With the razzle-dazzle portion of the upfronts long over, the ad industry is now learning the impact of those presentations.
Early indications forecast softer upfront deals than in years past, but what we’re seeing is more complicated than that. Live sports remains one of the hottest commodities, with NBC boasting its biggest sports upfront ever. Fox showed growth in sports sales, while, over at Disney, even with upfront sports buying surging, overall sales were flat.
Amid the ongoing tariff rollercoaster and economic uncertainty, it’s clear that brands don’t feel secure enough to lock in huge deals outside of live sports. So what happens to all of that nonsports content spread out across a growing number of streaming channels?
Opening up inventory
We may be facing the largest scatter market we’ve ever experienced, which means dramatic growth in programmatic CTV. Both buyers and sellers will have to respond to take advantage.
On the buy side, brands and agencies will have different criteria for making their CTV purchases. Smaller budgets need to provide a quick return. This means more discernment when it comes to inventory selection, as well as an emphasis on performance.
The key to achieving these goals in programmatic buys is through more precise targeting, which requires as many refined signals as possible. Buyers forced with smaller budgets can’t afford to make buys across an entire streaming channel. They need to focus their initiatives on the specific content that is most relevant for their messaging or offering.
This brings us to publishers. While those with live sports content are happy, what about those who don’t hold those hotly contested licenses? The need to monetize nonsports content puts pressure on streaming platforms to open up more inventory for programmatic.
There are only a few streaming platforms that qualify as major entities with the most premium content. The other streamers make up the majority of the market. Mind you, these channels still offer premium content and great opportunities. They are just not the top of the pyramid.
Data drives discovery
Not every streamer has the time and resources to arrange deal IDs for each of their advertisers. This means publishers need to think about how they can make their inventory more discoverable to buyers and competitive. Advertisers and agencies must look for easier ways to find relevant content for their scatter buys. Meanwhile, pubs will need to rethink their transparency signals strategy.
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Across the streaming market, buyers layer audience signals onto their buys. The lack of content-level signals means most buys are content-blind, marginalizing the value of the streaming publishers themselves. Think about it: There may be a streamer with great content that matches all of an ad buyer’s criteria for context and suitability. But if the buyer only sees audience performance without content, they are missing a huge piece of information.
The big question is: How can sellers engage in deeper relationships with buyers to prove the value of their content? The best way to benefit from increased programmatic interest is to help advertisers understand which inventory accomplishes their goals and which does not.
To do this, publishers need to make a wealth of signals available in the bidstream to entice advertisers to spend, and then prove out that their inventory is working to allow for further optimization. Amazon Prime Video’s decision to offer show-level data is a step in this direction. This may be the first domino to fall as the trend grows among all streaming platforms.
We’ve seen this movie before in both display and mobile. Yet, with those channels, economic reasons drove the marketplace to focus on simple and accurate media-buying methods. The most common criticism of CTV is that the channel as a whole hasn’t beefed up its signal capabilities. As a result, buyers do not fully know what is working beyond the audience.
First movers will have a massive benefit here. The scatter market will evolve with more signals, injecting some much-needed transparency into a market that will grow its biddable inventory every year. These enhancements will bring in new CTV advertisers who have traditionally spent only on search, social or programmatic display.
“On TV & Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video.
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