The advertising industry, having spent decades debating whether a tree falling in a forest makes a sound, has now turned its attention to the more pressing question of whether a television commercial playing in an airport terminal is really a television commercial at all.
The Interactive Advertising Bureau released a draft framework earlier this month that attempts to bring some order to the increasingly chaotic taxonomy of digital video advertising. The document, which carries the somewhat leaden title Redefining Media Types Standard, aims to create a classification system that would allow advertisers to specify what, exactly, they are buying when they buy streaming inventory programmatically.
The need for such a system has become acute. YouTube is now the most-watched streaming service on television screens, and yet many advertisers do not consider YouTube to be television. Free ad-supported services like Pluto TV sit uneasily beside premium streaming platforms. And screens in bars, gas stations and doctor's offices are frequently tagged as connected television inventory, which they are in only the most literal sense.
"In the video landscape there continues to be a ton of smoke and mirrors," said Jesse Math, a former agency executive who is now senior vice president of partnerships at Keen Decision Systems, a marketing mix modeling firm. "There are a lot of especially small to mid-sized businesses that are buying what they think is the big screen, and then they are getting a whole mix of stuff."
The framework would classify video inventory along two axes: the viewing environment (a television in a living room, a phone, a screen at a gas station pump) and the operational attributes of the ad placement (whether sound is enabled, whether the ad can be skipped, and so forth). An advertiser could then configure campaigns according to their own definition of quality.
Danny Weisman, co-founder of the agency Obsessed Media, said the current uncertainty has already pushed some buyers away from programmatic purchasing entirely. "We prefer to go direct I.O. because it's just too complex," Mr. Weisman said. "I just need to know I'm running on Hulu."
(The Interactive Advertising Bureau, for an organization in the communications business, has never quite mastered the communications part; the acronym RMTS lands with a thud.)
The framework does not settle the eternal question of whether YouTube is television. But it does give advertisers a way to answer that question for themselves — which may be the most anyone can hope for in an industry that has made a profitable habit of remaining unsettled.
Original story published in Digiday: "Future of TV Briefing: The streaming ad industry finally has levers to pull on quality"