In light of recent comments around Connected TV’s BVOD user experience – it’s mind boggling that some advertisers still compare Youtube to BVOD. It’s like comparing fast food to a hatted restaurant. Yes fast food is great and one can frequently enjoy it but it doesn’t exactly represent fine cuisine that you’ll tell your friends about.

The viable solution here is to utilise broadcasters first party audiences in a deterministic manner on a TV screen. In addition to this, by facilitating all media buying on the same email addresses, all the deterministic measurement and brand lift capabilities that are unique to YouTube become possible with BVOD.

Connected TV’s BVOD frequency issue has many guilty parties and misguided media folk involved from advertiser to ad technology provider. In fact, it’s a great analogy for the issues facing the industry as it drags itself into the domain of addressable media.

With programmatic trading there has been one consistent challenge which all media owners have had to face – the margins in programmatic don’t match those of direct sold inventory. Hence there are a number of campaigns bought both direct and programmatically that overlap. It is this, and to a degree clunky ‘prefetching’ (programmatic bulk buying) methods, that largely contributes to the user experience that Uber's Lucinda Barlow referenced.

Don’t blame the networks!

Advertisers continue to ask for the cheapest prices – find me 20 per cent savings please. This was one of the hottest topics of 2019, with former Initiative Global CEO Matt Baxter blasting the unsustainable “dog and pony pitching show”, the commoditisation of media and the increased involvement of procurement, all of which is accelerating the race to the bottom on price which networks are being squeezed ever tighter. We are all complicit and therefore should not complain about the results of our own actions.

But there is a light at the end of the tunnel. It starts with providing financial confidence to networks that more dollars are possible with a commitment to technology that improves Connected TV’s BVOD user experience and importantly at a better yield. The key to this is to deliver high value audiences that deliver the optimal outcomes for clients. By moving away from broad demos to high value audiences the networks can start to rationalise value into the programmatic supply chain.

Magnite’s Unified Decisioning solution is a step in the right direction and the adoption of a unified ID – similar to that of Google’s approach within their ecosystem – is a sound mechanism to manage frequency effectively across all channels.

Luckily for Australian broadcasters, technology such as the Unified ID is already in market. If Australian broadcasters were to adopt this mechanism, not only would it be a stride forward in eliminating back-to-back ads on their platforms, but it would give buyers a persistent, person-based ID which is common across all BVOD platforms.

BVOD Connect attempts to answer co-viewing, unified ID, frequency management, VOZ and privacy in one fell swoop but misses the mark when you’re trying to be all things to all measures. The KISS approach might be a better bet. We can get fancy later. It may also potentially fall short of the Online Privacy Bill’s need to stop entities sharing individual’s data, whereas Unified ID and Liveramp’s ATS solutions do not require any data from separate sources to be combined.

Now if anyone tells you the mechanism of IP address or Household IDs is the answer – run, run now! IP addresses change almost as frequently as betting odds. Your house could have a different IP address every day! It nigh impossible to be accurate when the identity is so unstable. So don’t be caught with a donkey on a promise that flatters with fancy but flounders at the bend. 

More gravy

The most obvious and viable solution is to utilise broadcasters first party audiences in a deterministic manner on a TV screen. And apply the Oztam’s data as service utility (not an identity) for buyers to understand the scale that co-viewing and Voz measures. When you couple deterministic targeting and broadcaster-produced content, it is without exception the most powerful environment to advertise in, you have a proposition that is a 250g O’Connor strip steak with herb mustard and confit garlic.

BVOD on CTV is something agencies and advertisers rightfully should pay a premium for. This approach would go a long way to solve for the “shit” experience of seeing endless back-to-back ads on BVOD and eliminate the issue of trading direct dollars for programmatic cents.