CTV in the rugby phase

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CTV enters its rugby stage

Last week’s CES saw a ton of announcements from ad tech and media companies, with a strong emphasis on CTV. Without taking anything away from the hype, it feels like we’re now in the phase where announcements are largely tactical — pushing and pulling for market share in a business whose overall parameters are starting to set. I’m calling this the “rugby” phase of CTV.

I hosted a great little panel at the Magnite space at the Barber Shop in the Cosmo, and that conversation also reinforced the Rugby mentality. Everyone’s trying to convince buyers their mousetrap is a little better than their competition’s. Part of this is the inversion in supply-and-demand that occurred in 2024 — there appears to be more supply in CTV than demand for the first time.

Let’s go around the horn and see what’s going on.

Fight for SMB budgets

The biggest announcement IMHO was Comcast’s “Universal Ads” which is an effort to bring self-serve SMB customers to streaming. This follows Roku’s similar announcement last Fall, as well as the ongoing hype around Vibe, TVScientific, and MNTN.

The most interesting part of this is who is not coming to the party: Google and Meta. Both have millions of SMBs already using their ad systems, yet have not made a dent in CTV (with the very notable exception of Google Ads→YouTubeTV).

The second most interesting part is that it is all based on Beeswax. One for the home team. If Zuck wants a Beeswax seat I’m sure it could be arranged.

Creative format innovation

Once you’ve got the pipes laid, you can get creative about what runs through it. I think as an industry we’ve come to the unfortunate conclusion that no one can scan a QR code fast enough to make that a viable creative format. So instead we’re seeing AI and other creative approaches. Some of the recent news:

• Omar Takawol’s Rembrant raises $23 million for in-creative AI-generated product placement;

• Kerv announced last Spring a partnership with Magnite, and is now also in with Pubmatic.

Data fueling the business

The New Year saw the big-ish news that Google was reversing itself on fingerprinting, a move that was widely seen as a way to get back into the game in CTV. Catherine Perloff his the ground running at her new gig at The Information with a deep dive on how Google has stumbled in streaming (link).

Roku made news with their new clean room.

Innovid partnered with Roku to debut the next evolution of their Harmony initiative. Now, instead of just enabling PG buys, they are shipping their delivery data to sellers to manage their reach and frequency with respect to all the other campaigns the advertiser might be running. This allows sellers to protect against over-frequency, and potentially focus on incremental reach. Very cool.

Yahoo PR coined the unfortunate phrase “buy-side curation,” which I guess means data in a DSP. But hype aside, they also announced a Roku deal (who didn’t?), in this case access to Roku’s TV audiences through the aforementioned clean room. Very cool, but no link.

Live streaming is a different ballgame

I didn’t personally see any exciting announcements about live streaming at CES, but it was a topic that everyone seemed to walk to talk about. This became especially clear when the Saturday evening NFL wildcard game was only available on Amazon Fire.

There’s a lot to watch in 2025!

Reading list

• Comcast competing for SMB ads in video (link)

• Disney to combine live offerings with FuboTV, FuboTV to remain public company (link)

• Roku launches data cloud (link)

• Catherine Perloff with a deep dive on how Google has stumbled in streaming (link)

• Experian launches 3p data marketplace (link)

• Innovid + Roku allows management of reach and frequency (link)

• Rembrand $23m Series A (link)