CTV Ad Innovation Will Need to Overcome Cultural Roadblocks
When technology drives innovation in a new advertising format, technologists tend to question first whether the product is viable from an engineering perspective.
For example, the next wave of CTV advertising technology will focus on bringing the innovations of other channels to the industry's fastest-growing medium. Dynamic creative optimization (DCO) will come to CTV, evolving ads in real time to reflect audience preferences and the content surrounding them. Technologists — and executives at tech companies — will wonder if this is technically feasible. (DCO, as defined by Amazon Ads, is "a type of programmatic advertising that allows advertisers to create personalized ads based on real-time data."
But technology is fast evolving and will sort itself out. The larger roadblocks to CTV ad innovation are cultural.
CTV represents the convergence of programmatic and linear TV professionals. To drive adoption, the industry will need to navigate those cultural differences.
Here are some of the cultural roadblocks to CTV innovation.
Concerns About Dynamic Creative
Creative production is a sensitive and time-intensive process. Especially on linear TV, brands spend tens of millions of dollars to produce creative across their own in-house teams, media agencies, and creative agencies. Creative relies on aesthetic intuition in combination with a lot of market research and data and is crafted to appeal to specific audiences in specific environments. This formula is not easily upset.
So, dynamically optimizing creative will have to pass muster with the professionals involved in the TV creative supply chain. Adtech companies will need to show proof of higher performance to justify the investment to advertisers and publishers. They will also need to verify the brand suitability of real-time optimization.
The good news is that DCO is already common on other channels such as the open web and social. No one needs to reinvent the wheel in getting everyone in the ad ecosystem onboard with DCO for CTV. They can apply lessons from other channels to the big screen.
What's more, DCO on CTV is an opportunity for creatives to take their place in the vanguard of tech-driven advertising innovation. It puts front and center the role that creative assets must play in improving the advertising experience and elevating brand perception.
To help creatives capitalize on the opportunity, technology partners should introduce new tools to them and empower them to take advantage. At its best, DCO won't pit creatives against technologists but enable them to become more than the sum of their parts.
Control Over Assets
Along with that extended advertising supply chain come many different partners who have a say in the creative process: brands, creative agencies, media agencies, ad servers, and publishers.
Who has the ultimate say over what happens to creative assets? Who signs off on their optimization based on not entirely predictable parameters such as the content and audiences against which creative appears? If an ad hops from the in-store environment to mobile or the open web, does a different agency team need to weigh in on it?
To avoid undue complexity, brands and their agencies should focus on approving the components parts of dynamically optimized advertising, not the various permutations of them. In other words, if every party aligns on each possible part that could be combined in a dynamically optimized ad, the advertisers can avoid the impossible scenario of needing to approve each combination, which will be generated in real-time.
Consumer Opinion
In the digital advertising industry, we often ask what distinguishes solutions from one another, and sweeping narratives develop to explain who wins and loses. But ultimately, it's simple: Consumers have the final say. They are the arbiter of which innovations perform and which are just innovations for innovation's sake. If ads perform better, advertisers and publishers will be incentivized to keep them. So, DCO and the companies that enable it will get to prove their worth.
In the meantime, though, technologists need to consider that code is not the only path, or obstacle, to CTV innovation. People matter, creative matters, and consumer sentiment matters, and CTV innovators will need to consider all three to make the case for dynamic optimization of TV ads.
Alistair Goodman is CEO of Emodo.
The views and opinions expressed in Industry Insights are solely those of the contributor and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the ANA or imply endorsement from the ANA.