It’s a complex time for the media industry. Economic uncertainty and ongoing debates on topics such as measurement, currency and fragmentation are shaking up how things need to be done.
The ad-tech industry exists to solve these complexities, but with the walled garden triopoly of Google, Amazon and Meta drawing the lion’s share of ad-tech budgets, smaller ad-tech companies face an uphill battle.
With fewer events and gatherings over these past few years, industry leaders have had to be more intentional in finding moments to collaborate with those outside their own organizations. In order to emerge from this pandemic era stronger than before, strategic alliances will be imperative in driving innovation to benefit the industry overall.
Build alliances in unlikely ways
Consortiums like OpenAP and Go Addressable are a good start. It wasn’t long ago that OpenAP significantly accelerated advertiser adoption of data-driven linear offerings. When each network was trying to do this independently, it created disparity in audience segment definitions and reporting. Advertisers were unable to understand their data-driven linear campaigns holistically; there was no way for them to make apples to apples comparisons because of the lack of standardization, which prevented data-driven linear adoption from accelerating.
In 2017, OpenAP—a collaboration between Fox, Viacom, Turner, and later, NBCUniversal—changed that meaningfully. The OpenAP consortium agreed on standardized audience segment definitions and consistent, third-party-verified campaign reporting across these participating publishers.
Understanding identity across the open ecosystem enables a holistic understanding of reach and frequency.
It’s a good example of what can happen when industry “frenemies” come together to solve common challenges. They had a shared vision for the problem and how to solve it.
Furthermore, they didn’t allow company gains to overshadow the larger goal of industry innovation because all parties understood that the innovation would be mutually beneficial for everyone and would grow the entire pie.
There’s a lot more work to do, but alliances like these will play a big role in simplifying complexities in the industry, ultimately strengthening the value proposition of the entire ecosystem. When this happens, each individual company within the open ecosystem wins and can more aptly compete against the walled gardens.
Determine what really works
As marketers turn to present-day challenges, how do they determine the table-stakes for transacting in a fragmented video landscape? Until there’s a clear industry consensus on several key issues, CTV will not reach its full potential or gain its fair share of advertising dollars.
One challenge to tackle is that of measurement tools and currencies of the future. There will be multiple measurement tools and currencies, but the industry needs to be disciplined to avoid confusing “different” with “better.”
An alliance to create baseline criteria for evaluating measurement and putting a “seal of approval” on currency-grade solutions would reduce complexity and enable advertisers and publishers to make more informed decisions for their cross-screen video planning and investment decisioning.
Understand identity
Another key challenge that can only be solved with a meaningful alliance across the ecosystem is the need for a complete picture of consumer identity. Understanding identity across the open ecosystem enables a holistic understanding of reach and frequency, which can then be properly optimized and managed.
This can be achieved in a privacy compliant way that also protects each individual company’s proprietary data. Without it, an advertiser cannot drive optimal outcomes, not to mention that the consumer viewing experience remains suboptimal at best. While the ultimate nirvana is to expand understanding of identity across the entire video landscape, inclusive of walled gardens, gaining this understanding across the complete open ecosystem is an imperative first step.
Over the last two-and-a-half years of pandemic-era media and advertising, the power of relationships and collaboration has never been clearer. As marketers start to recalibrate the industry post-pandemic, may they remember the transformative synergy that is possible when like-minded competitors coalesce around a shared mission to improve the industry as a whole.
