As someone with 14 years of experience in digital advertising, and experience across different media houses, including newspaper publishing, OTT services, and ad tech, would you mind sharing what changes you’ve seen in digital advertising?
The digital advertising industry has evolved immensely over the past 14 years, but the most notable change has come as a result of the explosion of video content. Video now dominates the market, which is a stark contrast from when I first started out in the industry. In the past several years, the continued expansion of the streaming landscape combined
with the shift to digital means that content is more accessible than ever, and consumers are more connected than ever. And while previously it was more challenging to reach consumers, we’ve also seen an improvement as it relates to targeting these audiences effectively, particularly with the introduction of programmatic. It’s now easier to scale campaigns, and advertisers can enjoy greater ROI from programmatic campaigns.
CTV and OTT are becoming increasingly popular with consumers, yet advertisers cannot discredit strategizing for traditional TV advertising. What challenges do advertisers face when adapting strategies across different devices and how can advertisers tailor these strategies for seamless integration across all devices?
While linear television still maintains a large share of media spending in India, consumers are choosing CTV for its flexible nature as they appreciate the ability to watch high-quality content on their own terms, at their preferred time. CTV’s data-driven capabilities empower advertisers to tailor their message to the consumer while providing them with the flexibility to alter ad creative to maximize impact.
Despite this, fragmentation across devices, channels, and walled gardens, continues to pose a challenge, but there are solutions to take advantage of the explosive growth across the ecosystem, which presents a can’t-miss opportunity for brands looking to reach new and existing audiences.
To keep pace with these changes, buyers can embrace the flexibility and efficiency of programmatic, forge more direct relationships with sell-side partners, and maximize audience data to future-proof their media-buying strategies. Programmatic pipes provide brands with a more streamlined ad-buying process that, when coupled with a centralized access point for inventory across channels, allows marketers to drive efficient and effective campaign performance. In an omnichannel landscape, Supply Path Optimization (SPO) can also be used to streamline sell-side partners to focus solely on those that deliver access to premium inventory across channels at scale, and who can provide the tools to better plan, buy, measure, and optimize in an omnichannel media ecosystem.
The Indian advertising industry is fragmented. With stringent privacy regulations and the deprecation of third-party cookies, how will media buyers navigate the evolving digital media landscape in 2024?
Although the timeline for cookie deprecation has been pushed back once more, buyers still need to be mindful of the evolving privacy landscape and continue to prepare. Navigating these changes successfully means they will need to adopt a portfolio-based approach that encompasses the main ID solutions most relevant to them and explore data collaboration. Owned first-party data will continue to be valuable to activate against directly.
Data collaboration through data matching can help to ensure accuracy and scalability of audiences. Data matching allows buyers and sellers to build out a scaled, secure method of matching data for insights and activation. While data clean rooms are a starting place, the future of data sharing will be encrypting data where it sits, but activating it where it’s required, allowing publishers to attach matched data to an ad opportunity.
Finally, buyers should look to work more strategically with the publisher supply paths that provide better data enablement, – including actionable insights for more informed planning and campaign optimisation – as well as better audience curation, and improved contextual Intelligence.
With the rapid penetration of mobile devices and the advent of CTV, how can publishers and advertisers make sure that their ad campaigns are seamlessly delivered to Indian audiences when it comes to Live Sports?
CTV growth in India is continuing to accelerate and the latest research from GroupM’s “The Changing Landscape of Indian Television report” estimates CTVs are expected to reach more than 45 million households by the end of 2024. While India remains a mobile-first market, live sports streaming is omnichannel, with viewers often opting for the CTV large screen environment when streaming live sports. Bringing the uninterrupted, big-screen viewing experience to digital means leveraging technology like server-side ad insertion (SSAI), which can assist with seamless ad delivery by prefetching advertisements, enhancing ads’ quality to match the stream’s quality, and stitching the ads into the content as one piece of the video stream. Ad serving tools are also key here to help ensure frequency capping and avoid repeat ads in live streams.
In addition, buyers can leverage the benefits of programmatic to target sports inventory across a wider range of broadcasters, making it easier to apply and distribute budgets as well as activate audience targeting to achieve the best outcomes (rather than buying in siloed fashion from individual broadcasters). Programmatic’s data-driven targeting capabilities empower advertisers of all sizes to tap into premium inventory, irrespective of their budgets. Programmatic demand should ideally be leveraged in concert with direct demand in business-compliant ways to ensure they are maximising ad breaks with large, diverse pools of advertisers.
Could you tell us about one prediction you made for 2024 in the past four months that has come true? And what are some other trends you see in digital advertising coming true as well?
The rising popularity of streaming services over the past several years, along with increased availability of smart TVs and more affordable data plans, continue to push CTV to new heights in India. As a result, streaming media companies have embraced advertising even more. It’s evident that an ad tier is crucial to attract viewers and achieve scale in the market. This shift has introduced numerous streaming apps, offering consumers a variety of choices when evaluating their current streaming subscriptions. In response to this, I expected we’d see increased consolidation as the market reached saturation, the number of streaming apps would be whittled down and bundles re-introduced. This is a trend we are witnessing play out among major players in the market as well as other key global markets.
We expect the adoption of programmatic buying in streaming to continue to accelerate as buyers see the value in being afforded greater control over how they structure deals and more insight into how their ad dollars get spent. In addition, I think we’ll continue to see more inventory available via FAST channels in India. As streaming becomes a permanent fixture in India’s video landscape, fueled by ad-supported video-on-demand (AVOD) adoption, Free ad-supported streaming TV (FAST) is set to grow, mirroring the rise of TV manufacturer FAST offerings globally and regionally.
