LOS ANGELES – The growing audience for video content on web-connected devices has prompted many marketers to run more advertising on streaming services. The transition from traditional linear television to connected TV (CTV) had been gradual before the pandemic triggered a surge in demand from consumers who spend more time at home.

“We’ve been betting on the connected television world for many years, and waiting for this transition from one cord to another,” Tal Chalozin, co-founder and chief technology officer of CTV adtech firm Innovid, said in this discussion with advanced TV leader Denise Colella at Beet.TV’s Beet Retreat.

Innovid this month went public through a merger with a special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC) and began trading on the New York Stock Exchange. The company helps brands such as Toyota, GlaxoSmithKline and Anheuser Busch InBev to make, serve and measure video ads on streaming platforms.

Audience Identifiers

CTV promises to combine the reach of broadcast television with the measurability and targeting of digital media. Those metrics are dependent on audience identifiers that can help marketers to keep track of the reach and frequency of their campaigns.

“Identity is a big topic for digital marketing altogether, because clearly the premise for a lot of marketers is that when I move to digital, I can do more one-to-one messaging,” Chalozin said. “As marketers moving from linear, part of what they expect is not only to get reach with people who aren’t watching linear television, but they also expect” better measurement and attribution.

His company in September introduced Innovid Key as a framework for identity management that provides a way for advertisers to better understand and target audiences on CTV. The following month, Innovid partnered with data connectivity platform LiveRamp to introduce advanced identity integration for a buy-side ad server.

“Each marketer will choose their own identity,” Chalozin said. “Our job is to take that ID or that ID space, and make sure it works the hardest around the CTV space.”

Data Clean Rooms

Advertisers and platforms that want to protect sensitive first-party data about their customers use data clean rooms to share aggregated information with advertisers. Meanwhile, walled garden environments are a key characteristic of the fragmented media marketplace.

“We think that the future will be very fragmented. There will be multiple ID solutions,” Chalozin said. “There are many ways to think about identity, but at the end of the day, there’s no replacement for first-party data….Everything that we’re doing is an optimization game. We want to make it better than it is today, and push it forward.”

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