CANNES – As television advertising dollars flow into streaming environments, the programmatic machinery built to transact those ads is growing increasingly complex.
A cottage industry of platforms providing aggregation and curation services is on the rise. This has prompted agency leaders to push for greater supply path optimization (SPO) to ensure transparency and value for their clients.
These are the views, at Cannes Lions, of a panel of agency and ad-tech executives who argued the industry has a chance to apply lessons learned from display advertising to the burgeoning CTV space.
- Kelly Metz, Chief Investment Officer, Spark Foundry
- Denise Ocasio, Executive Director, Investment, Mindshare
- Ben Hovaness, Chief Media Officer, OMD Worldwide
- Kris Magel, VP, Head of Global Agency Partnerships, FreeWheel
The premium inventory problem
For now, the CTV ecosystem remains largely controlled by major providers, but a growing long tail of free ad-supported streaming (FAST) channels and apps is expanding the programmatic footprint. The industry is moving to get ahead of the problem as programmatic ad spending is forecast to surpass $200 billion by 2026.
A significant hurdle to programmatic growth in CTV, however, is the availability of the most valuable content, particularly live sports. The delay is often not due to publisher reluctance but to complex league rights agreements that restrict impression-level ad sales. “A lot of the delay in moving sports inventory to programmatic isn’t actually on the publishers,” said Ben Hovaness, chief media officer, OMD Worldwide. “It’s being driven by what’s in the league rights agreements where they’re not able to part it out on the impression level, they have to sell a whole spot.”
This bottleneck on top-tier inventory means that while more sports are becoming available, the most sought-after events remain largely within direct-sold channels. “(As) there’s a little bit more of a release of different types of inventory into the programmatic space, I think that’s going to allow it to grow exponentially,” said Denise Ocasio, executive director, investment, Mindshare.
Searching for a deal-type middle ground
The structure of programmatic deals themselves presents another challenge for buyers, who often find themselves caught between two imperfect options: private marketplaces (PMPs) and programmatic guaranteed (PG) buys. Hovaness described PMPs as addressable with dynamic pricing but non-guaranteed delivery. PG, conversely, offers a 100% delivery guarantee but at a fixed price and without audience addressability. “You’re kind of betwixt and between,” Hovaness said.
This trade-off has led to calls for a new, hybrid deal type that could offer the best of both worlds. “There’s probably room for a new deal type that sits in between those where maybe we can take a page from like Meta and YouTube and have a buy type that’s like 99% certainty of delivery,” Hovaness suggested. “But you keep dynamic pricing and addressability.”
Other agency leaders believe they are already finding ways to bridge that gap. Metz argued that by buying across a large aggregate of publishers, delivery is less of a concern. Kris Magel, VP, head of global agency partnerships at FreeWheel, advocated for a “hybrid strategy” that uses guaranteed buys as a foundation for must-have inventory, supplemented by more flexible biddable strategies for incremental reach.
Curation’s promise and peril
As buyers navigate this landscape, “curation” has emerged as a strategy for simplifying access to inventory. In principle, curation allows buyers to package inventory from many publishers and layer on specific audience data, creating a customized, brand-safe bidding environment. “You create a little universe within which to bid and it’s safe for the advertiser, and it’s targeted to the audience that they want,” Magel said. Tech platforms like FreeWheel have moved to facilitate this, recently announcing an expansion of its premium CTV marketplace to better unify the ecosystem.
In practice, however, curation faces significant operational hurdles. The lack of standardized content tagging across the fragmented CTV ecosystem makes it difficult to execute at scale. This fragmentation is a known industry challenge, with different platforms operating as distinct ecosystems that complicate cross-network efforts.
“Different SSPs are actually categorizing content differently. So when you do that, how do you find that commonality across?” Ocasio asked. Metz added that while the word “curation” sounds pleasant, “in reality, this is the most tedious stuff you have to do, which is get the data signals right.”
Ultimately, the panel agreed that the most effective strategy involves shortening the distance between buyer and seller. Magel urged agencies to look past the intermediaries that package and resell inventory. “You want to be working with the publisher directly, and you want to be connecting to the publisher’s ad server,” he said.
“If you start routing out who is ultimately that last mile, and you start placing your agreements with those partners… you’re going to be doing the right thing for your client.”
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