Mumbai: While CTV has potential for advertisers, it is still at a nascent stage in the country. Scale is the biggest issue it faces. Transparency is an issue in measurement, as is the fact that the industry is facing fragmentation. There are lots of players. But if the stakeholders work together, magic can happen.

These points were made on a panel discussion during GroupM’s division Finecast India and Kantar’s “Addressable TV and Beyond” summit. The discussion looked at the issue of measurement in CTV. While the moderator was GroupM chief strategy officer South Asia Parthasarathy M A, the speakers were Sensara Technologies India CEO Bharath Kumar Mohan, Airtel Ads head of business Vignesh Narayanan, Mondelez director of consumer experience Anjali (Krishnan) Madan, and Pubmatic country manager India Amit Kumar Yadav.

Madan noted that Mondelez obviously looks for new ways to connect with its consumers. If that is where the consumer is going, there is opportunity. But the company is sitting on very low numbers when it comes to connected TV. “We are using it experimentally across our brands, which are premium and cater to a much younger audience. While we are doing test and learn, it is pretty much at a nascent stage, which is where digital used to be when it first started out. It is ‘wait and watch.’ We are learning from what is working and not working.”

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Narayanan said that the problem on the consumer’s side is serving the right ads with the right content. On the publisher’s side, it’s about getting a better ROI. Right now, the industry is on the cusp of something big. On one side are advertisers who are looking at OTT. But the challenge is that the CTV industry is very fragmented. On the other side, linear TV is huge, but the right tools are not available to make it addressable. His company is looking at how to capture a large part of the media and make it addressable. That way, there is a high ROI for everybody. “That is the challenge that we are looking to solve. On the publisher’s side, broadcasters need to be aware of how CTV is working, how it can be scaled up, and how they can make their offerings more addressable. On the consumer side, people wonder if CTV will be as good as digital. It could be. How do we make that happen? If everybody from broadcasters to distribution partners to technology companies and brands comes together, I think we can make magic happen.”

The space is interesting, as many partners need to come together to make the movement come alive. Yadav agreed with Madan that CTV is still at a very nascent stage. Scale is an issue. Transparency is an issue, and the media buyer may want the same transparency that one gets on linear TV. RTechnologies is coming up to help in this area. Flexibility in running ads is also coming up, but it is not as prevalent as a media planner and buyer would like it to be. Having said that, he also noted that his company has been part of CTV across various markets. Addressability in other markets is not yet solved but is more advanced compared to what is going on in India. He gave the example of Australia. There are multiple things being tried, like Finecast ID. Then KSR is done by OEMs. More and more adoption will happen across the industry. Another point made was that TV is getting distributed across many mediums like YouTube and Firestick, and the issue is that there is no one medium for measurement. This is a fundamental challenge. TV is available in many places, and if each partner brings their own measurement system, it will be a challenge. The question is, “How do you have one measurement system to measure TV wherever it is being consumed?” Currently, we are not set up for it. The measurement is in place for traditional TV, but it does not take into account the other ways in which TV is consumed.

Mohan said that there is no better measurement if it can be done on the glass itself. That is the final frontier before it meets a viewer’s eye. The next best way is the set-top box. His company looked at measurement from the point of view of it being perfect. That means that everything the consumer does with the TV should be measured. Also, every moment should be measured, including when a viewer switches away from an ad. Working with OEMs is a great way to do this, and his company works with Airtel, whom he called a thought leader. There has been a lot of learning. Linear and OTT apps can both be measured.

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“Technically, we know how to measure what is being watched inside OTT. We know if certain ads are being played because they can be measured at different levels of technical difficulty. Various forms of measurement can be done, like fingerprinting or something on the cloud. It is all getting there. There are 20 million homes coming up. A good number of them will be with Airtel, Jio, and Tata Sky. All of them are bullish on the hybrid box. It means that you can get viewership patterns for both linear and OTT as well. This has been a minefield. The patterns we have unveiled in terms of how people switch from linear to OTT and back are just mind-boggling.”

He noted that Barc’s unit of measurement is one minute, but a lot can happen in a minute. An ad can be skipped, for instance. “A lot happens inside a minute. We know how the dropoff happens every second the ad moves on. We also know where the dropoff happens. People do so many things and then come back. Nobody knew what was happening because measurement was not happening at that granular scale. There are fantastic patterns that we have seen in terms of how traffic goes in and out and comes back. We are also coming up with new strategies. Should I start doing new content placements? What is the ROI for that? Is there a link between an in-content placement and switching to something else if the first ad shown is for the same brand? We have fascinating data. It is a playground.”

Narayanan said that more granularity in the data is available. So if somebody is watching in a household, traditionally you would target them based on who owns the box, and that is not enough. There are five individuals in a home. So viewing goes from a kids channel in the afternoon to a news or sports channel in the evening. “There are five different user personas in the household. That itself is something we can segment and target. Being a telco, we understand our users in terms of affluence, age, and gender, and their interactions within our ecosystem help us deliver a much, much richer cohort of data that we can cross-tabulate between different mediums. This is something that we have never done before, but it is definitely possible now. The phone number is the unique identity number for all of us.”

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Madan noted that scale is a very important thing because this is not just in terms of getting to the sizeable number that her company wants to target. It is also a fact that there aren’t enough audience insights for Mondelez to target to the extent that it can drive personalisation. “For brands, driving personalisation is very, very important.” When CTV reaches scale, the company can look at addressable audiences that can be divided into cohorts that make sense for its brands and businesses. That is the trade-off. She concluded by saying that, as more clients begin to collect their own data, they will consider how connected TV can supplement that in terms of audience insights.