Bridging the divide: challenges in cross-platform advertising

For advertisers, delivering integrated, measurable campaigns across multiple platforms is an objective worth fighting for – even if achieving that objective is fraught with difficulty.

Advertisers want to use a range of media to reach their target audience, but delivering integrated cross-platform campaigns in the context of TV on its own is challenging enough. The fragmentation of video distribution between linear broadcast, live and non-linear streaming, and the use of both shared (TVs) and personal (mobile phones) devices has turned the planning and execution of TV campaigns into something like a game of three-dimensional chess.

Standard challenges

Challenges that stand in the way of effective cross-platform targeting of campaigns include non-standardised ad identifiers, inconsistent metadata tagging, ad frequency issues, and different personalisation capabilities of different platforms.

Fragmentation of the TV landscape has been accelerated by connected TV-based services – AVOD and FAST – and by subscription streamers’ launch of ad-supported tiers of their offerings.

That fragmentation of the landscape has also given rise to walled garden approaches on the part of platform owners, who have often been unwilling to share audience data with others in the chain.

Consistent metadata tagging is key to enabling contextual targeting – which is still the primary form of TV ad targeting in day-to-day use. According to Trent Wheeler, Chief Product Officer at Nielsen-owned metadata provider Gracenote, the proliferation of AVOD and, more recently, FAST, has delivered a set of “products that have enough volume”, contributing to “the maturation of a TV ecosystem that is looking for different video products to be able to purchase”.

However, he says, many of the platform operators active in the space have adopted a walled-garden approach, partly because of the technology choices that they have made, but partly also as a deliberate strategy.

“The content they have is very mixed with high-quality and low-quality content. Initially, publishers on the supply side have wanted more control, and they get more control by not offering as much data,” he says. “But as that ecosystem matures and they seek more advertising dollars, they need to offer more data products to really help to be able to drive those bigger advertising offerings.”

For Wheeler, publishers cannot hope to enable advertisers to reap the full benefits of cross-platform advertising without collaboration.

“What we are trying to do is [shape contextual data] more as a well-known standard across platforms, as opposed to right now, where that data is pulled within a walled garden and expressed in a unique way for each particular platform,” says Wheeler, who argues that Gracenote is well-placed to help define such a standard because its Content IDs are already well-known throughout the industry as a way to identify content for discovery.

“If you want to know the type of content, you want to know parental safety information about it, you want to know information about mood and scenario – that’s a lot of use-cases that people can’t do right now – we solve that pretty well,” he says.

Wheeler says that the scale Gracenote brings with its metadata for content discovery will serve as a base to enable contextual placement of ads across multiple platforms.

“We know what a programme is, and we don’t care if it’s on Samsung TV or Netflix or Sky,” he says. “It has one single ID, one single taxonomy that travels with it everywhere it goes.”

While Gracenote would be happy to see take-up of advanced use cases such as scene-by-scene targeting of ads, Wheeler says that the primary focus for now is to enable more broad-brush targeting across platforms.

“Targeting by genre and rating are the most common, and that just makes sense. Our datasets offer programme-level data and I believe that for brand advertising programme-level data makes a lot of sense. Right now, nobody knows if a sports event is live or not, even though the value of advertising on it could differ by a factor of 10. The data is not there.”

Different devices

Delivering a consistent advanced video experience across platforms also remains challenging because of the different capabilities of different devices.

Video processing and player specialist Bitmovin has recently been developing Multiview, a new offering it launched prior to IBC, which allows multiple streams to be displayed side-by-side simultaneously and which James Varndell, Senior Director of Product Management at Bitmovin, believes could have a strong application for advertising, enabling, for example, the presentation of ads during sports events without disturbing the main live experience.

However, he says, service providers are keen to combine existing streams into a single playback session on devices that may only be able to decide on a single stream at one time.

“A lot of challenges come from smart TVs, which is a difficult area for video players generally,” says Varndell. “You may have a single video decoder at which you want to throw multiple video streams. It’s quite hard on that device.”

Varndell says that media companies don’t want to have to implement different video players on different devices, which would re-fragment an ecosystem that has been coming together and return the industry to a situation where “you have a different player on every single device – I don’t think customers want to go back to that”.

Consistent measurement

Delivering consistent cross-platform measurement is a major challenge, alongside ensuring that where and when ads are played is accurately captured and reconciled with billing systems.

Anthony Katsur, CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) Tech Lab, says that a standardised form of ‘tokenisation’ – whether in the form of a cookie, device ID or synthetic ID or fingerprint – is needed.

Katsur says that a related issue is the lack of a standardised creative ID across ad buys. He says this is less of an issue in the UK, where all ads on the major commercial platforms are cleared through the Clearcast organisation, than it is in the more fragmented North American market and elsewhere.

“A consistent creative ID can often get lost at some point in the hand-over from agency to publisher or agency to ad tech company,” he says. “Some form of a consistent creative ID will also help with things like reach and frequency management.”

To this end, IAB Tech Lab recently launched the Creative ID Framework, a new initiative aimed at building a kind of registry to ensure a creative ID is in place for ads that can talk to the likes of Clearcast and others to assist with ad frequency management, campaign reconciliation and billing.

“A consistent creative ID allows you to know where your creative is appearing is associated with your brand,” says Katsur. “You have greater control of where your brand shows up or at the very least get reports on where it shows up, because you have a consistent creative ID across all environments and channels.”

Registration required

For Fatima Dowlet, Head of Streaming and Social Media Propositions at UK ad-funded public broadcaster Channel 4, delivering a consistent experience across platforms is relatively straightforward if viewers use the broadcaster’s registration-required apps (rather than go outside to view content on third-party platforms such as YouTube).

“Cross-platform hasn’t been hugely problematic because everybody watches Channel 4 through the Channel 4 app, so they must be logged in. If you are watching on your mobile device, and then go to the big screen in your living room, we know you have already watched for two hours on your mobile, and we won’t serve you the same ads on the connected TV. If people weren’t logged in, it would be very difficult,” she says.

“What we’re finding is that our advertising community sometimes likes to pick and choose creative depending on what they have. If it is something that is more suitable for a big screen, with high production values, they will only pick the big screen. But if they know they want to reach a much younger audience, for example, they may think about a mobile strategy rather than a big-screen strategy. However, in terms of managing the user experience, it’s not massively different for us across any of these platforms.”

For a single publisher like Channel 4, registration enables effective cross-platform management. But to enable advertisers to deliver integrated campaigns across multiple publishers and platforms, more work needs to be done at the platform level. Advertisers clearly stand to benefit from delivering integrated cross-platform campaigns. It remains for those on the sell-side – particularly the platform operators – to fill the gaps that can help enable this.