Streaming and linear has become increasingly converged and advertisers want to treat them as such when assigning spend. But impediments remain, notably the lack of an authoritative and consistent metric spanning platforms.
A new survey from TVSquared, in conjunction with third-party research firms Dynata and Advertiser Perceptions, asked buyers about the challenges and opportunities aligned with converged TV advertising.
Globally, TV is transforming into a cross-platform, cross-channel ecosystem, with roughly 75% of marketers across the US, UK, Germany and Australia in agreement that TV is now defined as linear and streaming platforms.
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However, there’s universal recognition that the accuracy of cross-platform TV measurement and attribution is one of the biggest challenges to in this space.
“The State of Converged TV: A Look at Global Trends & Adoption” found the imitations and rigidity of the traditional TV advertising industry, and its legacy approaches to currencies and measurement, are the impetus to the top barriers to entry for converged TV.
READ MORE: Report: The State of Converged TV: A Look at Global Trends & Adoption (TVSquared)
There is considerable room for growth for advertisers wanting to achieve greater reach by allocating more impressions or investing more heavily in streaming platforms, the survey indicates.
However, linear is and will remain a key part of the media mix.
To achieve a reasonable amount of incremental reach, advertisers need to allocate at least 10% of their total TV impressions to streaming, is the advice.
The industry has also reached a point where the traditional currency no longer meets the needs of the market, with more than 70% of global TV buyers in support of all forms of TV moving toward an impression-based model.
“The TV ecosystem is now rooted in cross-platform, and we must deliver a transactable currency that allows us to count and ascribe value in a similar way — across linear and streaming — to ensure TV budgets continue to grow. Reliable, transparent insights are the keys for ensuring that total TV media investment and allocation is both effective and efficient in achieving audience reach and business outcomes.”
— Jo Kinsella
The emergence of converged TV strategies is not limited to the US. As CTV adoption steadily increases in other markets, including the UK, Germany and Australia, advertisers’ video mixes will become more diverse.
Close to half of all respondents from Australia, Germany and the UK identified “accuracy of cross-platform TV measurement and attribution” as the top barrier to entry for converged TV.
As the converged TV world is rich with data and, ideally, cross-platform usage of that data, another top challenge across the regions was “growing concerns around privacy and security” (37%-45%). Specific to Australia, almost 40% of respondents cited “lack of accurate and scalable occurrence and viewership data,” while more than 40% in Germany and the UK rounded out their top three challenges with “difficulty targeting audiences across linear and CTV platforms.”
In order to accurately measure the incremental reach across linear and streaming, advertisers need one set of metrics that can be compared, “apple-to-apples,” across TV platforms and channels, TVSquared insists.
This type of cross-platform measurement is not currently being done by legacy/traditional TV measurement companies because they lack one of the following, per the survey:
- Access to actual viewing data, collected from millions of households
- Integrations with OTT/CTV platforms to collect household exposure data or the technology and processes to connect these disparate datasets together in a privacy-compliant way
“The TV ecosystem is now rooted in cross-platform, and we must deliver a transactable currency that allows us to count and ascribe value in a similar way — across linear and streaming — to ensure TV budgets continue to grow,” said Jo Kinsella, President, TVSquared. “Reliable, transparent insights are the keys for ensuring that total TV media investment and allocation is both effective and efficient in achieving audience reach and business outcomes.”