What's happening with connected TV? 3 thoughts post Programmatic Press Play

A couple of weeks ago there was the 'Press Play' connected TV event, organized by Programmatic, which we were lucky enough to attend. It was a great opportunity to see, in just one day, what's on the minds of the various players who are helping to drive such an important advertising mainstay in the industry right now. There were three ideas that, in one way or another, were a constant in all the conversations and that we wanted to bring to the table -with the help of Programmatic's own coverage of the event-.

Everything converges on a single television

As usual, "hybrid TV" or "converged" continues to make headway and was on the table at several points during the day. The idea is clear; we need to adapt to the consumption of users who simply "watch TV " - whether it's following a live sports broadcast, watching a reality on demand, a Netflix series or a tutorial on YouTube - and stop seeing these platforms as isolated universes, with infinite and duplicated audiences.

If we want to reach the entire audience and that our reach does not stagnate, we need to design a strategy that combines different channels and platforms in the same mix. Staying only with linear TV or betting everything on connected TV, we will lose an important part of the audience. This was warned by Beatriz Pérez Montequi, from Samsung Ads: "we are in the golden age of television and consumers have understood this, but not so much the industry, which has lagged behind (...) Not seeing television as a whole makes it more difficult for us to reach the audience every day".

But but don't be careless...

But, watch out. That "everything is television" does not mean that the different 'TVs' within 'TV' are all the same and that we can approach the audiences that are predominantly on each of them in the same way. If we want to be effective, we have to adapt. Elena Neila, from Havas, explained: "the ideal is to impact the user in the right environment, where it attracts attention". To do this, creative strategies have to evolve to create ads that adapt in duration, tone or format to the most appropriate style for each case, or to the technical possibilities offered by each platform, among other things. **Silvia Fernández from Sunmedia, or Miguel Fernández-Gil, from PubMatic, were some of the speakers who focused on this point, calling for a greater personalization of creativity for each medium.

And we couldn't leave measurement out.

No merit for us to say it but, as it came up at the table on the challenges of CTV, measurement is essential to continue advancing with guarantees in this hybrid or converged television environment. In fact, knowing the incremental offered by this medium compared to others, doing it through cookie-less solutions, and being able to forget about walled gardens or similar are the main concerns that arise recurrently in the numerous studies that are made in this regard. This concern is also reflected in an agreement such as the one we recently made public with GroupM, whereby we provide measurement data to the agency's clients.

You need data that correlates the different TVs converging on the TV. Without a unified view of the total and incremental reach of one over the other, the type of target you reach with each, or the total frequency with which your ad is seen across all platforms, you'll be hamstrung when it comes to assessing your ROI, reallocating budget or understanding where, in the ocean of possibilities TV offers today, you should impact your audience.