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ARTICLE

Unlocking the Scale and Reach Potential of CTV

April 23, 2020 — by MediaMath    

While CTV has been a channel on the steady climb for the last few years, advertisers have faced hurdles in adopting it. The landscape has been fragmented, with different apps and devices, pricing models, delivery specifications and measurement approaches all creating challenges.

Now, CTV’s massive growth in the month since COVID-19 started—we saw CTV grow by 20% in our own platform between February and March—keeping citizens across the world at home has brought the industry together to accelerate the effort to mitigate these challenges by creating more accountability and addressability in this medium. We’re committed to continuing the work with our trusted partners to bring accountability to the CTV supply chain by providing access to high-quality inventory that delivers radical transparency with minimal discrepancies and fraud.

Measurement

We are bringing transparency, standard metrics and proof of performance to digital TV with our announcement Wednesday of our global partnership with TVSquared. Our partnership furthers our ability to deliver greater accountability and addressability to brands and agencies through proven accuracy, scalability and fast time-to-insights. Through our work together to provide full visibility into the performance of CTV buys, thousands of advertisers will be able to track, measure and optimize the performance of streaming video ads served via CTV.

Fraud

As fraud follows money, CTV is a prime target as it continues to grow this first half of 2020. Last week, we shared a blog post by our SOURCE launch partner White Ops about the massive CTV fraud operation known as “ICEBUCKET,” which counterfeited over 300 different publishers in over 30 countries by hiding sophisticated bots within server-side-ad-insertion (SSAI) backed video ad impressions.

The impact of the ICEBUCKET threat was extremely negligible to the MediaMath platform, with less than 0.1% of impressions affected. Our clients and partners remain protected against this threat thanks to White Ops’ pre-bid IVT filtering technology and other anti-fraud measures we were already taking to help protect against future threats:

  • Vetting and holding our supply partners to SOURCE partnership standards that rest on direct relationships and require full supply chain accountability and transparency
  • Actively encouraging our CTV supply partners to adopt and post app-ads.txt files so we can readily enable app-ads.txt targeting within our UI for this channel without impacting scale
  • Adopting sellers.json to support further visibility into the supply chain and supply path optimization, planned for release in summer 2020

As markets react to change, so must your advertising and media strategies. We know advertisers must remain fully protected and confident in where they spend ad dollars. MediaMath is best prepared to help you take advantage of better CTV outcomes with the efficiency of programmatic buying on the industry’s most transparent and brand-safe supply chain.