NewFronts leaned into CTV performance offerings this year

While performance marketing is being souped up with generative AI, it’s suffering from a lack of robust measurement of CTV marketing spend, which only continues to grow.

That can make proving performance marketing’s worth a challenge. Many companies at this year’s IAB NewFronts, like Comcast Advertising, DoubleVerify, and Future Today, touted CTV performance-focused offerings to woo marketers who are obsessed with performance.

“Historically, a lot of credit has been given to those that are closer to last-click attribution,” James Rooke, Comcast Advertising president, said during a mock interview with Seth Meyers that aired during the company’s NewFront presentation. “Premium TV has been under-credited for the value that it delivers.”

Run the numbers: To help with measurement, Comcast Advertising rolled out Outcomes+, a CTV-focused targeting and attribution performance product, at its NewFronts presentation on Wednesday. The suite of tools includes Lens, an “AI audience discovery engine that allows clients to identify and target households with no or light exposure to national TV campaigns,” according to the company. The tool is supposed to help advertisers strategize their media buys.

Outcomes+ already has some brand partnerships to provide additional sources of data advertisers can use to measure performance. Mastercard will provide “aggregated and anonymized spend insights” and Fandango (which is owned by Versant) will supply movie-ticket sales information, among other partnerships. One client who used Outcomes+, the automotive brand Mini USA, claimed that participating dealers “saw a conversion lift of 35% for new and used cars,” Kelly Perone, Comcast Advertising technology and product SVP, said.

“We’ve heard feedback from many of you…that the gap between reach and certainty, between spend and proof, is costing your business money,” Perone said. “It’s hard to activate campaigns that you can’t be entirely sure are driving real business results.”

During its onstage presentation, streaming technology vendor Future Today debuted Audience Advantage, a targeting and measurement offering tied to its Fawesome streaming service.

The tool leans on several measurement partnerships from Circana, MRI-Simmons, among others, to evaluate campaign performance. That includes brand and emotional lift measurement through research firm Sleeping Giant Labs, incremental reach through iSpot, and attention and co-viewership data from TVision.

Be honest: While measurement is critical to proving performance, transparency into campaigns is important for marketers to understand what’s working and what’s not. That can mean accessing more granular data on what content on streaming TV drives performance.

A “lack of transparency has been a structural problem” for adland, according to Johanna Wahlroos, VP of marketing, global strategy, and planning at digital media measurement platform DoubleVerify said during its presentation at the IAB NewFront. “We know 70% of advertisers say they can’t justify putting spend into streaming TV without better transparency,” Wahlroos added.

“Data changes how marketers choose to invest…This is the difference between knowing that your ad ran on some streaming app or knowing that it’s running against March Madness basketball content to drive the exact audience that the market is trying to achieve,” Alex Groysman, VP of ad product development at Spectrum Reach, said.

To that end, DoubleVerify announced a partnership with Spectrum Reach, Charter Communications’s ad sales business, on Wednesday. Spectrum Reach is the first partner to sign onto DoubleVerify’s Certified Transparent Streaming Program.

(The program allows streaming TV publishers to share granular data on content, like show-level data, through a clean room that is shared in aggregate to comply with existing regulations.)

DoubleVerify will ingest Spectrum Reach show-level data to produce data for advertisers to help understand what apps their ads ran in and what content they ran next to, Marissa McArdle, SVP of product management, streaming TV at DoubleVerify, said onstage.

DoubleVerify will use data licensed from IMDb to label genre and maturity ratings, she said.

“When granular content-level metadata signals are transparently shared, ad campaigns can be optimized with far greater precision,” Groysman said. “That precision ultimately drives statistically better outcomes for performance-driven marketers.”