The State of Video Ad Tech 2021
Are you still seeing the same ads over and over again while watching OTT? That's because streaming advertising technology (ad tech) is still maturing. While many parts of the streaming workflow have made great technical strides in recent years, ad tech has had its share of growing pains. Everyone wants to create a great ad experience, but each workflow requires a lot of troubleshooting, and there's no such thing as a "plug and play,无论服务器端广告插入(SSAI)还是客户端广告插入(CSAI)是更可取的解决方案.
When viewers will buy on average two to three subscription streaming services, 如果你的服务不在订阅视频点播(SVOD)购买的前列，广告支持的视频点播(AVOD)就会成为首选的商业模式. 2020 saw the arrival of a number of new AVOD services, and a raft of research confirms that consumers prefer free services overall. Ad tech will take center stage in 2021, and the experts I spoke to say there are three areas to watch as it grows: privacy, 工作流碎片, 和规模.
隐私挑战
由于法规和操作系统/浏览器的变化，个人信息的控制权逐渐向消费者倾斜, many in advertising are worried. "The most fascinating story right now in ad tech is the focus on first-party data, 尤其是当消费者更多地了解这个行业的做法，以及他们的数据是如何被共享和传递的时候,托尼·布朗说。, 新闻y的幕僚长. 很多广告技术都是建立在使用第三方信息的基础上的，而这些信息是由任何掌握观众信息的人进行套利的. This creates many walled gardens of consumer data, 更不用说允许公司从消费者个人数据中获利的可疑做法了.
Third-party cookies used for retargeting are set to go away in 2022. 除非媒体公司有第一方关系，消费者选择向其提供个人信息, it will have a hard time deciding if a viewer is looking to buy a car, get his or her clothes cleaner, 或者为度假购物.
"We are having a lot more companies asking for user consent with cookie notifications,米歇尔·亚伯拉罕说, senior research analyst at Kagan. From a video perspective, there are two impacts. One is the ability to target or personalize advertisements, 第二是使观众能够控制和管理对存储的有关他们的所有数据的同意. "对于媒体公司, 这是为了确保他们向观众提供选择加入和隐私通知,亚伯拉罕说.
The upshot is that viewers will have more control, and technology will need to be designed to meet this requirement. "Privacy is going to be a differentiator going forward,Louqman Parampath说, VP of product management at Roku. So, how do companies work with the new constraints? 更多的 on this later, but first, we interrupt this article to discuss frequency.
通用用户和Ad id
保持广告频率可控，确保没有太多的重复是一个重要的焦点, 大卫·德沃林说, VP of advisory services at 免费的Wheel. This is even more important when viewers watch content over multiple devices. 要实现可接受的频率和业务目标，需要跨平台的测量方法，这种方法在任何地方都是标准化的，以确定目标用户和目标对象. 让我们来分析一下:媒体公司需要知道他们在所有平台上向观众展示了什么，以及这些观众是谁.
一种选择是通用用户ID，它允许基于单一信息集向个人投放广告和内容, 或基本真理, as opposed to each entity collecting 信息 about users. 目前来自多个第三方的联系人的重复数据删除过程导致了大量的浪费，并且在目标定位中占用了宝贵的时间. Several universal user ID platforms are competing for market share, and we'll be keeping an eye on which one can negotiate the most participation. This takes care of the viewers.
Next up is ad identification. “通用广告ID是我们在VAST4中引入的一个功能，可以更一致地识别跨系统的创意资产,阿米特·谢蒂说, senior director of product for the IAB Tech Lab. 通用的广告ID可以让广告服务器识别广告的内容(无论是汽车还是清洁剂), 例如), preventing consistent repetition. “它在管理高质量的夹层创意方面也很有用(使用ID来确定广告是否已经被缓存和转码), even if it came from different sources]. Ad ID is one of the registries whose IDs can be used as a universal ad ID." It would go a long way toward solving the "ad burnout" problem, but adoption has been slow. “我们看到它与大型‘广播’出版商合作，并希望随着CTV(连接电视)的发展，以及保持高质量广告创意的重要性变得更加明显，这种情况会变得更加普遍,谢蒂说.
通用广告ID, like the one being developed by the IAB Tech Lab, would let ad servers identify an ad’s content, 这将有助于提高目标，并防止相同的广告在广告中重复或在同一节目或电影中多次出现.
Another issue is that the same ad can be sold by a number of ad exchanges. 它可以在程序化拍卖中直接购买，也可以由内容分销商和有线电视分销商同时播放. Each transaction might buy the same ad, but there is no consistent 信息 showing who bought what.
