#OTT/CTV

This week, Genius Monkey is taking a look at the trends that we expect to continue into this year so you can be prepared for what the industry is likely to become. From an emphasis on first-party data to a TikTok-shaped void in social media advertising, there’s a lot to dive into: The Increasing Importance of First-Party Data In 2024, Google announced that it would, in fact, NOT depreciate third-party cookies in Chrome.

Connected television (CTV) has stood out as the black sheep of the programmatic family for a while, featuring the lowest total ad spend and the trickiest audience tracking of all mediums. Early rumblings in the industry and consumer habits have convinced Genius Monkey for some time that CTV is a slumbering giant, waiting for the right moment to awaken and take the digital ad industry by storm. That day is quickly approaching, and it’s time for advertisers to take note.

While athletes around the globe were competing for gold, one challenger stood out as the reigning world champion of digital ads. Making its Olympic debut this year, programmatic advertising continues to demonstrate its flexibility and dominance in the field, enabling advertisers to reach a global audience and winning mouth-watering ad revenue for NBCUniversal. Let’s take a look at Programmatic’s performance throughout the 2024 Paris Olympic Games. Programmatic’s Stunning Debut at the Games For the first time in Olympic history, advertisers could programmatically purchase ad space for all competition events.

GA4’s Report Card; Consumers are Missing Universal Already Digital marketing turned a corner in July 2023 when Universal Analytics rode into the sunset and GA4 stood up to take its place. Genius Monkey covered the major difference between UA and GA4 in in a July 2023 article. Now – after one whole year of nothing but GA4 – how does the new system hold up compared to Universal Analytics? Short answer: not great.

Each year in May, television (and now streaming) networks invite the industry to come together and bask in the advertising glory of the year to come. This is the TV Upfront event, where major new shows are revealed, big announcements are made, and advertising deals are struck. It’s a time when all the major outlets are looking to win over programmatic dollars and a timely snapshot into the health of the OTT/CTV medium.

Programmatic advertising has cemented itself as the premier digital marketing avenue, representing the vast majority of digital ad spend in 2023 – the exact percentage depends on who you ask, but the lowest we found was about 80%. Not only is it big, but the numbers also confirm that it’s growing. Programmatic covers a variety of mediums, all of which experienced their own ups and downs worth examining. In this week’s blog, we’re taking a look at how the mediums collectively and individually grew in the year 2023 – as well as comparing them to Genius Monkey data – so you can know the trajectory of industry moving forward.

In a stunning move, three big names in the world of live sports streaming are teaming up to build a “new and exciting platform” launching later this year. Disney, Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery are all contributing to a new yet-to-be-named streaming entity in an unprecedented partnership that aims to streamline (or monopolize, depending on how you look at it) the sports-viewing experience. This has the potential to upset the way many marketers reach their audience through sports broadcasting and programmatic OTT, but Genius Monkey users have nothing to worry about, and can even look forward to the exciting new marketing opportunities it provides.

In early 2023, a startup called Telly boldly declared its intention to revolutionize the television industry. Many took notice because the founder and CEO is Ilya Pozin, the former CEO of the wildly successful Pluto TV streaming platform. Even more stand-out was the novel approach to selling televisions: giving them away at no charge. The basic premise is to sell ad space on the TV that subsidizes the cost of the panel itself.

The COVID pandemic was largely responsible for the explosive growth of CTV in the last few years. The lockdowns left many people looking for new entertainment, and connected TV was a simple solution. The U.S. Census Bureau reported a 35% increase in shopping for electronics during this time, suggesting an increased investment into in-home entertainment. The lockdowns are mostly lifted all over the world, and those TVs are still there and are still used.

DoubleVerify recently created an ad verification solution that can verify an ad’s viewability for connected TV. They launched this ad verification in February 2023, allowing advertisers to determine if an ad within a CTV app was actually seen by a user. This marks the first time a viewability measurement solution for CTV has hit the market. On top of our numerous other verification metrics, Genius Monkey employs DoubleVerify for all our video and CTV/OTT campaigns to ensure inventory quality and provide fraud avoidance.