion — for a nearly 12% share of total global TV ad spend.

Still, CTV faces its own set of challenges for advertisers. In October 2021, industry executives at Advertising Week bemoaned issues around fragmentation and measurement, saying they are particularly difficult to solve and that, without a solution, CTV wouldn't be able to fully deliver on its promises.

CTV remains a marketing channel where confirming things like viewability is complex while also opening up opportunities to find new metrics.

"The big advantage of CTV over linear TV is that it can be measured against other behaviors across devices, which leads to more interesting data points than reach, frequency and viewability," Raphael Rivilla, media and connections planning partner at agency Marcus Thomas, told Marketing Dive.

Hulu leads CTV ad spend. It reported $2.1 billion in ad revenue for the year that ended in September 2021, per a Kantar report. Its closest competitor was ViacomCBS' Paramount+ with $822 million, followed by NBCUniversal's Peacock with $279 million, and Tubi (owned by Fox Corp.) with $250 million.

Saucony's CTV campaign and its results point to how marketers continue to experiment with an emerging channel that combines the data-related benefits of digital marketing with the creative opportunities of linear TV to find best practices.

Mondelez in February 2022 named Innovid its preferred global solution for Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO), per a press release. The snack marketer will use Innovid's technology to deliver real-time, personalized advertising at scale and across channels.

The deal expands a previous partnership in EMEA and LATAM regions to the U.S. and APAC. Earlier campaigns for Mondelez's Philadelphia Cream Cheese that utilized Innovid's tech saw ad recall rise 29% and view-through rates on YouTube increase 38%, per the release. The expanded partnership comes as CPG advertisers increasingly embrace CTV, which accounts for 44% of their video impressions, per Innovid data. Innovid is focused on CTV and earlier this month acquired measurement and attribution platform TVSquared in a sign of the space's maturation.

Mondelez is expanding its partnership with Innovid as it seeks to deliver personalized creative across the globe — a priority for the marketer and other CPGs for years. Personalized, relevant advertising results in higher click-through and conversation rates, but while most marketers are working on implementing plans to support personalization, just 13% are confident in their ability to deliver, according to Gartner studies cited by Innovid in the press release.

Innovid's technology seeks to close this gap with its DCO solution, which uses first- and third-party data — spanning geography, weather, audience, frequency and more — to generate thousands of ad versions from a single creative asset. The privacy-compliant tech does not require third-party cookies or mobile device IDs, both of which are being phased out or limited by major tech companies amid a heightening of data privacy.

Mondelez has worked to increase personalization in its advertising as part of its larger "humaning" marketing strategy, while also avoiding what Global Vice President of Consumer Experience Jon Halvorson has previously called the "creepy chasm" that the tactic often faces. The expanded partnership builds on previous efforts that infused empathy with personalization, Halvorson said in the press release.

"Now, we can further that success across new markets, ensuring our customers experience our portfolio of iconic global and local brands in an even more human way. At Mondelez, we are committed to delivering the most relevant experiences to our customer base, wherever they may be, and across any channel, device or screen, including CTV," he said.

While Innovid powers campaigns across channels including social, display, video, digital out-of-home and TV, its focus is on CTV. The surging channel has been embraced by CPG advertisers, accounting for nearly half of all their video impressions, and Innovid has benefited from its growth. The ad-tech company, which went public in December 2021, projected $89 million to $90 million in revenue for that year, a roughly 30% year-on-year increase. It also acquired TVSquared in a move that could help it build a unified buy- and sell-side platform for advertisers.

Connected TV (CTV) is among the advertising channels that have seen adoption accelerate due to the pandemic, attention that is likely to continue as the health crisis drags on and behaviors become permanent. While scale was once an issue, that's no longer the case: By the end of 2022, there will be more than 213 million CTV viewers in the U.S. streaming over a billion hours of video content every week, eMarketer forecast.

In addition to enabling marketers to reach consumers where they're increasingly spending their time, CTV also blends high quality, long-form television environments with the precision targeting capabilities of digital. Enhanced data opportunities could even help marketers compensate for the loss of third-party cookies and other internet identifiers. Yet, issues around fragmentation and measurement remain particularly difficult to solve and without a solution, CTV won't be able to fully deliver on its promises, according to several industry executives at Advertising Week in October 2021.

"Currencies that have been used historically with linear have many gaps when it comes to connected TV," Kristen Williams, senior vice president of strategic partnerships at Magnite, said during an Advertising Week panel. "There are many devices that either aren't measurable or devices that might be measurable in some cases aren't depending on the activation path. This creates so much fragmentation and a complex landscape for buyers to navigate."

