TV Advertising May End Up Just Like Digital - As in Awful

Is Amazon showing us a glimpse of a dystopian CTV future?

Cannes is coming. I am super excited to be working with Brian Morrissey of The Rebooting on an awesome three days of content. Check it out here.

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I’ve seen the future of advertising on connected TV - and my advice is - be afraid.

Let me back up.

I recently was running low on dog food, and my usual DTC provider - the usually reliable Chewy.com - didn’t have my brand in stock.

Not that I’m precious about these things, but if you own a dog, you know what can happen if you mess with their food, and it involves something you personally have to pick up with a bag every day.

So rather than run to the actual store, I found and bought Shadow’s usual on Amazon.com. It came within 24 hours.

And then the fun began.

It just so happened that we’ve recently started to watch the teen spy show “Alex Rider” on FreeVee. There is an everlasting struggle to find TV that you can watch with your tween/teen that isn’t painful, and I have to say, ‘Rider’ is pretty solid.

It’s also free, and ad-supported on FreeVee - which admittedly I don’t watch a ton of.

To be sure, every streaming service struggles with ad frequency problems, for a myriad of reasons. You’ve surely had a viewing experience that drove you nuts, seeing the same ad again and again.

I promise you, you’ve never seen anything like this before.

Immediately during the show, we started to get ads for the natural pet food brand The Farmer’s Dog. During every break. Sometimes twice a break.

You might have thought that FreeVee was just having a bad night. Then it happened again the next night. And the next. Although this time, there were a few other ads mixed in- from the exact Purina brand I’d recently purchased for my dog.

It got to the point that during each break my 13-year old would either laugh or moan each time the ‘Farmer’ ads popped up.

Is this just a crazy coincidence? Did the media buying agency just have a bunch of inventory to burn with Amazon, and went nuts on FreeVee? Maybe. I’d actually heard from folks in the industry that for all its talk, Amazon wasn’t very far on it’s promise to link TV advertising with its vast vast database of shoppers and purchase behavior.

Yet to me, this one felt like the TV equivalent of being chased around the web by ads for shoes that you changed your mind about. Only much worse, because you could see, hear and almost feel the Farmer ads in your living room. It had the effect of making me both feel like shit for apparently buying my dog lousy process food, and also never wanting to buy anything from The Farmer’s Dog.

Again, this could all be a coincidence. A weird moment in time. But if it’s not - well it doesn’t bode well for CTV, which is supposed to be the greatest medium of all time given it’s potential for blending the power of TV with the targeting magic of digital advertising.

If CTV becomes all about being bombarded - we’ve got real problems. Which may get even worse. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Amazon is considering launching an ad-supported version of Prime Video (not to be confused with FreeVee?). One would assume a major selling point of more ads on Amazon shows would be the potential for unlocking all sorts of powerful retargeting, and eventually shoppable ads.

Because that is where the medium seems headed. There was a massive emphasis on retail media and CTV at the Trade Desk’s big ad showcase in New York this week, including a strong intimation that retailers would be able to do far more prospecting of customers using first-party data on TV, not just online.

CEO Jeff Green predicted that by Q2 of next year, the majority of CTV ad impressions will accommodate the post-cookie targeting alternative UID 2.0 - meaning they’ll be ‘targetable.’ And because most of CTV features logged in users, “it’s value is only going up.”

This could be spectacular - or become nightmarish. To be clear, I’m all for making TV ads smarter, better targeted, maybe even interactive. Amazon should be able to make this sort of thing work better than anybody - theoretically.

I realize that maybe it’s premature to just this market based on a few experiences - maybe Amazon just needs more advertisers buying this way, more volume, tweaks to the targeting. Still, if one of the supposedly most technologically sophisticated companies on the planet can’t deliver a user experience that is better than my Farmer’s Dog travails, then who can?

And who’ll be able to tolerate TV advertising if they can’t? Maybe dogs?