COMMENTARY

Does Streaming Have an Identity Problem? Reach Or Performance?

• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, Yesterday

Streaming and connected TV may have an identity issue. 

Established legacy TV brands want CTV to grow all in the hope of rebuilding their linear TV-centric reach efforts for all their big brand awareness-seeking advertisers. 

CTV can do that -- in part. But some CTV platforms would like a dual-purpose, also wanting “performance”-focused advertisers. Should they try to do both -- or just one?

Legacy media-owned streamers want to access the "open" internet -- to gain access to better reach for their clients. 

Ad technology like The Trade Desk, the big advertiser demand-side platform, want advertisers (and premium streamers) to use their open-source identity graph -- UID 2.0 (Unified ID) -- to make it all happen. 

And that is one reason that Walt Disney, NBCUniversal, and Roku have made deals with advertising demand-side platform The Trade Desk, providing access to those companies' media inventory. Much of this focuses on the goal in making big, branded deals with advertisers.

At the same time, some CTV publishers -- as well as legacy TV owners --  want to go to the next level, to what walled gardens provide for those niche marketers who really focus on performance marketing, that being connected, for example ,to shopper data.

In a recent industry panel discussion, major media agency holding company executives say CTV’s main advantages currently are having reach and brand awareness -- in the hope of giving a boost to declining linear TV.

Laura Martin, media analyst of Needham & Co., believes ad-tech companies are targeting business for those bigger brands, which pursue full-funnel marketing efforts. That’s what Disney, Roku, and NBCU want from their ad-tech partnerships, not just narrowly targeted, niche brands looking for performance-only only marketing results.

Martin believes publishers who want CTV to mostly target performance results will lose their specific advantage as well as over digital-first walled gardens platforms of data.

One complicating factor in some of these ideas is that transparency issues still surround CTV for big brand advertisers.

In the meantime, will streaming/CTV platforms continue to have a growing identity problem?