Shrinking addressable supply a ‘challenge’ for CTV, Yahoo ad data lead warns

Current privacy regulations mean 30% of audiences are non-addressable, but Yahoo has forecasted that with Google’s cookie deprivation and incoming consent regulation in five US states, the percentage will increase to 75% by 2024.

“The impact will be felt across optimizing web or in-app to CTV conversions, making it more challenging to measure the effectiveness of CTV buys,” Gardelli said.

Known audience signals gathered from web and in-app will also decline, making this type of audience targeting more difficult, he explained. “The effect may mean first-party, consented and logged-in data along with CTV-specific and viewership data (such as ACR or set-top-box) will become more coveted,” Gardelli said.

In the future, the majority of supply will not be addressable. “We will have to come up with completely new ways of trading media,” Gardelli said.

The challenge for the industry is that as the addressable supply shrinks but the same number of advertisers are trying to target a smaller pool of supply, competition increases and so do budgets.

“For advertisers focused on preserving addressable there is going to be a big challenge on preserving ROI in the future,” Gardelli said.

But the opposite trend is happening with non-addressable supply, he explained. In fact, non-addressable supply is rising, and since brands aren’t prepared to pay for the ID-less inventory, competition is low and prices are 30-40% lower.

“We believe the next major big advantage lies with the non-addressable,” Gardelli said.

Brands have been testing solutions to gain access to these ID-less users. Gardelli has seen a “resurgence” in panel-based solutions. “Ingesting the learnings of known users and projecting them to unknown audiences can help advertisers achieve effective targeting and measurement across CTV,” Gardelli said.

Contextual advertising is another method brands are applying. Gardelli said: “The evolution of contextual signals and tools will also allow brands to control content adjacency based on suitability and sentiment – an attractive alternative to audience targeting where not available.”

Then there are seller-defined audiences, which give publishers the responsibility of segmenting audiences. Even though most of the supply will become non-addressable in the future, Gardelli said it’s paramount to protect the addressable audience that is left. Optimistic in the potential to do so, Gardelli advised investing in first-party data, ensuring there is a clear value exchange for the consumer and “regaining control of the privacy narrative by being very transparent.”

He also suggested increasing user registration by incentivizing audiences to keep logging in and signing up for other services and products. “Subscriptions are also incredibly important,” he added.

“It’s the right time to be testing and learning how to preserve addressability for the future,” Gardelli concluded.