NEW YORK—IAB Tech Lab, the global digital advertising technical standard-setting body, has laid out its key priorities and roadmap for 2023, with a product roadmap that includes consumer privacy, addressability and privacy enhancing technologies (PETs), advanced TV, ad supply chain, and cross-media measurement. 

"We are heading into a transformative year for the digital advertising sector where interoperability, transparency, and scalability will be imperative," said Anthony Katsur, CEO of IAB Tech Lab. "Tech Lab has a critical responsibility to ensure that the industry works together to tackle these issues head-on. These priorities ensure that buyers and sellers can effectively work together to reach consumers efficiently, placing privacy and sustainability at the forefront."

More specifically, the group said its priorities in each of the five areas were:

• Privacy. There is a proliferation of new privacy regulations around the world with an impact on how businesses operate and potential fines for non-compliance. IAB Tech Lab will continue its consumer privacy-related work in 2023 by expanding on the Global Privacy Platform, a comprehensive and secure consent signaling framework across multiple jurisdictions providing global controls. The international trade body also plans to establish a Data Subject Rights Signaling Framework (providing consumers the ability to access, delete, and modify their data across the digital advertising supply chain). The Tech Lab will also release the Accountability Platform, a technical accountability framework designed to provide transparency on using personal data for addressability for regulatory audit and compliance. Lastly, IAB Tech Lab will release a list of best practices and guidance for the privacy-safe use of other technical standards, the group said. 
• Addressability and Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs). In early 2022, IAB Tech Lab announced the newly formed Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) Working Group, inviting the digital advertising community to develop privacy-enhancing standards and software tools. This year, IAB Tech Lab will continue to facilitate post-cookie and privacy-first addressability for audience activation and measurement by creating a portfolio of privacy-safe addressability solutions, updating Tech Lab's industry taxonomies, and publishing technical standards for Clean Rooms, the group said. 
• Advanced TV. After spending 2022 analyzing converging use cases between legacy and connected television and understanding the trajectory of TV viewing and media investment, IAB Tech Lab released a multi-year advanced TV roadmap. Tech Lab's goal is to modernize the fragmented TV landscape and bring universal addressability, reconciliation, and measurement interoperability to all TV environments. In 2023, led by the newly created Advanced TV Commit Group, Tech Lab will work across the television industry to drive the adoption of an open video watermark standard, supporting technical framework and best practices to achieve standardization across the diverse environments and devices consumers use to watch TV. The Advanced TV initiative will enable the industry to achieve interoperability, improve measurement, and bring greater efficiency to a converging TV landscape. Additional use cases in the roadmap include frame-accurate ad insertion, cross-environment addressability, and universal reconciliation and audit while enabling viewability verification across TV environments, the group said. 
• Ad Supply Chain & Programmatic Foundations. Building on efforts to promote a secure, flexible supply chain in 2022, IAB Tech Lab will announce plans at this year's Annual Leadership Meeting (ALM) to support a green, programmatic supply chain for all digital advertising media. IAB Tech Lab will also work to establish a secure and authenticated supply path from device to demand, a faster and more extensible Open RTB release process, and enhance the Transparency Center, while evolving industry support tools and open source projects, the IAB explained. 
• Measurement. Emerging technologies and new media formats in the digital advertising ecosystem are wonderful opportunities for advertisers to innovate. They also breed inefficiencies in ad delivery and fragmentation in measurement capabilities. The proliferation of devices, platforms, and channels are drivers of complexity and opportunity. In 2023, IAB Tech Lab will continue working to establish consistent cross-media, cross-channel, cross-environment campaign measurement and viewability verification. Tech Lab's ongoing investment in technical measurement standards includes updates to Open Measurement Interface Definition and Open Measurement SDKs to ensure continued support of all mobile/web video and CTV via the newly released OMSDK for CTV, the IAB said. 

NEW YORK—Comcast Advertising has released findings of a new study focusing on how COVID-19 has impacted agency media strategies. Nearly all respondents have felt at least some impact from the pandemic, while a good many are also adding advanced TV options as part of their strategies.

According to the Comcast Advertising survey, 65% of ad buyers have experienced a “large impact” from COVID-19 on their 2020 plans, while 29% said it has had at least some impact. Still, 93% believe it is important to keep advertising, though they acknowledged that it is reliant on the money available to do so.

