Every new channel experiences growing pains – and connected TV has been growing fast.

According to Andrew Casale, President & CEO of Index Exchange, the explosive growth of CTV and programmatic has brought with it some problems that need to be addressed.

“Like any channel that has grown tremendously, as the growth starts to recede a little bit, you start to notice a few problems,” Casale says in this interview with Beet.TV.

Transparency in the CTV channel

One major issue Casale highlights is a lack of transparency. He believes that marketers are not always informed about what they’re buying, specifically the position in any given ad pod or some of the metadata from the feeds.

He says ad buyers ask questions like: “Am I buying a certain network, a certain genre, a certain show?” That information can sometimes be “obfuscated”.

That obfuscation will be important to solve. “That level of transparency … is going be imperative to ensuring we can continue to see growth,” Casale says.

Adopt standards to scale

It’s not just about transparency. When asked about the biggest challenge in scaling CTV, Casale cites the need for industry standards.

“Everybody’s effectively entered the CTV market on different protocols. Some of them support certain signals, some of them don’t. And we really need everybody to take the leap, to get onto OpenRTB 2.6, so that we are all speaking a common language and we can really light up the channel,” he says.

OpenRTB 2.6 is designed to address some of the signalling nuances that Casale mentions. The challenge today is that not everyone is using the same protocols. Casale believes that by moving to OpenRTB 2.6, the industry can align.

2023 alignment?

Index Exchange has been working with IAB Tech Lab on OpenRTB 2.6. Casale believes that the industry’s adoption of these standards has been slow due to a lack of understanding about the benefits they bring.

“I think that some of the holdup is just education and understanding of what the benefits are,” he says.

“We are trying to create a bit of a ground swell right now so that a bunch of DSPs and exchanges and ad servers all make the leap at the same time. I’m confident we can do it within 2023.”

Indexing with openness

Index Exchange is a technology company specializing in programmatic advertising.

It operates as a global independent advertising exchange, connecting buyers and sellers of digital advertising inventory in real-time.

You’re watching “What’s Next: Scaling CTV Through Industry Collaboration,” a Beet.TV Leadership Series produced at IAB ALM 2023, presented by Index Exchange. For more videos from this series, please visit this page. 

By Robert Andrews on @robertandrews