The State of Ad-ID in CTV and Streaming
Launched by the IAB Tech Lab’s Advanced Television Systems Committee and designed to “provide standardized identity management for ad creatives” through metadata, Ad-ID is designed to bring streaming ad insertion—particularly for live events—out of “the Wild West,” according to Paramount’s Jarred Wilichinsky, and to stop, among other things, the mindless repetition of ads that drags down so many streaming experiences. Wilichinsky, Roku’s Charlie Goodman, JWP’s David Palomento, Akamai’s Peter Chave, and Infinitive’s C.J. Leonard weigh in on ad-ID’s progress and its potential impact in the streaming ecosystem in this clip from Streaming Media NYC.
The universal ad-ID disparities between traditional linear and streaming
Wilichinsky of Paramount laments how universal ad IDs are nonexistent in digital advertising, unlike in traditional and linear broadcasting, where ad ID has long been standardized. However, with streaming, he says, “You think about live events and as you have programmatic filling in, you don't really know what ad you are serving because there is no notion of this universal identifier and a universal directory or metadata, it’s the Wild West. Everyone in this room streams something. And how many times do you see the same Sherman ad, break after break, or you get a Ford and a Toyota ad in the same break? And it's all because everyone's trying to do it themselves. Luckily, at Paramount, we have the resources to build stuff like Conduit, which lets us get the data we need for proper global brand frequency caps. When Roku tries to serve the same Atkins ad break after break, we throw it out because we’ve got to always remember who's first, and it's the user. It's our fans who want to consume our stories. So the notion of trying to get that into the digital world is a massive effort that we're really trying to focus on this year.”
The challenges and benefits of the linear to streaming ad-ID transition
C.J. Leonard of Initiative emphasizes the challenges of this transition and the need to adopt some television procedures to make digital platforms resemble television. She says there are many issues with using web address domains as identifiers, where there could be a “Ford Dealer group out of Philadelphia and then ford.com…you could have back-to-back ads just because maybe it's the same creative and just there's different deals going on. A domain is such a blunt object that you would think by now would've been resolved.”
JW Player's David Palomento does mention some side benefits of this transition. “It improves caching in your ad stitcher, which means that more viewers get a faster ad response and less buffering,” he says.
Why “homebrew” solutions further highlight the need for standardization
Peter Chave of Akamai highlights many workarounds that larger companies with more resources have been using, such as tagging every ad themselves, allowing them to gain credit for national ads playing on digital platforms. “I've seen a whole bunch of homebrew solutions with metadata being stuffed in secret places into the stream to get it down to the player,” he says. “So it would be nice to have a standard.”
Roku's Charlie Goodman further underscores the complications with these various approaches. “Somebody is buying us from the trade desk. They're buying us direct,” he says. “You're buying us so many different ways. But ultimately, the actual video might be the same, but you might have a creative ID. It has five videos in it, in different dimensions, etc. And I think it plagues the advertisers too. When they have beacons and measurement pixels, they can look at it globally, but it is really hard even for them to tell which videos are performant. I think [we need to move] to a standard where we know it's the same ad we've transcoded.”
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