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Blog / Insights
The CTV supply landscape can be a perplexing confluence of paths to your desired audiences, but not to worry — we’ve got the insights to help you streamline this complex ecosystem and successfully reach your target audience.
Mark Fleisch
Director of Advanced TV Sales & Strategy, Yahoo
The Connected TV (CTV) supply landscape, while consisting of only a few dozen publishers and distributors, can be complex, opaque and oftentimes confusing to buyers. The ultimate goal of reaching a desired household requires buyers to decide amongst a myriad of ways to purchase TV ads from going direct to a publisher all the way to programmatic buying in an real time bidded environment. Here we will break things down and help make sense of it all. We’ll also highlight a few different ways one could approach buying TV programmatically, maximize reach of all TV households, and potential pros and cons of various strategies.
First, let’s outline why this fragmented landscape can quickly become confusing to buyers. Connected TV (CTV) ad inventory doesn’t really exist in silos, meaning there isn’t just one magical CTV platform to reach all your desired audiences. It's more like a matrix in which there are multiple paths to reach your audiences. To overly simplify, advertisers can buy ads through publishers and distributors. Traditionally, the publishers were TV Networks and distributors were the cable companies and network affiliates. In today’s world there are multiple methods through which publishers can distribute content such as linear TV networks, direct-to-consumer apps, premium video-on-demand (VOD), licensing content to other streaming apps, creating FAST channels (free ad-supported streaming TV), etc.
Where it gets even more complicated is that in today’s world, publishers are becoming distributors through direct-to-consumer apps, like Disney+, and distributors are becoming publishers and creating their own FAST channels, like The Roku Channel. ARG!!
Still tracking? If your head is spinning you are not alone. Many video buyers struggle with the question of what to buy in order to reach their audiences in this highly fragmented market.
We believe an easier way to look at the Connected TV landscape is through the lens of the consumer. In TV terms, this is really done through the lens of a household. In this infographic we lay out some hypothetical households to help you understand the various ways you could reach some or all of them through various supply channels.
Here we have a few CTV households. Each of them are accessing content via various smart TV devices, distributors, and publishers including: smart TV operating systems, ad-supported streaming apps and services, and access to FAST channels. In addition, a few of them are also subscribing to digital cable services aka vMVPD (virtual Multichannel Video Programming Distributor).
As you can see in this example, there are many ways to reach some or all of these households, but there isn’t one supply partner that can reach all of them. Let’s take a look at some of the ways in which a buyer could reach each of these households in this scenario.
One thing that is clear, there are many different paths to reaching consumers in this space which presents both a challenge and an opportunity. The challenge lies in determining the right mix of supply partners and supply paths for your brand, while striking the right balance between factors like premium environments, reach and frequency, and ultimately, performance. The opportunity is in finding efficiencies within the matrix. This is a primary reason why many buyers have chosen to work with DSPs, like Yahoo DSP, which offer advanced identity graphs and cross-screen measurement solutions to help them understand the following:
Reach out to your Yahoo DSP team to learn more about how we can help you navigate the Connected TV landscape.
¹Forbes. "Top Streaming Statistics In 2024." August 2024
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About Mark Fleisch
Mark Fleisch is an experienced media sales and strategy leader with 15+ years of success in digital media and ad tech in addition to several years in TV planning and buying. At Yahoo, Mark is responsible for driving demand for the Yahoo DSP suite of Unified TV solutions and partnering with agencies and brands to further the advancement of programmatic TV planning, buying, and measurement. Mark also serves on the Board of Directors for the Chicago Advertising Federation which seeks to elevate the marketing community and foster thought leadership in Chicago.