通用的广告ID可以为广告数据带来与通用用户ID为消费者数据带来的相同的一致性, and its implementation would hopefully cap the frequency issue across multiple platforms, 广告技术供应商, 和出版商. 换句话说:广告交易所将知道它已经展示了即将播放第二段的汽车广告, 第三, 或者第14次, whether it's being viewed on one device or several over the course of the evening. The best-case scenario is that we will arrive at universal standards, 但我们 not there yet.
工作流碎片
Viewers will soon have the ability to opt in to being targeted. Their consent is then passed along to the media application. “通常, the application hosting the video player is responsible to collect and handle the users' consent, which will be used to enable or disable SSAI for the particular customer,罗伯特·西格尔说, 动态广告插入解决方案的领导和高级项目经理，未来的应用和媒体在弗劳恩霍夫福库斯.
SSAI can be used regardless of whether viewers have opted in or not. "People who have opted out of any kind of tracking, 或者没有设备ID, are only going to get contextually targeted ads,Jarred Wilichinsky说, SVP of global video monetization and operations at ViacomCBS. Since the focus of digital is very narrow targeting, contextual targeting is considered a step backward.
A sample SCTE ad-insertion workflow, courtesy of Unified Streaming
Consumers should expect to be asked for an email, 手机号码, or some other piece of 信息 to create that new data relationship. "Sometimes [services will] have a little bit of stuff that's available for free, but they will still require you to log in, 即使是免费的,亚伯拉罕说.
测量
测量 starts on the client side within SSAI or CSAI. “IAB印象标准要求所有测量信标都是客户端启动的. 流媒体的挑战之一是协调IAB对客户端信标和服务器端广告插入的要求,德沃林说. Common questions include, "Was the ad seen according to the buy-side ad server (used for payment)?" and "Was the ad seen according to the sell-side ad server (used for billing and, 经常, 对于活动节奏)?“虽然 SSAI can measure the same way that CSAI does, advertisers aren't yet comfortable with these metrics, Magnus Svensson说, VP of sales and business development at Eyevinn Technology.
“(广告买家面临的首要问题是)我如何在流媒体服务中使用基于受众的视频测量，并将其与使用调查和面板数据的电视式测量相协调。?德沃林说. "We haven't figured that out in the same way for digital, and so there's still a lot of competing tech and competing tools, and that leads to challenges." Nielsen is working on a cross-platform measurement system called ONE, but it won't be available until 2022.
破损
这里有一个典型的广告投放路径，以及它是如何被打破的:媒体公司(卖家)有一个广告舱需要填充，可能有直接的交易, a private marketplace programmatic deal, 或者在另一种出价情况下，它希望在其pod的长度内放置一定数量的广告. If the ads returned aren't in the right format, that's the first problem. If they don't exactly fit the ad break, that's another problem. 事实上, 尤费舍尔, 沃尔的技术高级副总裁, says there are maybe 10–15 different causes for ad breakage. 这些包括坏的。, creatives that have different durations than stated, Google Ad Manager returning a wrapper that unwraps into nothing, communication issues between vendors, or even a channel surfer clicking through an EPG, initiating multiple ad requests as he or she momentarily hits each channel, then moving on to another channel and leaving the ad with nowhere to go.
“我认为在短期内, 事情只会变得更加复杂，因为各种平台上有这么多不同的玩家,新闻y的布朗说, "We're not just trying to serve ads on our owned-and-operated platform or apps, 但我们 also on other platforms, apps, and terrestrial cable 系统也是如此.“虽然 not everyone has 新闻y's reach, most ad-supported digital platforms have to deliver to many different ad stacks—Fire TV, Roku, Sling, Peacock, Apple TV, Hulu, AT&T TV NOW, fuboTV, Tubi, YouTube TV, mobile, desktop, gaming devices, and the many flavors of CTV. (Note that, for the purposes of this article, I'm focusing on the live-streaming use case.)
A flowchart from Wurl shows the typical ad breakage points in the ad delivery path.
标准?
"SSAI is the de facto standard with all large premium publishers. I've been at Roku now for approximately 6 years, 我什么时候开始的, maybe 80% or 90% of all ads were client-side ad inserted. Now it would be hard to find a big premium publisher who is not doing server-side ad insertion,Parampath说。. 西蒙Westbroek, VP of global sales at Unified Streaming, says most of his company's 150 clients are using SSAI.
"The SSAI solution must be able to derive parameters like encoding settings, 比特率阶梯, and cue marker-signaling from the ingest source to configure the SSAI workflow,西格尔说. And SCTE markers are the signals of choice. "We expect the SCTE markers to be inserted by the encoder, 当然，编码器接收它们作为SEI(来自单个发射器的特定发射器标识符)信号或其他方式."
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