It’s the worst kept secret in advertising: 2021 was the year of CTV. According to eMarketer, US residents streamed more than 80 minutes of content a day last year — up 8.7% from 2020. A Roku/Harris poll found that more people than ever are streaming TV (over 213 million a month in 2021) — and they’re watching 78 more minutes of CTV than linear TV.
READ MORE: US Connected TV Advertising 2021 – Insider Intelligence Trends, Forecasts & Statistics (eMarketer)
READ MORE: Roku: Streaming Has Surpassed Linear Viewing, Bigger Push for Shopping (The Streamable)
As a result, advertisers are doubling down on their CTV commitments. According to a blog post by CTV marketing platform MNTN, CTV ad spend rose by 59.9% to hit $14.44 billion in 2021 and it’s already on track to reach $19.1 billion by the end of this year.
MNTN also finds that brands are diverting budgets from social media, not just linear TV, into CTV.
CONNECTING WITH CONNECTED TV:
Currently one of the fastest-growing channels in advertising, Connected TV apps such as Roku, Amazon Fire Stick and Apple TV offer a highly effective way for brands to reach their target audience. Learn the basics and stay on top of the biggest trends in CTV with fresh insights hand-picked from the NAB Amplify archives:
- The Ever-Changing Scenery of the CTV Landscape
- TV is Not Dead. It’s Just Becoming Something Else.
- Converged TV Requires a Converged Ad Response
- Connected TV and the Consumer
- Connected TV Opens Up a Million Ad Possibilities
“As digital performance likely craters due to the disappearance of cookies and the gatekeepers exerting more control over their ecosystems, digital marketers will seek a new channel for their spend,” predicts Advertising Week. The growth in spend in 2022 will be in large part due to a shift from digital to CTV.”
READ MORE: CTV 2022: Attribution, Fragmentation, Clean Rooms and More (Advertising Week)
Much has also been made of the bruising ratings agency Nielsen took in 2021, with admissions of inaccurate reporting during the pandemic.
READ MORE: Nielsen Confirms Undercount of Pandemic TV Viewership (Adweek)
“Experts predict that Nielsen’s struggles with CTV attribution will only continue to worsen in 2022, as they lose further influence in the new media landscape,” says MNTN (while pointing ad buyers to its own measurement platform for CTV). “Advertisers and CTV platforms are looking for a better way to control privacy and security while still providing meaningful analytics on ad effectiveness.”
Fraud is rising as CTV gets more popular. Last year, DoubleVerify’s Fraud Lab detailed the SmokeScreen scam that cheated advertisers out of $6 million in just a few months. Nearly 10,000 devices were impacted daily, generating up to 10 million fraudulent requests a day.
READ MORE: How a Screensaver Cheated Connected TV Advertisers Out of $6 Million (AdAge)
MNTN predicts a rise in third-party organizations that work within the walled gardens of CTV platforms to remove any personally identifiable information and deliver the insights to advertisers.
So while there is work to be done to securely connect the dots, 2022 could be a massive year for CTV as a means of finally uniting content with viewers and with brands.