As a result, there is more pressure on sports rights holders to maximise the value of their investment. The industry strives to offer more personalised entertainment experiences, meaning rights-holders face essential decisions that will make or break their investment when devising the best go-to-market strategies to overcome today’s challenges.

In parallel with the increasing competition for rights is the lowering of the barriers to entry for our entrants into the market. Streaming has opened the door to direct-to-consumer (D2C) streaming operations – look at how Amazon Prime has disrupted the market using the D2C model. Also, for less valuable sports than the UEFA Champions League football, there is an opportunity for sports organisations to cut out the middleman and go D2C.

Adopting a D2C strategy is possible because of the high quality and affordability of streaming technology. However, delivering the content at a premium quality and at scale is a complex process. This is partly due to the increased demands on monetisation in the digital arena, especially where advertising is concerned.

The current advertising landscape

Many ad experiences remain poor for viewers, with excessive repetition and poor execution. In many cases, rights-holders miss out on achieving the highest CPM through a lack of personalisation and measurement.

With a cohesive D2C strategy, sports organisations can create a 360º view of their fans by collecting data on their interactions and spending behaviours. They can then use this data to target customers with relevant adverts promoting specific products, an essential revenue generation tool in today’s market.

Adopting a D2C approach is already finding success, particularly in the U.S. live sports market with the NFL, NBA, and MLB. These sports organisations are offering a strategy that hits the mark with fans. They provide them with greater freedom, choice, and flexibility with their desired content, including access to archived content, real-time stat overlays, social media integration, and live in-game chats. This move has created a fan ecosystem and maximises revenues through personalised experiences.

Market complexities 

However, despite the signs of success, the challenge of complexity looms large. There is a fantastic opportunity for companies to build D2C offerings that deliver high-quality advertising, but factoring in a mix of first-party and third-party sold creates enormous complexity. Third-party require integrations with (often multiple) ad networks. Plus, media companies must consider how to prepare ad content, brand safety, and real-time measurement – as effectively and efficiently as possible.

In addition, to effectively execute a D2C strategy, brands must have the proper technical infrastructure in place to allow them to meet demands. This means a platform enabling them to manage content and digital assets, incorporate broadcast level resilience, and integrate analytics. This infrastructure needs to be flexible enough to allow them to adjust to changes and be able to integrate new technologies in the future.

With the right tech stack, sports brands can embrace the changes in today’s market. By adopting this future-proof infrastructure, brands can improve the digital experience for their customers rather than be limited by legacy monolith systems that have become outdated, expensive to maintain and slow down progress.

Build, buy or partner? 

Scalability, resilience and flexibility are essential in managing such complexity at a mass scale in a live environment where all ad calls happen simultaneously. Identifying the right approach to technology is essential if sports rights owners are to maximise the value of their inventory in an era when the cost of sports rights only increases.

It has been common practice for organisations to have their tech in-house to capitalise. Still, we are now at a stage where media companies are turning increasingly towards third-party vendors as they seek best-of-breed solutions that will allow variation in revenue strategy over the long term.

Competition is increasing, and it’s being matched by complexity. But with the right strategy and the flexibility to deliver it, there is every reason for D2C providers to find long-term success on and off the field.

This may come as a surprise given CTV’s similarities to mobile, where data flows in abundance, even with Apple’s restrictions to ID-level targeting. Both operate through devices and apps, but where they diverge is in the availability and accessibility of data. Equipment manufacturers and, to a lesser extent, streaming providers are holding their assets close to their chest, perhaps seeking to avoid the commodification which devalued data on mobile and the open web.

While this guardedness is understandable, it is impeding cross-platform measurement and targeting capabilities, making it challenging for buyers to deliver consistent ROI while driving up CPMs for sellers.

To solve this problem, brands need to explore how adtech can bring life to this parched ecosystem, allowing data to flow to those who need it without compromising its value or its safety.

