Get the Complete Picture on Campaign Quality and Performance

Over the past few decades, those in the tech world have come to appreciate early January for its mega-expo, CES, which kicks off the year in Vegas with innovations and insights from brands and thought leaders around the world. While this year’s event pivoted to digital, attendees were still privy to a variety of inspirational and thought-provoking content from various players in the space.

Once again, DoubleVerify had a part to play with two virtual sessions that touched on the opportunities in Connected TV and how to power media performance in today’s age of privacy. In case you were unable to attend our CES 2021 sessions, below are some key highlights from our presentations.

Quality Is a Prerequisite to Performance

It’s the combination of quality and performance that truly helps drive successful media campaigns. In order to build a foundation of quality, advertisers should be certain their ads are being fully-viewed by a human being in the intended geography. Moreover, the ad should be viewed in an environment that is relevant and aligned with their brand values. While this sounds pretty straightforward, advertisers are often surprised how much budget can go to waste if these components aren’t addressed in a holistic way. Our solution, the DV Authentic Ad™, verifies ads are fully viewed, by a real person, in a brand-safe environment, within the intended geography. This is a vital starting point, as the DV Authentic Ad™ qualifies ad opportunities in terms of their potential to perform and drive a business outcome.

A World Without Third-Party Audience Targeting

Many advertisers have relied on third-party data to ensure the most precise and effective targeting across their media campaigns. As most browsers are moving to eliminate third-party cookies, advertisers are looking for alternative solutions. At DV, our product team has stayed ahead of the curve, building innovative solutions that do not rely on cookies and offer precise forms of measurement and optimization to improve performance.

Our performance solution includes two core offerings:

• Custom Contextual, which leverages a deep understanding of content and context to enable interest or intent-based targeting
• DV Authentic Attention™, which leverages exposure and engagement metrics to help determine what truly drives performance

During one of our sessions, our SVP, Global Account Management, Joris Stevens, brought DV Authentic Attention™ to life with a specific use case, showing viewers how real-time optimization and post-campaign analysis can help inform the campaign decision-making process and, ultimately, improve performance. You can watch the entire presentation here.

Connected TV (CTV) Presents Tremendous Opportunities, But What About the Challenges?

CTV is very appealing for marketers looking for a full-funnel solution that captures the attention of their audiences on the largest screen in the living room. Even more exciting for advertisers, CTV U.S. households are expected to grow to 86% by 2024 and cord-cutter and cord-never households are also expected to increase to 44% of the population during the same period (according to Leichtman Research Group). Relying on traditional TV alone is a missed opportunity as 32% of households can now only be reached by CTV and the number is growing (statistics according to reports from eMarketer and Comscore).

So, while the impetus is clear, what are the hesitations for advertisers looking to invest in CTV? In our CTV-focused session at CES, our CEO, Mark Zagorski, and CPO, Jack Smith, highlighted the challenges and solutions to succeed in CTV. Here are some of those takeaways below:

Fraud

Fraudsters are undoubtedly enticed by the high CPMs in CTV. In fact, when we compared 2019 with 2020, we saw a 221% increase in fraud impressions on CTV. Have no fear. Our DV Fraud Lab is a team that has been at the forefront of detecting and protecting our clients from all types of fraud — from site fraud to app fraud and fraud on digital video, CTV and other emerging platforms. The team has identified thousands of fraudulent CTV apps over the past year and continues to actively monitor emerging fraud schemes. Most recently, the team discovered the highly active CTV fraud schemes MultiTerra and LeoTerra.

Viewability

It may come as a surprise to some advertisers that CTV inventory is not always viewable. DV’s 2020 Global Insights Report found that about 88% of CTV ads are fully on screen. To address this issue, we offer measurement on whether an ad is fully on screen and provide quartile completion metrics. While this is currently the best proxy for viewability in CTV, it’s only the first step towards ensuring full, consistent accountability and measurability.

Brand Safety and Transparency

In its current state, CTV overall lacks transparency, especially in programmatic. In many instances, buyers are in the dark when it comes to measuring what they actually purchased. This can present problems for both brand safety and suitability. Fortunately, DV offers advertisers a first-to-market solution that enables effective CTV app-level brand safety and suitability controls for advertisers around the world. Furthermore, DV’s Video Complete is the industry’s first and only solution to offer three layers of protection, including pre-bid avoidance, post-bid blocking and Video Filtering. This allows advertisers like NortonLifeLock to substantially reduce non-compliant traffic, helping to improve the quality and performance of their video and CTV campaigns.

Connecting with DV on Performance and CTV Solutions

If you’d like to speak with a representative at DV about how we can help you improve the quality and performance of your digital ad campaigns, contact us here.