Solving for Challenges in CTV Ad Serving – Part 2

In a Q&A that appeared in ExchangeWire, Unruly’s Erhard Neumann, Managing Director of our Spearad ad serving and unified auction platform, discussed the current state of CTV and how TV broadcasters and CTV/OTT content providers can address industry challenges. We’ve divided the interview into quick-hit reads to keep you in the know…fast.

PART 2: What’s Needed For Effective Frequency Capping

How can the industry work on a collaborative basis to ensure effective frequency capping?

User IDs and household IDs present a problem here. We don’t really have user IDs for a CTV device in the living room, because many people are potentially watching the device separately or together. This is a difficult challenge to solve quickly, especially in Europe with GDPR. We also know some broadcasters renew the user ID every 24 hours, which limits the ability to frequency cap for longer than a day.

As previously mentioned, the first thing we need to do is, find a way to identify what ad is being served irrespective of which demand partner it comes from. Then we can decide on whether we should have this ad inside an ad break or not, as it may have already been used. Solutions are already being tested on the market, to identify the ad by mechanics such as reading frame-by-frame to identify duplication of the frames. However, this is a challenging thing to do in real time, as you need to take the ad in, analyse it, put it to one side while delivering something else. Once the ad is analysed you can insert it into the ad break but you can’t yet do it in real time as you can’t analyse it in under 30 seconds.

Secondly, publishers and broadcasters should implement a leading system for holistic ad decisioning and ad break management, one which can receive all responses and places, according to the numbers of rules set. One of these rules of course being frequency.