Lack of identity spine weakens CTV’s cross-platform capabilities

ID solutions are perhaps the most essential adtech solution for delivering effective targeted CTV campaigns, as they allow brands to identify users across different platforms and devices. With ID solutions, brands can deliver relevant ads to consumers no matter where they are, ensuring they reach the right audience at the right time.

For example, an ID solution can help advertisers pseudonymously recognise a user who watches a show on a connected TV and then clicks on a social media ad on their phone by linking the user’s CTV device ID with their mobile advertising ID. Being able to consistently recognise users is also vital for universal frequency capping and limiting ad exposure across platforms to maximise incremental reach. The advertiser can also deliver relevant ads on other connected devices that the user interacts with, providing a personalised and sticky experience across devices.

Unfortunately, with so many Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM) in the market offering their own variation of device IDs and strictly controlling access to them, CTV lacks the identity spine needed to deliver accurate frequency control and measurement. The static nature of big-screen TVs has seen IP addresses stand in as identifiers, but this falls apart the moment a brand wants to measure outside of the CTV ecosystem (for example, in a cross-channel campaign that also targets mobile and web) or target an individual rather than a household.

Data exchanges are a bustling market of consumer insights

Data exchanges are marketplaces that act as intermediaries between data owners and buyers, making it easier for brands to access the information they need for effective targeting. Data exchanges can offer a range of data types, including demographic, behavioural, and location data.

For the media owners that set the boundaries of what is possible in CTV campaigns, data exchanges offer an opportunity to apply data targeting to campaigns — à la programmatic deals. This, in turn, increases the value of their inventory to a wider range of advertisers.

Brands, meanwhile, can use data exchanges to overcome limitations within their own data. This is particularly useful for brands that have been unable to use first-party data to make up for the shortfall of data availability in the post-GDPR era, as is the case for many CPG brands, for whom TV is a key touchpoint.

Most of all, CTV needs technology to empower data collaboration

The best way to help brands quench their thirst for data in the CTV ecosystem is to open the floodgates of data collaboration. If all siloed pockets of data (whether first, second, or third-party) along with all identifiers and ID-enriching signals can be unified and appropriately pseudonymised, the limitations of each component part can be overcome. Overlapping audiences between brands and platforms can be segmented and targeted not just within CTV, but across the wider advertising ecosystem.

Clean rooms are one of the ad tech solutions built to facilitate data collaboration. These are secure environments that allow brands to share and analyse data without accessing it directly, with cryptographic scrambling preserving user privacy and data ownership while still delivering valuable insights. In the UK, CTV broadcaster Channel 4 and retail media network Nectar used a clean room to discover shared audiences.

However, clean rooms are far from plug and play. Both parties must have their data organised to be compatible with the clean room they are using, which does not guarantee compatibility with any other clean rooms the brand may want to use. It is a significant investment of time, resources, and money to set up a clean room, and data sets must be regularly re-matched to ensure insights are up to date. Then, after all of that, there is no guarantee that anything actionable can be taken out of them.

Data collaboration, then, must not be limited to certain tools but be embraced at a cross-platform, cross-solution level. ID resolution and data exchanges can make more data available on CTV, while data collaboration tools can facilitate the smooth exchange of first and second-party data between the supply and demand side. A dedication to interoperability and an acknowledgement that no single approach can solve the ecosystem-level data drought will be necessary for CTV to thrive.

As CTV continues to grow and evolve, the role of adtech solutions in unlocking the full programmatic potential of the ecosystem will become increasingly important. With the right adtech tools, the promise of a CTV ecosystem that delivers the best of both linear TV and digital advertising can be realised. It will take collaboration, a more open attitude to data sharing, and perhaps some consolidation for us to bring life to CTV’s data desert.

The agreement will enable a “first-of-its-kind” integration between Disney’s proprietary Audience Graph and the open-source identity framework, Unified ID 2.0, within a secure environment. The companies say this will allow buyers to discover more addressable and biddable inventory across Disney’s portfolio, giving them more flexibility, choice and control

Disney and The Trade Desk also believe that the move sets the stage for better measurement, giving advertisers a path to leverage their first-party data in biddable environments. This becomes increasingly important “as the industry faces new disruption caused by the deprecation of third-party cookies” according to the companies.

