Future of TV Briefing: TV, streaming ads’ overexposure issue is turning off audiences

“It has probably become a bigger issue,” said Ashwini Karandikar, evp of media, technology and data at the American Association of Advertising Agencies.

The reason that the ad overexposure issue has persisted, and even worsened, is not because there’s no way for ad buyers and sellers to manage how often a given ad is shown to a given viewer. There is — more than one, actually: The U.K. has a creative ID standard called Clearcast, and in the U.S., there’s the aforementioned AD-ID. The issue is not an absence of support from ad buyers and sellers, either. 

More than 80% of Fortune 500 advertisers support AD-ID, according to AD-ID CEO Nada Bradbury. “It’s not a lack of interest by the advertisers, and it’s not a lack of interest by the agencies or the publishers for that matter. It’s making sure people are sticking to the little components that need to happen in between,” she said.

In other words, it’s an execution issue, compounded by the growth of the streaming ad market and streaming ad viewership. Either advertisers and/or agencies are not properly appending the identifier to the metadata attached to their creative assets — such as by embedding it among the tags wrapped, according to IAB Tech Lab’s Video Ad Serving Template standard — or the AD-ID is not being properly passed along within the programmatic bidstream.

“It feels like folks are more than half of the way there. They’re just missing that component when it gets dropped sometimes,” Bradbury said.

To address that execution gap, AD-ID is working with other industry organizations, including IAB Tech Lab, to train members of the industry on how to implement the creative identifier. The two organizations are also working to develop a method for programmatically checking that an AD-ID is present and valid. Additionally, IAB Tech Lab has introduced a system for companies to monitor and manage creative IDs, including AD-IDs, called the Ad Creative ID Framework, and XR Extreme Reach has signed on to support the framework with its video ad server.

So there is progress. But there’s still a lot of work needed to be done to rein in the overexposure issue.

“It is going to continue to be constant work in terms of checking and repeating. A lot of operational work. It is not necessarily difficult. It’s just there’s just so much that it is going to be a function of doing it and getting it at every step,” said Karandikar.

“It’s such a simple fix that could be truly impactful,” said Bradbury.

This article has been updated to reflect that AD-ID has rebranded to spell its name in all capital letters.

What we’ve heard

“I was really high on the FAST channels this year for that reason alone: just more available inventory.”

— Agency executive on the streaming ad market’s supply-demand dynamic

Numbers to know

3: New maximum length, in minutes, for YouTube Shorts.

$0: The additional cost (or lack thereof) for subscribers of Charter’s Spectrum TV Select pay-TV service to receive access to Peacock’s ad-supported tier under a new pact.

£52 million ($68 million): The amount of money that Channel 4 lost in 2023 as a result of a weak ad market and its own increased digital investment.

What we’ve covered

TikTok joins the AI-driven advertising pack to compete with Meta for ad dollars:

• TikTok’s Smart+ is designed to automate everything from creative development to targeting and optimization.
• Google and Meta offer similar tools with Performance Max and Advantage+, respectively.

Read more about TikTok here.

Omnicom Media Group strikes partnership with Snap for creator collaboration:

• OMG’s influencer marketing agency Creo will work with Snap’s Snap Star Collab Studio to develop campaigns with creators.
• The agency group’s consumer packaged goods clients are likely to be the first to use the program.

Read more about Omnicom’s Snap deal here.

What we’re reading

Amazon looks to up its ad load:

Having apparently constrained its streaming ad inventory in its debut year, Amazon Prime Video plans to increase the number of ads it will show viewers on its ad-supported tier next year, according to Financial Times.

Meta intros AI video generator:

Facebook’s and Instagram’s parent company has joined the likes of OpenAI and RunwayML in developing a generative AI tool that would allow people to create videos from text prompts, according to Bloomberg.

The NFL and Skydance discuss a deal:

The sports league and Paramount’s soon-to-be parent company are negotiating a deal that could have the latter acquire the former’s media division, including its cable TV network, according to Bloomberg.

Comscore and Vizio renew their ACR deal:

While Walmart’s acquisition of Vizio still has yet to close, the question of whether Vizio’s smart TV data will remain available to the broader market seems to have been answered (at least temporarily) with Comscore renewing its deal with the smart TV maker, according to Stream TV Insider.

Meta unifies its creator monetization programs:

Rather than creators having to qualify for each of the platform’s monetization programs separately, they will now need to only qualify for the Facebook Content Monetization Beta, which is invite-only at the moment but will open up more broadly next year, according to Tubefilter.