Streamers are giving marketers more signal as the competition for ad dollars heats up

In the first wave of video streaming growth, a healthy subscriber number was the ultimate marker of health. In the next wave, it’s shaping up to be signal to enable advertisers to find their audiences.

Platforms like Netflix, discovery+, Prime Video and Warner Brothers Discovery are making moves to boost their measurement capabilities around the globe — a sign that as the sector matures, it’s relying more on a healthy advertising engine.

Netflix and discovery+ recently signed up to the UK’s Barb, which measures TV ratings. Prime Video did something similar when it signed up with Canada’s Numeris recently, the first streaming platform to do so, as Numeris’ interim president and CEO Sue Haas tells The Current.

In short, streaming platforms are courting media buyers with competitive ad offerings to bolster revenue from subscriptions. As higher competition drives down  CPMs, a media buyer who spoke to The Current said that buyers and advertisers are pushing streamers for more signal and data. It looks like this prodding is yielding results.

That’s a big shift from just five years ago when most streamers shunned ads and didn’t use consumption data for targeting purposes. Indeed in November, when Netflix celebrated the two year anniversary of its ad tier, it touted its hit shows and emphasized its commitment to expanding its “measurement suite globally.”

Netflix also said it will be working with more partners for verification and ad fraud prevention. In the UK last month, Channel 4 released new measurement and targeting solutions for small and medium streaming advertisers. And Warner Bros. Discovery International is  expanding its first-party data targeting platform as it launches across several Asian markets.

And in Australia, BVOD players like Nine and Foxtel are inking third-party partnerships to provide holistic, cross-media insights and help prove ROI from CTV ad investments.

“With the growth of programmatic deal activation, the reality is that the better signal a publisher can provide to a brand, the more effective and efficient the campaign will be,” says Rachel Gantz, managing director at Proximic by Comscore. “When streamers provide more signal for deal activation […] brands will increase investment in performant partners.”

Streamers’ efforts in signing up to industry ratings panels also reflect a demand from advertisers for more transparency and standardization.

“As streamers move towards advertising offers, they are therefore more inclined to partner with JICs (Joint Industry Committees) or media measurement companies to provide third party and transparent data to agencies and advertisers,” says Haas.

“These partnerships with third parties allow agencies and advertisers to understand and analyze audience behaviors from all platforms and devices, utilizing standardized and comparable metrics,” adds Haas.

Haas says there is still a lot of work to do to fully unlock the powerful addressability that CTV can deliver, “with a large portion of data and signals being kept behind walled garden measurement.”

“Advertisers are challenged with navigating the modern measurement monolith, with inconsistent methodologies across partners, and platforms with media arms also ‘grading their own homework’,” says Gantz.

While advertisers can target ads programmatically based on show-level data via some DSPs, this level of granularity ultimately depends on how much data streamers are willing to share.

“A big piece that still lacks in the programmatic space is show-level data from a majority of publishers,” says Sean Edwards, director of programmatic and e-commerce media at Exverus Media.

Still, as ad-supported plans keep gathering viewers and attracting ad dollars, making more streaming data available to advertisers looks set to be a trend that will only gather pace.

“Advertisers want to know the data they're tapping into is top-level data they can use to reach their audience,” says Edwards. “The more they can learn about their audiences via the signals passed back, the better they can optimize their CTV strategy.”