Local and regional buyers are now showing more interest in advanced media options for advertising. Per Comcast, 80% of buyers said they intend to carry some part of their business via programmatic buying, while more than 91% plan to put some of their video budget toward Advanced TV channels, like video-on-demand, OTT, addressable or advanced linear. As recently as October 2019, agencies interested in Advanced TV was at 79%.

Buyers also identified where their priorities were during the pandemic, with nearly 50% saying flexibility was most important, 30% saying price and 20% saying more efficient use of data and targeting.

PLUS: BIA's Adjusted 2020 Local Ad Revenue Forecast Slips to $144.3B

“The events of the past few months have posed a challenge to many agency buyers, especially those who buy on behalf of local and regional businesses,” said Maria Weaver, chief marketing officer, Comcast Advertising. “Our study revealed that these buyers are impacted, but they’re not sitting still. In many cases, they are finding ways to be more efficient with their dollars through the use of data, targeting and automation.”

As far as how things look for 2021, 60% of local and regional ad buyers said it was too early to tell, while 33% were certain impacts would continue. In how they might change in the next year, 30% said they are looking at advertising efficiencies, 25% are expecting to explore new channels, 20% will look into new ways of using data and 16% expect to change their targeting approach.

All participants in this survey are users of Comcast’s FreeWheel Strata platform.

The full Comcast Advertising survey is available online. 

AUSTIN, Texas—Samsung continues to dominate the Advanced TV market, according to the new DSCC Quarterly Advanced TV Shipment and Forecast Report, which also forecasts Advanced TV revenues to see a 9% growth rate from 2019 to 2025 to $26 billion. 

The report covers the worldwide premium TV market, including most Advanced TV technologies: WOLED, QD Display, QDEF, Dual Cell LCD and MiniLED with 4K and 8K resolution.

This report looks at current and future TV shipments and revenues by technology, region, brand, resolution and size, and forecasts the growth of all of these technologies. The report includes the preliminary shipment result for Q1 2020, a forecast by quarter for 2020 and an annual forecast to 2025.

Advanced TV is defined as any TV with an advanced display technology feature, including all OLED TVs, 8K LCD TVs and all LCD TVs with quantum dot technology. The historical data in the report allows analysis by feature for advanced LCD TVs, including:

• QDEF TV: TV using a Quantum Dot Enhancement Film; these TVs are sold as “QLED” by Samsung, TCL and others. 
• MiniLED: LCD TVs with a MiniLED backlight, as sold by TCL starting in 2019.
• Dual Cell: LCD TVs employing dual-cell technology, as introduced by Hisense in 2019. 
• LCD Others: this category includes LCD TVs with 8K resolution that do not fall in any other category. 

In Q1 2020, among all Advanced TV products, Samsung increased its revenue share to 54% from 53% in Q1 2019 by expanding its QDEF product line into more affordable models. LG held the no. 2 brand position in Q1 2020 with 24% revenue share, while Sony took the third spot with 8%.

The share battle in China has gotten increasingly intense, with four companies with double-digit percent market share. Samsung’s share of Advanced TV in China increased to an all-time high in Q1 with 42% unit and revenue share, whileHuawei has emerged as a major player in Advanced LCD TVs, capturing an 18% share in Q1. Hisense introduced OLED TV in 2019, but this did not prevent the company’s share from eroding to 14% in Q1. LGE fares poorly in China with less than a 5% share. Skyworth, once a major player with 24% share in Q2 2018, has seen its position diminish to only 3% share in Q1 2020.

While the COVID-19 impact will slow growth in Q2 2020 to 11% year-over-year (Y/Y), growth will resume in the second half of 2020 and Q4 unit growth will reach 27% Y/Y. Forty-eight-inch OLEDs will start in limited volumes, adding to the product mix for OLED, and LGD’s increasing OLED capacity will allow OLED to hold its unit share of Advanced TV and increase OLED’s revenue share. Across all technologies and sizes, DSCC expects Advanced TV unit shipments to increase by 30% in 2020 compared to 2019.