Rita Ferro, President of Advertising Sales, Disney Media & Entertainment Distribution, said: “Disney Advertising had a bold vision backed by proven results from the start, and we’re thrilled to continue to deliver on our commitment to power greater automation and addressability for our customers through this expanded deal with The Trade Desk.

“We have spent years investing in our data and technology strategy to create innovative solutions for advertisers to engage their audiences with greater precision and accuracy in a privacy-focused way. This first-to-market capability sets the stage to empower access to the Disney portfolio, validated by powerful audience insights, in a way that’s automated and accessible.”

Tim Sims, Chief Revenue Officer, The Trade Desk, commented: “With this agreement, Disney and The Trade Desk are pioneering a new approach to audience addressability in a post-cookie environment.

By creating interoperability between Unified ID 2.0 and Disney’s Audience Graph, we are unlocking the opportunity for our customers to activate their first-party data at scale programmatically, against some of the world’s most premium content, across all channels. As a result, advertisers will be able to deliver relevant advertising, while ensuring consumers have more control of their own privacy.”

Audience login and authentication allows advertisers to target individual households or viewers, while digital attribution helps identify the link between ad exposure and engagement. At the same time, return data flow and rapid execution means buyers can analyse and optimise campaigns with agility, without needing to lock in to lengthy or rigid upfront commitments.

With analysts predicting digital video and CTV spend to grow 14.8% and 34.8% in 2021 respectively, CTV is emerging as the premium channel for the post-linear future. Still premature in many markets, there are a few key ways ad tech platforms that can help buyers and sellers realise the full potential of CTV around the world.

Apply programmatic methods

CTV benefits from being driven by real-time data, providing an opportunity for precise targeting at the local, household or even device level. Today, marketers can use first-party data from their own customer relationship management (CRM) and transaction records, online data such as website visits and available digital segments indicating, for example, kids at home or occupation type, to identify when and where to reach their desired audience.

Frequency capping and competitive separation

Consumer fatigue due to excess ad exposure can be a brand-killer and a waste of valuable advertising budgets. Frequency capping allows media owners to specify the maximum number of times ads are served to a viewer, while competitive separation ensures ads from similar or competing brands are not played back-to-back. Both methods are key to maximising a campaign’s efficiency.

Increased responsiveness

The digitisation of the TV-buying workflow will speed up ad trading. More than that, the ability to activate, optimise, report and adjust campaigns rapidly allows ad buyers to change their creative messaging or spending commitments far quicker than traditional TV would typically afford, as many had to do early in the COVID-19 pandemic.

CTV has grown at a tremendous rate, accelerated by the rise of on-demand consumption. These changes are leading to a broader convergence of traditional and digital media and increasing innovation in TV advertising products. With the right technology in place and partnerships across the industry, ad tech platforms can help participants on all sides reach their full CTV potential.

The next chapter of growth and innovation

Increasingly, we are seeing TV players ramping up their digital capabilities to complement their traditional strengths, while online players are looking to integrate third-party audience metrics into their platforms to improve comparability and transparency.

Proactively tackling challenges arising from emerging formats like CTV – around identity, context, campaign planning and outcomes – and ensuring that buyers can transact with assurance and drive performance has been top of mind for everyone.

Innovative thinking and solutions are fundamental to go beyond traditional CTV capabilities. Xandr’s data science-based CTV pacing solution, for example, instills confidence that buyers’ budgets are allocated correctly, and its novel content taxonomy system enables a user of curated marketplaces to transact and report on a clearly defined and manageable set of OTT content descriptors, gaining critical insight into where their ads are running.

Around the world, broadcasters and technology platforms are working to align and simplify access, thereby making it easier to buy across multiple channels. This exciting evolution will ensure all parties are able to reap the benefits of CTV.