Creative opportunities

People in the industry know issues like fragmentation and measurement will have to be addressed for the channel to grow, explained Allison Clarke, head of client development at Vizio. Fixing those issues could lead to even more innovation.

"I think we're going to see a lot more interactivity capabilities, shoppable content and some really unique ad units continuing to come into play in the marketplace," Clarke said during a panel.

For years, the effectiveness of rich media and interactive ad formats on CTV has made the channel attractive to marketers. But there is still work to do for wider adoption of those formats, executives from digital ad platform LoopMe explained in an interview with Marketing Dive.

"I think the reality is that it hasn't been a scaled enough platform for a lot of that," said Rob Cukierman, general manager of measurement, CTV and product partnerships at LoopMe. Still, those interactive components are likely to be a huge part of CTV due to channel investment from tech players like Google and Amazon and consumer interest.

"The comfort level of consumers is going to grow, and then that's going to allow these ad experiences to be even better. But they're not going to be scalable, unless there's adoption in the market," added LoopMe's Vice President of Marketing Rachel Conforti.

The ability to make more interactive ad units that bridge linear and digital capabilities is one opportunity for marketers adopting CTV. Brands can also use CTV as a storytelling environment to connect and align with target audiences, while using multiple versions of creative or telling a sequential story to avoid user fatigue, Williams said.

"I think the depth of the data that we can provide when looking at specific creatives gives [marketers] the opportunity to really see what's working for them, and in what places," Clarke added about Vizio's capabilities. "Being able to align them to the right audiences that we know are linked in to a specific genre or programming really allows them to tailor creatives specifically to audiences."

But even with the data-driven capabilities of CTV, marketers must still keep sound advertising fundamentals in mind.

"From the consumer's perspective, CTV is TV. So although in some cases consumers may be expecting a lighter ad load in streaming environments, they're still expecting that same high quality, creative and engaging experience with your brand that they would receive in a linear environment," she said.

Measurement challenges

Marketers are using CTV for broad reach, precision targeting and performance, while taking advantage of the channel's flexibility to optimize mid-campaign and change how budgets are being spent in real-time to meet incrementality goals, Williams maintained. But while measurement in video is still built on audience and demographic exposure data, the industry ought to have measurement that is better aligned on buy- and sell-sides, Joe Cady, senior vice president of digital and advanced advertising strategy and development at NBCU, said during the panel.

"We should have a much bigger toolkit to work with," he said. "As we improve that measurement together as an industry, then I think it allows advertisers to do many more interesting things in terms of how they design their campaign objectives and and how they're executing them."

The fragmented nature of CTV that splits audiences across devices, platforms and services has made it difficult for advertisers to plan campaigns. While YouTube, Roku and Samsung have reach and frequency tools, each is specific to one inventory, making it difficult to gauge and de-duplicate audiences, LoopMe's executives said.

"Traditionally, you had an agency's reach and frequency tool that was powered by Nielsen that could look at all of the different sort of places where video reached," Cukierman said. "[Advertisers are now] reliant on the vendor's technology to be able to say, 'who am I reaching and how does that interact with who else I'm reaching elsewhere?'"

The fragmentation of CTV is here to stay, as major players including Apple, Amazon and YouTube are unlikely to share data, making it difficult for advertisers to decide how to invest and measure outcomes, Conforti told Marketing Dive.

"They're all going to have a slice of the pie, and it's going to be a place that marketers are going to place their dollars, but unless they have a standard measurement tool across all of those platforms, there's really no way for them to tell what's duplicative," she said.

A third-party view across the entire CTV landscape, in addition to other marketing channels, will be increasingly important as advertisers — especially CPG marketers, who traditionally don't have first-party data — lose access to identifiers like third-party cookies. Such third-party tools will only make CTV a stronger ad channel.

"We're seeing a lot of interest in that data-driven aspect, whether that be advertisers bringing on their CRM data or other unique first party audiences," Magnite's Williams said. "The use of audiences is really helping reduce advertising budget waste, and ensure they're reaching who they're intending."

The continued loss of identifiers and additional privacy regulations will likely make the ad ecosystem more complicated and fragmented, but first-party data still has its limits, Williams explained.

"First party data is only valuable if you understand the data that you have, and that you have strategies and technology partners that can help you capitalize on that data," she said.

The focus on measurement and data can make mastering CTV seem like a tech challenge, but once again, the fundamentals of marketing still apply.

"The takeaway is to remember that we're not communicating to devices — we're communicating to people and audiences," NBCU's Cady said. "All of these devices and tools allow us to do that in more targeted and more precise ways, but it's important to remember that at the end of the day, the audiences are what really matters."