NEW YORK—As the identity ecosystem that increasingly powers the TV and video advertising marketplace faces significant changes and challenges, a new study from CIMM and OpenAP urges the industry to reassess current approaches to identity and identity resolution (IDR) and build a more effective, efficient and durable ecosystem.
The study comes as trends such as rise of digital streaming and privacy concerns are posing major challenges to the video advertising industry and the IDR approaches it uses to plan and measure the effectiveness of ad campaigns.
Executed in collaboration with ThinkMedium, “Identity Resolution for Advanced TV and Video Advertising: A Case for Durability and Transparency” provides a detailed analysis of the IDR landscape, with use cases and recommendations for how the industry can strengthen and improve current approaches.
“Identity and IDR serve as the backbone for planning, activating, and measuring video advertising that is relevant, personalized, and effective,” CIMM Managing Director Jon Watts said. “However, the rise of digital streaming, growing privacy concerns, and other trends are challenging traditional approaches in the TV advertising landscape. The increasing complexity and fragmentation of the ecosystem necessitates a reevaluation of strategies and industry collaboration to support future advancements with IDR in the Advanced TV and Video Advertising marketplace.”
The study found that while there are established technological foundations in place—enabling a variety of advertising use cases— and the well-funded, competitive ecosystem of suppliers promotes innovation and development of new solutions, the lack of transparency and consistency across the industry is costly. Misaligned industry incentives have led to opaque solutions and inconsistent methodologies, resulting in a lack of efficiency and effectiveness, wasted investments, and ultimately erosion of trust in the buy- and sell-side markets, the researchers said.
To address these challenges, the study highlights increased transparency as the most important step in improving the IDR ecosystem, specifically surrounding identity-related data inputs/outputs; practices and processes related to data onboarding, matching, modeling and more; and solutions and technologies that enable IDR.
The findings suggest a two-pronged, collaborative approach to developing industry resources could have the greatest impact: (1) providing buyer education guides to facilitate understanding of fundamentals and provide curated questions for engaging with identity providers (as part of the RFP process); and (2) defining taxonomies and templates for providers to communicate about definitions and methodologies for how data is sourced, matched, aggregated, and validated.
“With the advent of streaming, we believe Identity Resolution will be the single most important thing we as an industry must coalesce around building new standards for over the next year to ensure the sustainability of TV advertising in the future,” OpenAP CEO David Levy said. “Inconsistency in householding leads to increased audience fragmentation and waste, and data translation is often a black box for advertisers. We must build a foundation that prioritizes consistency and transparency across all steps from campaign start to end. The time is now.”
Added ThinkMedium CEO Dennis Buchheim: ”While the landscape continues to transform and adjust to challenges and opportunities, incentives are not always aligned—creating a negative feedback loop that complicates the development of valuable industry-wide solutions. To support demand for interoperability across planning, activation, and measurement, we must come together to define and adopt a practical layer of standard practices.”
The report was developed collaboratively with extensive input from an advisory group of CIMM members, OpenAP, ThinkMedium and consultation with industry participants from across the U.S. media and advertising industries, undertaken during Q2 and Q3 2024.
“Streamlining transparency and standardizing communication among buyers, sellers, and ID providers can establish a solid foundation upon which the industry can increase efficiency and effectiveness and collaboratively address ongoing and new IDR-related challenges within advanced TV and video advertising,” CIMM’s Watts said.
To download the report, click here: “Identity Resolution for Advanced TV and Video Advertising: A Case for Durability and Transparency”