Long-term Advanced TV shipments are expected to grow from less than 10 million in 2019 to nearly 35 million in 2025, a 24% CAGR for that time period. OLED TV units are expected to grow at a 31% CAGR from 2019-2025 to 14.7 million units, while advanced LCD TV units are expected to grow at a 21% CAGR to 20.8 million units. The largest sizes will see the biggest growth, with growth in 75-inch-plus expected to be 36%, and growth in 75-inch-plus OLED even higher at 87% CAGR.

From a revenue standpoint, while the overall category will see revenue growth, OLED TV is expected to capture all the revenue growth in Advanced TV, as advanced LCD revenues are expected to be the same in 2025 compared to 2019. OLED TV revenues are expected to grow at a 19% CAGR from 2019-2025 to $16.2 billion. Advanced LCD TV revenues were $10.0 billion in 2019, are expected to peak at $11.1 billion in 2022-2023, then decline to $10.0 billion by 2025. Even larger size LCD TVs are not expected to have revenue growth as Samsung shifts its emphasis from its QLED LCD products to QD OLED.

Netflix recently released "Black Mirror: Bandersnatch," a hit drama praised for its innovative experience that allows users to shape the narrative and select how the story unfolds. The viewer watches as the main character encounters new scenarios and the viewer gets to decide what actions the character takes, which leads to different possible video sequences playing.

Based on its success, Netflix has already green-lighted more interactive videos.

This newfound level of consumer engagement can inspire the next generation of video ad formats and experiences, now made possible by combining identity with advanced television.

Imagine choosing your own adventure with a brand for a far more engaging video ad experience. Evolving from the “Which ad experience do you prefer?” ad format Hulu popularized, where users can select which video to play from a brand, this possible video ad format could prompt the viewer to decide what the characters in the video ad are to do and lead to new video options in future video ad pods.

How It Would Work
In the Netflix experience, a user is logged into their Netflix account and sits from the start of the adventure until the end without interruption. If the user doesn’t choose an action when prompted, a timer running ends and randomly selects for the user.

However, ads running in between parts of content and between distinct plays of content have a different, more challenging environment to operate. They have to consider questions like “is this the same user?” and “what action did the user take before?”

Today’s marketer and video platforms benefit from having cross-device identity graphs. By utilizing a persistent ID, the ad can keep track of if it’s the same user or household between ad plays and across devices. Without identity, this idea would never work, as you’ll often be stuck playing only the first part of the adventure as the interactive ad forgets choices and where the user is in the journey.

Now knowing who the viewer is, the video ad can play a few seconds of video at each pod and then prompt the viewer to make a decision or auto-decide after too much time elapses. Having options does, of course, mean the advertiser will now need to shoot many more video clips to cover all the possibilities, but if this sounds far-fetched and too futuristic, remember, Burger King pioneered this video production approach already for its Subservient Chicken video ad campaign in 2012.

An Example
Imagine a bank running an interactive video ad campaign. During a commercial break, the ad shows a character going up to pay for a retail purchase and the viewer is asked to choose between paying in cash or using the bank’s credit card. If the viewer chooses credit card, it plays a video of the character paying via credit card, which may highlight how many rewards points the character would get using the card and how easy it is to pay with the new contactless credit card.

If the viewer chooses cash, it plays a video that shows the character not having enough money and needing to now go to an ATM. In the next ad episode, it could then have the viewer choose between a sketchy ATM inside the store and the bank’s branch location, which is around the corner. If they choose the sketchy ATM, the character can withdraw cash while the commercial highlights the bank’s fraud protection or no ATM fees. If they choose the branch, it can highlight new services at the branch or other benefits for the character.

This example is just the start of what is sure to be a creative revolution for video advertising now that we have advanced TV and identity. Netflix has started a revolution for digital media and may have just kicked off one for digital advertising, too.

Victor Wong is CEO ofThunder Experience Cloud, a San Francisco-based ad technology firm. 

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CHANTILLY, VA.—As BIA/Kelsey looks down the road of local video advertising, it is seeing a healthy growth as a result of progress in Advanced TV and an industry commitment to improving interactivity and the viewer experience. The “Advanced TV: Executive Views on Industry Progress & New Directions” report forecasts that the local video advertising market will grow to $32.6 billion in 2018 and will reach $37.1 billion by 2022.

