For years, the streaming advertising market has operated under a peculiar arrangement: advertisers could target viewers with remarkable precision — down to household income, shopping habits, even the brand of yogurt in the refrigerator — but could not reliably learn which shows their commercials actually ran during. It was a bit like being handed the wine list but not being told what you ordered.
That situation is changing, at least partially. FreeWheel, the ad technology firm owned by Comcast, is introducing show-level reporting for advertisers using its buying platform, Buyer Cloud. The reports, available roughly two hours after ads are delivered, will tell advertisers the names of the programs where their spots appeared.
The catch, as is often the case with industry initiatives promising transparency, is that publishers must opt in. So far, the roster includes A+E Global Media, NBCUniversal, Paramount, Warner Bros. Discovery, Fuse, Spectrum Reach and Xumo — a respectable list, though notably missing some of the streaming services that have become central to the market. (Netflix, for instance, is not among them.)
"Contextual in streaming is much superior," said Mike Treon, head of CTV and video strategy at PMG, the agency. Mr. Treon suggested that the availability of such reporting from FreeWheel could pressure other sellers to follow. "It's not just limited to what platforms like FreeWheel will do," he said. "You've got to think of the downstream implication."
Show-level reporting has been, as industry parlance has it, table stakes in traditional television for as long as there has been traditional television. Fixed schedules made it simple. Streaming's on-demand nature requires explicit disclosure — which some publishers have been reluctant to provide, fearing advertisers might cherry-pick popular programs or demand lower prices for the rest.
Jon Mansell, vice president and United States head of demand at FreeWheel, acknowledged the concern. "One of them is anxiety around channel conflict," he said.
The new reports will not include episode-level or network-level details, and the depth of information will vary by publisher. A+E Global Media, for example, plans to provide impression counts, so an advertiser could see how many spots ran during "The First 48" versus "Duck Dynasty."
A subtler problem remains: the industry has not agreed on how to format show titles. If one system calls a program "The First 48 Hours" and another calls it "First 48 Hours, The," the data may not match up properly.
"If these agents aren't speaking the same language," Mr. Treon noted, "that could cost consequential amounts of money if those errors are made."
Which is to say, transparency is a fine thing to promise, but someone still has to read the report.
Original story published in Digiday: "Future of TV Briefing: FreeWheel adds show-level reporting to tackle streaming’s transparency problem - Digiday", by Tim Peterson