Scott Klein, Chief Innovation Officer at Pixability chats about the future of digital advertising and adtech:

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Welcome to this MarTech Series chat, Scott, tell us about yourself and more about your role at Pixability…

I’ve spent my career in product and engineering leadership positions in ad tech companies, helping to define, build and deliver solutions that solve important advertiser problems. As Chief Innovation Officer at Pixability, I have just such a role as I oversee our product and engineering teams, building critical solutions for effective CTV and YouTube advertising. I was thrilled to join the company both because it’s a leader in the space and growing rapidly, but also because of the respect I have for the incredible team at Pixability. So far it’s already been a great ride.

What excites you most about the state of CTV and digital ads today? Can you take us through some of the dominant trends you are observing in this marketplace?

We’ve all watched the huge shift away from traditional TV viewership and towards CTV viewership. We recently did a major survey of consumers that showed that only ¼ of US consumers will continue to have traditional cable or satellite TV in a few years. What’s exciting to me about this shift is that there are some very key challenges to CTV advertising, that, if fixed, will open up whole new worlds for brands.

An example of one of these challenges is that YouTube represents the largest reach on ad-supported CTV right now at over 40% of viewing hours according to Nielsen, yet many advertisers are not effectively running YouTube CTV campaigns alongside other CTV platforms. There are some great strides being made to make YouTube a core part of CTV plans including solutions our team is focused on around effective audience extension through deduplicated reach and cross platform alignment. Additionally, even those running YouTube alongside other CTV platforms don’t have effective ways to identify the audiences that primarily use YouTube for their media consumption, which is something that can be resolved through the use of deep content insights. Another big challenge is that when running CTV campaigns programmatically, advertisers often aren’t provided with transparency into where their ads will run. They may know in general what platforms will be included but have little insight into the specific content the ads appear on. This too is a challenge that is complex but fixable and as we as an industry take steps to address it, we’ll see even the die-hard linear TV advertisers accelerate their shift to CTV.

How according to you will CTV and the tech behind it evolve over the years (what types of features) will come to the forefront more?

With cookie deprecation set to happen, the advertising industry is moving towards privacy durable, contextual solutions that won’t be affected by the change. I think we’ll see much better technologies evolve to determine and drive contextual relevance on CTV in coming years.

Advertisers will be able to target beyond just surface level IAB categories of content, into more nuanced contextual variables. In addition, I mentioned the lack of transparency in CTV before.

Advertisers are frustrated with not seeing information about where their ads will be running and not seeing post-campaign information about where they ran, so we’ll see solutions that provide that detail. I also believe we’ll see technology that can better tie together CTV campaigns across all the disparate players, including the walled gardens like YouTube.

Other significant evolutions will address the challenges of bad end user experience; in the short term, Open RTB 2.6 has introduced features to address the repetition of ads being served from the same brand, brand competitor adjacency and other issues. There are also amazing technologies that will measure emotional responses of consumers that will be a big part of the CTV future.

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As advertisers adjust to new data collection models today, what top of mind tips and best practices do you have for digital advertisers to optimize their ad spend and ROI?

One challenge with some forms of CTV advertising is that there is a lack of measurement data outside of view rate information, which for non-skip ads tends to be pretty uniform.

Advertisers should work with platforms like YouTube and Amazon Fire TV and others to demand deeper measurement data other than just view rates, and even track all the way through to products purchased in some cases.

I also believe we’ll see a huge rise in the use of data clean rooms and think all advertisers need to become experts so they can protect user privacy while maximizing their ability to find audiences and report on engagement. Privacy and data collection are making the advertising ecosystem more complicated, not less. I wish that wasn’t true, but it is. Advanced techniques that require more investment and know-how are table stakes and advertisers will need to rely on trusted partners.

If you could change five things about adtech and CTV ad models, what would they be?

This is a really good question! 1 minute, let me ask ChatGPT … just kidding!

In CTV there has been a lot of discussion around post-activation reporting. Advertisers want it but many publishers don’t want to provide that level of detail and amazingly the technology doesn’t make it easy, especially on programmatic.

What I would like to change here is helping advertisers and publishers understand that there is a perfectly reasonable middle ground: context and insights. If advertisers can have information on the context of the show their ads were run against and insights on how different contexts influenced their outcomes, they would be thrilled and publishers wouldn’t need to worry about giving out detailed information about their inventory. It is a win/win.

Unintended consequences of removing 3rd party cookies. Publishers and advertisers are going to be incentivized more than ever to collect match data (email, phone number, address) and obtain consent. All of this data is going to be stored server side and shipped around to various clean rooms, making end-user data and privacy more vulnerable, not less. How the industry used  3rd party cookies wasn’t right and it had to go away but we could have come up with (and I hope we eventually do) a better solution.

Ad Units! So many digital ad units are so awful. How can one of the most creative industries still be stuck with Skyscraper, Leaderboard and Large Rectangle? The flexibility of a video based ad unit coupled with digital advertising technology might be the answer the industry is looking for!

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A few common misconceptions about digital advertising you’d like to dispel?

Digital Advertising is simple enough that anybody can do it – There are a lot of really good, impressive, self-service tools out there and I am a fan of all of them but they only scratch the surface of the complexity of digital advertising. If your brand really wants to effectively advertise, you need experts not only in digital advertising but also on the nuances and capabilities of the channels you want to use.

Cookiepocalypse is going to kill audience targeting tactics – Although it is going to get a little more complicated, audience targeting isn’t going to evaporate. Google, Facebook, etc. have plenty of inventory that will not be impacted by 3rd party cookies going away. For example on YouTube, you’ll still be able to serve ads to users who recently searched for a certain product or topic on Google, and be able to leverage many other behavorial signals Google will still have access to. Ultimately, clean room solutions are going to allow publishers, advertisers and data providers to still provide audience-based tactics. Advertisers are also going to see major benefits in improved contextual awareness to augment audience targeting.