BIA/Kelsey’s report is defining “Advanced TV” as linear TV platforms; this includes automated TV, programmatic TV, addressable TV, OTT, Smart TV, Connected TV and ATSC 3.0.

The report indicates that growth in the market for local video impressions and related ad spending comes from the mobile and digital categories. Per the report, marketers plan to increase their spending in these categories because of the ability to develop and measure data-infused video campaigns that can target video audiences on an individual basis using segmenting attributes. Local TV is looking to advanced TV solutions to provide the capabilities to match mobile and digital.

“Local TV must become more competitive to maintain growth in a market where local ad spending is migrating to digital ad platforms, driven by the secular trend of increased people-based marketing,” said Rick Ducey, managing director at BIA/Kelsey and report co-author. “Advanced TV could be a viable solution because it brings data-infused audience targeting beyond just gender and age and delivers analytics between TV ad exposure and subsequent consumer behaviors. Eventual success will come down to continued efforts in developing and transitioning to new automated workflows.”

The full report, which includes interviews with industry executives, is available here.

CHANTILLY, VA.—Local TV broadcasters take heed; now is the time to innovate in order to compete effectively with new local digital platforms for advertising dollars.

That’s one of the takeaways from a new BIA/Kelsey report, “Advanced TV: Industry Views on Progress & New Directions,” looking at advanced television and the thoughts of top executives from various media enterprises.

A July BIA/Kelsey forecast indicates the spend for local linear television and digital video platforms will grow from $31.9 billion in 2017 to $38.3 billion by 2021. Linear TV, which includes broadcasters and MVPDs, will account for 82 percent of spending on local video and 54 percent of the growth.

Digital platforms, including local mobile video, local online video and out-of-home video spending, will account for the rest. However, broadcasters have the ability to challenge the flow of these ad dollars into local digital platforms, particularly if they choose to innovate.

“Agencies and marketers and their data scientists and planner[s] are becoming more sophisticated in their matching and uses of disparate database[s] to develop strategic profiles of their consumers,” the report says.

They have built “data-driven strategic consumer profiles,” and buyers want to bring that into the media domain, it says. So far, digital has a leg up on linear TV in this regard.

However, “interesting innovation” is happening in cross-platform solutions, local data management platforms, audience targeting and greater campaign accountability. “These innovations may bend current trend lines in the media mix if linear video can become competitive,” the report says.

The advanced television report presents the insights of several media executives, including an executive from Sinclair Broadcast Group, on these trends.

 “We need to become easier to buy,” the report quotes the Sinclair executive as saying. “Local TV systems and buying protocols were designed for simple local sales around single stations—the ecosystem has evolved far beyond the traditional spot based, single station sales paradigm, as consolidation has spawned larger broadcast groups.”

The next-generation TV standard will add even greater complexity and present new opportunities requiring its own automation, the Sinclair executive is quoted as saying.

BIA/Kelsey predicts “a relatively volatile future” for the local video market as traditional media players, new pure plays, audiences and advertisers “settle into a panoply of new options and start creating new habit.”

To learn more about the report, visit the BIA/Kelsey website.

NEW YORK—Videology, a software provider for converged TV and video advertising, released its “U.S. TV & Video Market At-A-Glance” fourth quarter report for 2016. One of the key elements sticking out from the report is the growth of its advanced TV inventory throughout 2016.

According to the report, since the first quarter of the year to the fourth quarter, the number of impressions available to be brought on linear TV increased 840 percent. The report indicated the reasoning for this was growth in the demand for advanced TV systems requiring more TV supply sources are opening inventory to be bought and sold programmatically.

Similarly, there was a large growth in spending on linear TV campaigns in the Videology platform. Over the course of 2016, the growth in linear TV spending rose 273 percent.

Additional findings in Videology’s report included a growth in advertising across PC, mobile and CTV screens, an 11 percent growth year-over-year that now has campaigns appearing on all three screens 54 percent of the time. It was also discovered that 15 second ads (55 percent) have overtaken 30 seconds ads (36 percent) as the most popular duration. In addition, geo targeting was among the most popular targeting campaigns in the fourth quarter, followed by behavioral and TV viewing habits. The report also indicates that despite being in an election year, only 4 percent of behavioral targeting has based on political behaviors.

To read the full report, visit Videology.