54% of CTV viewers are less interested in products and brands that appear contextually misaligned ads
A consumer study by the Alliance for Video-level Contextual Advertising (AVCA) to measure the impact on viewer attention and brand perception of CTV advertising revealed that viewers are sensitive to irrelevant and brand-unsuitable ad placements, resulting in reduced attention and increased negative perception of the brands and products appearing in the ads.
U.S. households regularly watching ad-supported streaming TV were selected to watch over 1,000 ad experiences. To simulate the CTV experience, participants watched control and test content on their smart TVs at home. Participants wore eye-tracking glasses while watching three episodes of a popular sitcom rated TV-MA. Each participant watched the same sequence of episodes. The order of exposure to the control and test ads was randomized and distributed evenly across participants. They were allowed to have their phones and other items they usually have when watching TV. After completing the 90 minutes of programming, the participants were interviewed and surveyed.
Participants expressed discomfort with ‘unsuitable’ ad placements and generally ‘tuned out’ due to the disruptive experience resulting in reduced brand favorability. Even though the participants knew the content was a comedy intended for mature audiences and often satirized serious situations, participants expressed confusion and frustration for ad placements they perceived as misaligned to the content, resulting in negative brand favorability.
Conversely, viewers paid more attention to the ad, learned more about the product, and were more interested in the products shown in AI-enabled contextually targeted ads. Respondents frequently commented that ads were engaging even if the product wasn’t relevant and that they would remember the product and bring it up in conversation.
Partner Updates
Equativ is the first IRIS-enabled full-stack integration.
Through direct integration, Equativ will create a new marketplace where publishers can easily integrate the IRIS_ID to offer brand-suitable, contextual ad targeting for online video and connected TV (CTV) inventory while also having increased access to demand from media buyers. Driving secure data sharing, the smart content identifier makes it easy to efficiently fuel relevant advertising by harnessing detailed insights about on-screen digital content...
Beachfront Introduces Self-Serve Select Platform to Bring Connected TV (CTV) Private Marketplace (PMP) Curation to the Supply-Side
“Our goal is to bring our universal content ID, the IRIS_ID, to every piece of content in CTV, online video and audio to enable buyers and sellers to plan, target and measure ad campaigns based on the specific content adjacent to the ad," said Richie Hyden , President & COO, IRIS.TV. "To do this, we need ad platforms to invest in the ability to action on this new signal. The Beachfront Select platform enables frictionless self-service use of these data sets, empowering buyers and sellers to apply the data with ease. We commend Beachfront for their commitment to creating frictionless products for the ecosystem...”
Oracle Advertising: Expanding CTV contextual targeting and brand safety
Oracle Advertising is thrilled that CTV and Online Video (OLV) buyers can now access its video-level contextual and brand-suitability data for programmatic buying on The Trade Desk. This solution is crucial in helping advertisers effectively use enriched video-level content signals to reach their desired audiences and ensure their ads run alongside relevant, brand-suitable programming.
Expanding its partnership with IRIS.TV Oracle Advertising has incorporated the IRIS_ID, a universal content identifier. With online video, the URL has traditionally been leveraged to track content and initiate ad opportunities. The IRIS_ID will serve a similar function, allowing CTV inventory to be transacted in real-time on open programmatic environments.
In the News
AVCA Spotlight - Mastering CTV With A YouTube Playbook: How Pixability is Bringing Its Contextual Targeting To CTV
Alan Wolk sits down with Pixability Chief Product Officer Jackie Swansburg Paulino to discuss how the company is bringing its contextual targeting from YouTube to CTV.
AW: You’ve been doing contextual targeting on YouTube for a while now. Any thoughts on why contextual has become a thing on CTV now?
JP: We learned a lot from the YouTube world. And that was important because the YouTube world is more complex—you’ve got 500 hours of content uploaded every minute. As we shifted into CTV, we saw similar patterns. It's important where you run your ads, both in terms of the content and in terms of when they are served. We've proven that performance is dictated by content and context. We brought that idea to CTV, talking to customers about their pain points on CTV. It overlapped nicely with our YouTube products.
AW: What were those pain points?
JP: The big pain points were all around lack of transparency, not understanding where their ads were running, not understanding the types of programs they're in, and lack of control over where their ads ran. Those are the problems we're focused on solving in the CTV space. We've learned a lot about how to do that in the YouTube world, so bringing that to the CTV world has been exciting.
AW: Can you explain how you solve those problems? How do you help someone who says there's no transparency and doesn't know where their ads are running?
JP: For understanding context on CTV, we've partnered with IRIS.TV. They’ve done the heavy lifting of going publisher to publisher to curate data for us. The data they pass us via the IRIS_ID is similar to the data we get from the YouTube measurement program. We're familiar with how to score and understand video context. So we look at the surrounding metadata, the title, description, and the transcript of the video, as well as a frame-by-frame, scene-by-scene analysis to understand a few things. What type of show is this? We use the IAB taxonomy. Is it about Home and Garden, or is it a news show? Is it safe or suitable for a particular advertiser? For safety and suitability, we've partnered with the Global Alliance of Responsible Media, which is part of the 4As. We've categorized shows as low, medium, and high based on the GARM rubric of safety and suitability.
How The IRIS_ID Is Helping To Solve TVs Metadata Problem
CEO and Co-founder Field Garthwaite discusses how the IRIS_ID is helping to solve TV's metadata and content transparency problems.
The Current: AI could be the key to unlocking greater CTV spend
CMO Rohan Castelino elino writes in The Trade Desk 's The Current how AI could be the key to unlocking greater CTV spend.
See excerpt below:
AI knows what the story’s about
Imagine now that publishers can move beyond sharing only broad categories like genre but also video-level contextual segments enriched by AI. These are insights that marketers have never before had access to, and that allow them to move past legacy segments like “show” and “episode” and target in an entirely different way. AI can scan video frame by frame and analyze it for content, emotion, objects, and people, then assign it with contextual and Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) brand-safety and brand-suitability segments. If these segments were made available to advertisers, it would ensure that every impression is sold at its premium for two reasons:
- Brand suitability at scale. Highly watched content that would otherwise be blocklisted (like news) or mature content (like crime dramas) have precise GARM brand-suitability segments that differentiate between low- and high-risk content.
- Relevance resonates. With the exception of live events, streaming viewers watch when they feel like it. Ads served programmatically through CTV could be delivered in a million different permutations — at night, in the morning, or watching a comedy, drama, or home cooking show. Studies have shown that when streaming ads are more aligned with the subject matter or mood of the show, ads are more effective, as viewers pay more attention, have double the unaided ad recall, and have higher search and purchase intent than when demo data or generic contextual data was used for ad targeting....
Research
Driving Viewer Attention and Brand Metrics in CTV Advertising: Understanding the Impact of AI in Contextual Targeting
Webinar
In this webinar, Sylvia Knust , Director of Insight Research, Tobii dives deeper into the research and findings of of the AVCA Reports: "Driving Viewer Attention and Brand Metrics in CTV Advertising Understanding the Impact of AI in Contextual Targeting"