The Role of CTV in the Media Mix

Mark Stewart: Tell me a little more about your current role.

Perera: I lead Boehringer Ingelheim's Media Center of Excellence. My team provides oversight and management of DTC and HCP paid media strategy, planning, activation, and measurement for our brands. We work closely with our key external agency partners as well as our internal brand and cross-functional stakeholders.

Stewart: At the ANA conference you will be speaking about the role of CTV in the media mix. What has been the most disruptive thing for advertisers brought about by the explosion of CTV?

Perera: New "channels" naturally cause disruption especially when they become the new shining toy that everyone -- consumers and advertisers -- seemingly want. In my opinion, the most positively disruptive thing brought about by CTV is the ability to reach very specific consumers via the advanced targeting options available in CTV, akin to digital media, so you would be reaching consumers who are interested in your offerings. And the most negatively disruptive thing is not being able to uniformly measure, or measure at all in some cases, exactly where your ads are placed within each CTV service, like advertisers are able to in linear TV.

Stewart: Almost two-thirds of the U.S. population are CTV users. How should advertisers be thinking about integrating CTV in their media mix?

Perera: Ultimately, advertising is meant to reach consumers where they are consuming or engaging with content. And if advertisers want to reach the "almost two thirds of the U.S. population who are CTV users," to quote you, then CTV should be one of the key channels in the media mix. To effectively include CTV in the media mix, advertisers' must be vigilant of audience overlap, programming redundancy, lack of unified measurement across ad-supported streaming services, and the ever-looming issue of fraud when CTV is bought programmatically in the open exchange. Short answer -- yes include CTV, but make sure your approach is very calculated to ensure you have controls in place for overlap, frequency, fraud, and measurement.

Stewart: Fragmentation continues to make it a challenge for marketers to reach and measure CTV audiences in a unified way. What can be done to give advertisers greater confidence that they are getting what they paid for?

Perera: Yes, the CTV/streaming landscape is highly fragmented and there seems to be an ever-increasing list of networks and platforms providing ad-supported services with even more diversified ad formats. From my perspective, measurement is challenging especially since CTV is comprised of platform-specific ecosystems which makes it impossible to measure and report in an automated fashion across all CTV platforms and services, let alone the whole video landscape. Then that gets further complicated by the growing list of vendors offering non-standardized ad verification and measurement solutions. So largely, advertisers would need to partner closely with their media agencies (or internal media planners/buyers) to establish a measurement plan that aggregates data, albeit manually, across the CTV services…and only activate in services that adhere to your measurement plan.

Stewart: If you could wave your magic wand and change anything in the media industry, what would it be?

Perera: Just one thing? In my opinion, the media industry has many areas that could be improved. But since you only gave me one wish, I will focus on the topic of today's discussion and ask for standardized measurement and identifiers across all CTV devices and streaming services. How about we go one step further and establish a unified standard for cross-screen measurement to which all Video platforms/services adhere.

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The opinions expressed here are the author's views and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillage.com/MyersBizNet.