Report: TV industry alignment needed for identity resolution
November 12, 2024
The identity ecosystem that increasingly powers the TV and video advertising marketplace is at a crossroads, facing significant changes and challenges with the rise of streaming on top of existing complexity and fragmentation. A study released by CIMM and OpenAP urges that now is the time to reassess current approaches to identity and identity resolution (IDR), to build a more effective, efficient and durable ecosystem.
Executed in collaboration with ThinkMedium, Identity Resolution for Advanced TV and Video Advertising: A Case for Durability and Transparency provides an analysis of the IDR landscape and a diagnostic assessment of the current marketplace, with use cases and recommendations for strengthening and improving current ways of working through industry collaboration.
“Identity and IDR serve as the backbone for planning, activating, and measuring video advertising that is relevant, personalised and effective,” said Jon Watts, Managing Director, CIMM. “However, the rise of digital streaming, growing privacy concerns, and other trends are challenging traditional approaches in the TV advertising landscape. The increasing complexity and fragmentation of the ecosystem necessitate a reevaluation of strategies and industry collaboration to support future advancements with IDR in the Advanced TV and Video Advertising marketplace.”
The study found that while there are established technological foundations in place – enabling a variety of advertising use cases – and the well-funded, competitive ecosystem of suppliers promotes innovation and development of new solutions, the lack of transparency and consistency across the industry is costly. Misaligned industry incentives have led to opaque solutions and inconsistent methodologies, resulting in a lack of efficiency and effectiveness, wasted investments, and ultimately erosion of trust within the buy- and sell-side markets.
To address these challenges, the study highlights increased transparency as the most important step that the industry can take to improve the IDR ecosystem, specifically surrounding identity-related data inputs/outputs; practices and processes related to data onboarding, matching, modeling, and more; and solutions and technologies that enable IDR.
Through industry collaboration, the sell-side needs buy-side motivation to overcome competitive concerns – which requires addressing the buy-side’s inconsistent awareness, understanding, and urgency. The findings suggest a two-pronged, collaborative approach to developing industry resources could have the greatest impact: 1) providing buyer education guides to facilitate understanding of fundamentals and provide curated questions for engaging with identity providers (as part of the RFP process) and 2) defining taxonomies and templates for providers to communicate about definitions and methodologies for how data is sourced, matched, aggregated and validated.
“With the advent of streaming, we believe Identity Resolution will be the single most important thing we as an industry must coalesce around building new standards for over the next year to ensure the sustainability of TV advertising in the future,” said David Levy, CEO of OpenAP. “Inconsistency in householding leads to increased audience fragmentation and waste, and data translation is often a black box for advertisers. We must build a foundation that prioritises consistency and transparency across all steps from campaign start to end. The time is now.”
”While the landscape continues to transform and adjust to challenges and opportunities, incentives are not always aligned – creating a negative feedback loop that complicates the development of valuable industry-wide solutions,” said Dennis Buchheim, CEO at ThinkMedium. “To support demand for interoperability across planning, activation, and measurement, we must come together to define and adopt a practical layer of standard practices.”
The report was developed collaboratively input from an advisory group of CIMM members, OpenAP, ThinkMedium, and consultation with industry participants from across the US media and advertising ecosystem, undertaken during Q2 and Q3 2024.
“Streamlining transparency and standardising communication among buyers, sellers, and ID providers can establish a solid foundation upon which the industry can increase efficiency and effectiveness and collaboratively address ongoing and new IDR-related challenges within advanced TV and video advertising,” continued Watts.