Ensuring Choice and Control in Your CTV Campaigns

Ensuring Choice and Control in Your CTV Campaigns

Welcome back to our “9 Days of CTV” series! Today, we’re diving into a  foundational element of successful CTV advertising: choice and control. In yesterday’s post, “Why Premium CTV Supply Drives Results,” we learned how quality supply sources can significantly impact campaign performance. Building on that, this post emphasizes the need for clarity and control over your CTV campaigns, enabling you to maximize your investments and avoid costly mistakes.

Navigating the CTV landscape effectively requires more than just reaching your audience; it demands a clear understanding of where your ads are placed and how they are performing. In this complex ecosystem, choice and control are necessary to ensure brand safety, optimize spending, prevent fraud, and achieve your campaign objectives.

Why Choice and Control is Necessary in CTV

Without proper choice and control, CTV campaigns are highly susceptible to costly issues. Here’s why these aspects are key:

• Fraud Prevention: Strong anti-fraud measures are essential to protect budgets from fraudulent activities and ensure accurate campaign data.
• Brand Safety Assurance: Control over ad placements safeguards brand integrity and avoids appearing alongside unsuitable content, with 8 out of 10 of CTV buyers making this their priority.
• Accurate Measurement & Optimization: Transparent reporting delivers crucial insights for data-driven adjustments and improved ROI, eliminating guesswork in campaign optimization.
• Supply Path Visibility: Understanding the source of inventory (direct or reseller) is key to assessing quality and value, and prevents issues related to opacity and intermediaries.

Understanding Supply Paths: Direct vs. Reseller Inventory

Knowing the difference between direct and reseller inventory is fundamental:

Direct inventory offers a clear, short supply chain. This results in better viewability and brand safety. Direct buys provide more transparency, are easier to track and verify, and offer greater control, allowing specific targeting and flexibility. A clear path often means fewer reporting discrepancies and easier troubleshooting.

Reseller inventory involves multiple intermediaries. While it may offer broader reach and sometimes lower costs, it can also introduce complexity, increased fees, less transparency, and reduced control. The longer supply chain makes it harder to track ad placement and performance, increasing the chances of fraud and hidden margins. This complexity leads to more reporting discrepancies. It’s important to note that not all resellers are the same, so due diligence is necessary when vetting potential partners to ensure quality and transparency.

The goal is to have visibility into the lineage of your inventory, and understanding if placements were direct or through a reseller is key. You want to ask questions like: How many partners are in the middle of my transaction? What technologies are you using to prevent discrepancies from the different reporting partners? Can you verify ad delivery and viewability by an actual human?

Brand Safety Measures to Protect Your Brand’s Integrity

Protecting your brand reputation is non-negotiable. Robust brand safety tools and verification partners are critical for any CTV campaign. These tools can offer:

Pre-Bid Filtering: Automatically exclude inventory from unsuitable sites or content categories before the auction takes place, preventing your ad from being considered for those placements. This is important because it prevents wasted bids on inventory that doesn’t fit your objectives.

Content Verification: Employing third-party verification services to analyze content in real-time, ensuring it aligns with your brand standards and prevents placement next to sensitive topics, hate speech, or anything else that could damage your brand. Verification also confirms that the content is what it claims to be, protecting against spoofing and other fraudulent activities.

Contextual Targeting: Aligning your ads with content that is relevant and brand-safe based on semantic understanding of the page/video content. By using this method, you make sure your ad is seen alongside high-quality content and relevant to the content that the end user is viewing.

Reporting and Measurement with Actionable Insights

Comprehensive reporting provides the insights you need to manage and optimize your CTV campaigns effectively. Key reporting features include:

Real-Time Performance Data: Access to current data allows for immediate adjustments to maximize performance. This allows for mid-flight optimizations that drastically impact performance, like managing reach and frequency to optimal levels.

Detailed Metrics: Going beyond standard metrics to include viewability rates, completion rates, frequency capping, device breakdowns, and detailed attribution data. The more granular the data, the more you can understand the whole journey and not just the end result.

Cross-Screen Insights: It’s important to have the ability to compare digital and linear TV spend to optimize reach and holistic frequency.

Customizable Reports: The flexibility to create reports tailored to specific goals and KPIs, facilitates faster and more accurate analysis for impactful decisions.

How Yahoo DSP Provides Choice and Control

Selecting a DSP that prioritizes choice and control is essential. Here’s how Yahoo DSP offers the clarity and control needed for successful CTV campaigns:

Supply Path Visibility: We provide comprehensive visibility into your supply paths through detailed reporting and the Unified TV Report (UTR) powered by VideoAmp. The UTR breaks down each partner in the delivery path for every transaction to the endpoint, clarifying where your ad ran and providing insights into programmatic direct vs. open exchange. This offers a truly transparent overview of your inventory and provides valuable data points for optimization and troubleshooting post campaign analysis.

Strong Brand Safety Features: We offer robust tools, including pre-bid filters and content verification, through our partnerships with leading third-party vendors. Real-time content analysis ensures your ads avoid unsafe environments, with keyword, category, and contextual targeting options. Strict policies for publishers also mitigate fraud. Yahoo DSP holds four TAG certifications.

Granular, Real-Time Reporting: You get detailed, real-time insights to enable data-driven decisions during campaign delivery. Our dashboards offer customizable views and reporting options, including breakdowns by device, publisher, time, and creative. Metrics like viewability, completion rates, and attribution are readily accessible for in flight optimization. Additionally, we provide rich cross-screen insights, enabling you to compare digital CTV spend to linear buys for optimizing incremental reach and holistic frequency. We also offer access to logs and data extracts for deeper post campaign analysis.

Take Charge of Your CTV Advertising

Choice and control are foundational pillars for successful CTV campaigns. By having a clear understanding of your campaigns, ensuring brand protection, and optimizing for maximum impact, you can drive tangible value from your CTV investments. Clarity and control are necessities for driving results. By utilizing tools like the Unified TV Report and leveraging robust brand safety measures, you can confidently manage your CTV campaigns. Next up, we’ll explore AI-driven optimization in CTV.