Marketers are closer to seeing across the entire video landscape as TV converges

Canada’s longest-running drama, Heartland, recently began its 18th season on CBC and its streaming platform, CBC Gem.

Seventeen years after the show first premiered, fans are now accustomed to watching on-demand, a prime example of the before and after split with traditional TV and streaming. TV executives have shifted their distribution strategies and with that have keyed in on the fragmentation that can come from all the ways people watch their favorite shows.

Buying models, as well as cross-screen measurement between broadcast TV and streaming, are becoming more sophisticated. TV in all forms, even on the traditional side, is becoming more data driven and addressable. Marketers are getting closer to seeing across the entire video landscape so they can optimize their campaigns.

“The ad opportunities on streaming apps are continuing to grow,” Sue Haas tells The Current. She is interim president and CEO of Numeris as well as president and COO of NLogic. “It has hit a critical point where there’s a lot of ad-supported video outside of linear, so you want to be able to see it together. When you’re buying and planning campaigns, you want to see the measurement holistically.”

To that end, Numeris — and its subsidiary software company NLogic — recently launched a solution that allows marketers in Canada to activate audience segments off its linear TV currency data for the first time. It’s an integration that enables marketers to bridge the gap between linear TV and streaming channels.

While Numeris acknowledges that nobody has all the data, this is a step in the right direction, allowing marketers to match up first-party data across channels so they know who saw which ad, when and how often.

“The request for innovative data solutions is so profound from the market as streaming usage continues to increase,” Haas says. “That’s changed significantly in the last 12 months. The pressure has increased for us to answer those demands.”

Recognizing what is missing in the market, Haas says media agencies have long struggled with wasted buys, stemming from blind spots that can make it difficult to know if they’re hitting incremental audiences, along with an inability to manage frequency.

“The silos are slowly coming down,” Haas says. “The ability to target using linear TV segments is a huge step forward. The segments will help cross-platform incremental audience reach and planned frequency targets.”

More modern solutions to break down silos

While Numeris hopes to provide a true source of truth agnostically across the industry in Canada, global media companies are developing their own solutions. These solutions are not exactly the same but show there’s a push by multiple parties to improve measurement across all video channels.

Earlier this year, Comcast Advertising launched its Signal Authentication Service, a tool to validate that ad impressions reached the right authenticated households. Comcast believes it will allow advertisers to better reach audiences with more precise frequency controls.

Blockgraph — the data collaboration firm owned by Comcast NBCUniversal, Charter and Paramount — is supplying the technology that’s the back end of the service. Its CEO and Co-Founder, Jason Manningham, told The Current in 2023 that he believes TV is going in the direction of being “all addressable, all IP based. I think that’s where we see the future.”

For marketers eyeing the scale that traditional TV has, making it more addressable can offer the best of both worlds as scale, precision and real-time data all come together.

After AMC Networks broke through into new territory last year by successfully creating a path for programmatic buying on three of its linear networks, it marked the first time live linear inventory was purchased programmatically. Another first came last year when Dish Media made it possible for advertisers to transact programmatically on Dish’s set-top-box inventory. Both of these instances subvert traditional TV practices by reshaping them to involve more digital components.

These innovations led Larry Allen, VP and GM of data and addressable enablement at Comcast Advertising, to tell The Current that he predicted 2024 would be the year when linear TV and digital finally converge.

“With this breakthrough, we can expect to see a considerable increase in addressable ad inventory being made available programmatically in 2024,” Allen said. “This, tied with a stronger push and emphasis on authenticated identity, will help pave the way for even more accurate audience targeting and measurement innovation across the TV ad ecosystem.”

The Current is owned and operated by The Trade Desk Inc.