One of the great promises of connected TV advertising - delivering personalized messages to individual viewer or households.
But, before it can get there, the technology will have to overcome in-built identity-tracking deficiencies at a time when some of the digital ad industry's foremost identity technologies are disappearing.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Jessica Hogue, Innovid GM for Measurement & Analytics, explains what will happen.
Cookie-less TV Third-party tracking cookies are being deprecated whilst tech vendors are also tightening up on advertiser user of other device identifiers.
For Hogue, and the whole of connected TV, however, that is familiar territory, because many CTV devices don't support system-level identifiers like cookies anyway.
"It's cookie-less by nature," she says.
"Cookies don't operate in the connected TV environment.
So the future really looks to having much more of a modern approach that allows for those principles of privacy and interoperability.
"I think that that includes a mix of panels and different integration of different, whether it's identity or first party data." Rip and replace?
That makes CTV the canary in the mineshaft for the big change that is happening in digital advertising - the move from tracking mechanisms like cookies toward more of an opted-in use of real audience data.
Across the industry, vendors are rushing to offer stand-in solutions in a world of disappearing cookies.
But Hogue doesn't think the idea of "repeal and replace" is the optimum one.
"When there's a leak, you want to rush to fill it," she accepts.
"So that was perfectly understandable.
But, I think as an industry, we're not really serving the market at the end of the day by just slapping a Band-Aid on what is becoming really a broader issue.
"I don't think that we'll see the emergence of a new single standard that becomes the de facto, if you will.
I think this has been a lesson that has some frailties.
So what we see is more of a means to having a system of layers of identity that can be connected." Personalised TV ads So Hogue, and others like her, believe that, instead, the industry will move to adapt all manner of practices and technologies that put independence, privacy compliance, privacy respect and interoperability at the heart of audience identification.
For Innovid's part, it offers a household-level ID built on its ad-serving platform, recording viewing behavior of individual services at the device level and then clustering them into that household identifier.
It's the sort of practice Hogue thinks will ultimately enable personalized advertising, and has already allowed marketers to be more responsive during the pandemic, on a location-by-location basis.
"Think of automotive dealers who had certain lots open in some DMAs (designated market areas) and perhaps not in others, or grocery retailers that maybe had kerbside delivery in certain markets but online delivery in others," Hogue explains.
"The need to have that relevant message can be achieved through things like geographic location, small amounts of data that can allow that personalization to take place.
"The evidence shows that it works.
When we look at campaigns that have those kind of KPIs and that relevance built in, oftentimes we'll see upwards of 40% engagement, whether that's measured through click-through activity, more time spent, completion, all those different variables." You are watching “The New Media Reality: A Consumer-Centric View of Identity and Personalization Emerges,” a Beet.TV Leadership Series presented by Transunion.
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