A lot of adtech companies have gotten into CTV in the past couple of years. Our CEO, Seth Hittman, weighed in today on how publishers can tell the difference between when modern adtech is made-for-CTV and when it is just legacy and made-for-web.
There’s been a CTV gold rush over the past couple of years. But many adtech companies are just applying web tactics to TV monetization. Often when adtech companies say they’re rolling out “CTV ad units,” their technologies are built on outdated infrastructure and workflows. They’re not innovating for the medium — they’re taking what they’ve done on web display for 20 years and applying it to CTV. There’s a huge opportunity cost to this approach, especially when publishers’ margins are even slimmer due to expensive live sports rights deals. Web-style ads feel cheap when applied to CTV. It feels like publishers are just throwing a banner on the CTV experience — because, with legacy adtech partners, they are. In essence, these companies are just scraping money from publishers who need it while degrading the viewer experience. When CTV adtech products are truly made for TV, they respect the 30-second ad breaks that publishers have built their businesses as well as the integrity of the viewer experience while expanding monetization opportunities. CTV ad products must be intelligent enough to create incremental inventory without disrupting the backbone of the CTV ad business. For example, picture-in-picture formats during lulls in the action allow publishers to generate revenue that wouldn’t exist otherwise. But this is only a small piece of the larger puzzle. Traditional ad pods and in-stream formats should not be independent products but a singular, unified strategy, all of which works together. All inventory must be addressable and accept standardized formats to scale no matter when and where the ad opportunity is determined. Adtech has a ton of value to offer CTV publishers, but it has to be flexible and scalable for this specific medium. If it’s just a legacy product foisted onto CTV to capitalize on the gold rush, it’s not a sustainable solution.?