Why Reach and Frequency Matter in Streaming Ad Insertion

Learn more about streaming ad tech at Streaming Media East 2022.

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Adam Markey: I can help with the question of why reach and frequency are important, at least from the buy side. From the buy side, this really comes from traditional TV where you have Nielsen measuring demographics of audiences based on a panel of users that are in the demo. Or the demo is male age 18 to 34, or some slice or demographic like that, because a marketer has been able to model that those types of customers are the ones to reach, to be able to buy their product. The nice thing about the world of CTV is we can actually start to do things like control reach and frequency versus just kind of measure where it comes. But as Steve said, it's really important to have like a really solid foundation of metadata or knowing exactly who your audience is to be able to control it. And there's a lot of fragmentation of data across across the ecosystem, which isn't really getting better with the way privacy regulations and device identifiers are going. But from a buy side, it's something we focus on every day.

Jared Willichinsky: The supply chain and how we all operate isn't a one way path to an advertiser. And an advertiser can have multiple agencies. So the same brand could have multiple direct IOs inside of Viacom, CBS. It could be coming in through Roku OneView via a different agency in a different path. It could be an inventory share relationship. It could be a reseller, it could be a PMP, you name it. One brand can show up 50 different ways inside your ad server. So understanding this ad, this brand, and being able to control that experience just for that one session on that one user is extremely difficult, 'cause there isn't a common set of scaled metadata in use today to help a decision. Ad ID is absolutely a big step in that right direction because Ad ID is a universal metadata element of advertising--the agency, the brand, the length, the actors, the category. It's great to have if the buy side used it everywhere. It's early days, there are other three-letter big networks that are saying, "If you wanna run on me, you have to use it." And I think it's gaining adoption. But it's still not directly integrated into the brain of the ad server to use it.

And then also, in conjunction with that, the buy side doesn't actively use it. Sometimes they don't even know what it is. Again, this is a very linear, heavy construct that is we're trying to put into digital. It's been part of apps for years, still not taking off. That "I only need to see a bear wiping in his butt once an episode..." It's hard to control that when that brand is coming through so many different channels and there isn't a common set of metadata. And you know, not every system talks to every system. It's a challenge, and we're all consumers are streaming in one way or another and we all see it. And we all need to work together too.