The Next Wave of Identity and Connected TV: Takeaways from Ad Week Europe 2022

For a week in late May, creative agencies, publishers, advertisers and even TikTok influencers gathered at the Picturehouse, London for the first in-person Ad Week Europe since 2019. Talks, interviews and networking events covered the full spectrum of the advertising industry’s hot topics to eager listeners. 

For those of us in adtech, the two (predictable) buzzwords were Identity and CTV, which were at the forefront of each conversation on the Tech Lab stage. In this blog, we have condensed our learnings and the impact of these two trends on the industry and Amobee for you to explore. 

No cookies? Let’s go shopping

In previous years, the cookieless future has been a well-trodden topic in the industry, but as cookie deprecation becomes even more of a reality, the conversation has shifted from theory to the delivery of actual solutions. More specifically, how can we approach identity and measurement in the new cookieless world?

A highlight was the panel on Future-Proofing Addressable Advertising featuring Rebecca Ackers, Managing Director UK & Nordics at Magnite, Ben Walmsley, Managing Director at The Sun and Daniel Knapp, Chief Economist at IAB Europe. The speakers introduced us to the  ‘Splinternet’ –  an apt name for the fragmentation of the open internet into silos. When publishers are adapting more quickly to the changing nature of identity than advertisers, agencies are immediately presented with a unique opportunity to drive innovation through testing and adopting solutions across fragmented environments. 

However, with an increasing amount of solutions emerging in the market, the correct approach is getting more difficult to find. We at Amobee see the identity solution as a combination of multiple identity providers and measurement — where advertisers can allocate, deploy, and analyze audiences across all forms of TV and the open web holistically rather than with a siloed approach. When comparing analytics solutions in the marketplace, advertisers ought to seek advertising technology platforms that are interoperable with multiple currencies, panels, and identities – and feature an advanced reporting suite that fully supports cross-screen investment strategies.

Delivering seamless experiences in the age of CTV

At times it felt that you could not escape conversation on CTV at AdWeek, which we gladly welcomed at Amobee! We witnessed agencies, publishers, DSPs, SSPs and data providers all getting involved in conversation across the different panels and sharing their diverging POV on the future of CTV. All players recognised that collaboration is evidently needed for a successful widespread adoption of CTV planning, execution and measurement. However, it is clear that broadcasters, by collaborating with the right technology partners, remain at the forefront of content delivery through CTV applications and continue to be a dominant force in the market.

Whilst excitement around CTV is growing, we must not lose sight of the evolution of traditional TV. 

Following Netflix’s news on subscription drop — pushing the company to evaluate AVOD as a service offering—  it was only natural for Samba TV to share their own CTV insights. Indeed, Ad Week coincided with the release of Samba TV’s State of Viewership Q1 2022 report, which outlines TV viewership trends across both the UK and Germany. Most notably is the oversaturation of linear advertising impressions, with 93% of linear impressions reaching 55% of German households in Q1 2022, meaning that the other 45% of households are becoming increasingly harder to reach for TV advertisers seeing only 7% of the linear impressions. This shows us that the future of viewership and content consumption is moving into a combination of Linear and Digital TV. In order to reach their audiences, advertisers now need to build holistic TV (Linear and digital) strategies that combine data from multiple sources but also be able to unify measurement.

These changes in the industry are opening additional premium content to advertisers like never before, but significant pressures remain on publishers to ensure a seamless user and buying experience in a controlled data environment. The aim when launching TechAlliance, a joint venture between Amobee and smartclip, was to fulfill these needs by providing a single access point to pan-European digital TV inventory. Through a seamless buying experience, advertisers can ultimately reach those elusive audiences not currently seen on traditional linear channels. We are looking forward to addressing these current challenges in TV buying for Pan-European clients and, through innovation, bringing premium broadcaster inventory into the programmatic world. 

About Amobee

Founded in 2005, Amobee is an advertising platform that understands how people consume content. Our goal is to optimize outcomes for advertisers and media companies, while providing a better consumer experience. Through our platform, we help customers further their audience development, optimize their cross channel performance across all TV, connected TV, and digital media, and drive new customer growth through detailed analytics and reporting. Amobee is a wholly owned subsidiary of Tremor International, a collection of brands built to unite creativity, data and technology across the open internet.

If you’re curious to learn more, watch the on-demand demo or take a deep dive into our Research & Insights section where you can find recent webinars on-demand, media plan insights & activation templates, and more data-driven content. If you’re ready to take the next step into a sustainable, consumer-first advertising future, contact us today.