The Streaming Ad Market: Disconnected TV
Plus, the worst deal in sports media
On Tuesday, I was lucky enough to moderate a fireside chat with OpenAP CEO David Levy at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The theme of the OpenAP summit was “Identity in a Streaming-First Ecosystem,” and among the many topics Levy and I talked about were whether the TV business is any better off than the open web, given that it doesn’t have to deal with that pesky, never-ending issue of cookies going/not going away.
After all, streaming advertising is booming - so something must be working, right? Well, while that’s true on a macro level, the major TV media companies are all seeing continued ad sales declines. Plus, as Levy and I discussed, there is often an assumption that CTV has ad targeting all figured out, since so many top services have logged in-users, and brands can bring their data, use clean rooms, and find their consumers everywhere.
Not to mention that all these new currencies that have emerged in recent years, providing more accurate measurement and presumably much better targeting.
Yet to hear Levy and others at the summit tell it, things haven’t quite played out that way - and the state of TV ad targeting and identity is in a somewhat precarious place.
The TV ad business “has a lot of pressure on it,” Levy said. “I don’t think we’ll have to have universal ID [like the cookie], but we need to make it easier to buy TV across platforms.”
Maybe we don’t want TV advertising to turn into a duopoly per se, but for it to thrive, “it needs to be more like the walled gardens,” said Levy.
“We need to push for more consistency to allow our clients to see end to end,” added Cara Lewis, Chief Investment & Activation Officer at Dentsu. Yet right now, that appears to be exceedingly difficult, and may be getting harder, thanks to competitive impulses among the major TV ad sellers (and OpenAP members).
Yes, there is some hope that one of the popular cookie alternatives will take off in CTV, such as ID5, UID 2.0 or the LiveRamp RampID.
However, not only does each media giant seem to have its own identifier, its own audience graph, and unique set of tools, but then you have agencies coming to the party with their own IDs, and methodologies. Take Epsilon, for instance, which employs it’s own people-based ID system.
“I think the tech industry probably needs to shift its focus from picking a singular standard identifier to standardizing the concept of identity itself,” said Michael Pollack on my podcast recently.
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“I don't think there should be a standard identifier,” Pollack added. “Email is just not enough. It's not person-based. Everyone's got multiple email addresses and if they're not resolved to an individual, that's problematic. And so I think there's risk if you go down to just trying to get a single standard for the industry.
Naturally, agencies like Epsilon see their solution as thee solution. Which may indicate where things are headed. Every brand, every agency, is going to go their own way on how they target consumers across multiple platforms. Is that set of circumstances going to alleviate the aforementioned pressure on the TV ad industry?
A natural solution is to expand the TV ad pie dramatically by catering to more performance brands and small businesses.
For years, “we’ve been asking the question, how do we get more marketers to participate in television,” said Krishan Bhatia, VP, Global Video Advertising at Amazon. “We’re just at the precipice of that.”
Which is why we’ve seen multiple ‘self-serve’ platforms in the market, to Levy’s point - they are all promising to emulate Google and Facebook’s ad platforms. Just this week Comcast introduced Universal Ads to that end.
“You can continue to compete in a diminishing market, or you can go on offense and you can go after where the growth is,” said James Rooke, president of Comcast Advertising. “We have to be fishing in the ponds where the growth is.”
These all make sense. Yet again, an identifier that cuts across all these platforms would appear to be vital…unless we think small brands want to buy and optimize across half a dozen CTV systems. In this case Comcast wants Universal Ads to work with lots of non-Comcast properties, such as Paramount (which has its own EyeQ ID) and potentially Warner Discovery and Disney…which by the way just announced it’s own proprietary TV ad buying tool at CES. So much for collaboration.
Meanwhile, Bhatia mentioned that Amazon has recently rolled out a new AI-based tool that should allow the ecommerce giants merchants to automatically generate TV ads “with a click of button…in as little as 15 minutes.”
It’s going to be hard for Big TV to compete with a titan like Amazon, with its vast pools of logged-in users and shopping data, unless it makes buying targeted ads as easy as that.
Sports Streaming Hooliganism
There has obviously been a ton of recent industry excitement surrounding Netflix’s largely successful Christmas Day NFL broadcast. To review:
Following the Jake Paul/Tyson Fiasco, the games were delivered with few glitches.
Even though the games were duds, Beyoncé wowed, and Netflix averaged 20-25-ish million viewers per game. The company says that 65 million global viewers tuned in at some point. It’s not so evident exactly what that number means, but overall, it’s clear that Netflix can draw big sports crowds, while the NFL seems to have established a new annual Christmas TV beachhead.
Lost in the NFL noise was the announcement that Netflix has reached a deal to stream the Women’s World Cup in 2027 and 2031. This should provide massive exposure for the sport, particularly among younger audiences.
Between Netflix’s sports advance, the recent NBA deal with Amazon (and others), plus NBCU’s smash success this past summer’s with the Olympics, it’s more clear than ever that streaming is the future of sports.
Which brings us to what might be the worst deal in sports media - Apple’s exclusive 10-year deal with Major League Soccer.
Source: Antenna
I am not Mr. Soccer, but in recent years, MLS was having a moment. Los Angeles was drawing record crowds. Beckham owns a team. And of course, Messi is in Miami (if you have kids, you know how many of them wear Messi jerseys).
But is anybody watching the games? Is MLS driving huge traffic to Apple?
Well, according to Nielsen’s The Gauge report, Apple is lumped in with the ‘other’ streaming category, meaning that it garners less than 1% of TV viewing - less than Pluto or Samsung TV Plus.
Take a look at the data in the above chart from Antenna. While there was a slight Messi bump in July of 2023, this is not exactly a juggernaut.
I know there are areas of the US that boast of big MLS fandom. Here in New York, you’d be hard pressed to find folks who know that the 10-year old NYCFC exists. The team is barely covered by local sports media, seems to have no stars, and is essentially never on TV. Is this any way to build a sports league? NYCFC should receive a boost when it opens a new soccer-only stadium in Queens in 2027, but until then, I’d love to know how many New Yorkers are streaming these games on Apple TV.
At the same time, Apple’s trying to build an ad business, with the ad-friendly MLS games as an anchor. This can’t be helping.
It’s one thing to hold an existing rabid fan base for ransom by forcing them to subscribe to Peacock for an NFL playoff game, or spend $500 plus for Sunday Ticket. It seems to make little sense to block off a fledgling league from growing its base, before asking them to pay for it.
I’m wondering if this deal has an out clause - it might be good for both parties.
Lastly, I’ve been pumping out lots of of stuff you may have missed over the holidays:
I spoke with Epsilon’s Chief Product officer Joe Doran on my podcast
As mentioned, I also chatted with his colleague Michael Pollack, Epsilon’s Managing Director, Digital Media Solutions
I talked the state of Retail Media in 2025 with Epsilon’s Ben Foulkes
Here is part two of my series with Pixability, with thoughts from top media buyers such as Publicis’ Shelby Savillle, Strategus’ Joel Cox, Noble People’s Danny Weisman and more on YouTube’s brand safety challenges: