Understanding the CTV fragmentation challenge

Connected TV has become a central part of how people watch and engage with video today.

With more streaming platforms available than ever and audiences spending increasing amounts of time with ad supported content, CTV offers the strongest way for marketers looking to reach viewers beyond traditional TV. However, this level of growth has introduced new challenges:

• Audiences are spread across platforms and devices, and data is often disconnected, making it difficult to see how everything fits together
• Marketers are left to piece together incomplete signals as they try to understand who they’re reaching and what’s working in their campaigns

The CTV fragmentation challenge

Today’s audiences don’t just watch content in one place; they move across multiple streaming services, frequently subscribe and unsubscribe, and watch on different screens throughout their homes. While this flexibility is great for audiences who like to consume a variety of content, it makes the situation more complicated for advertisers. It’s become extremely difficult to get a single, consistent view of who’s watching what, where or when.

A lot of organizations are relying on IP addresses, but the main problem here is that IP addresses don’t reliably represent individual viewers. They’re shared across devices and change frequently throughout the day, making them an unstable signal. What appears to be a single household may include multiple people, while what looks like a new viewer may actually be the same person returning on a different device. This leads to:

• Wasted ad spend
• Frequency issues
• Inability to measure true reach

How this guide can help

CTV is only going to continue to grow, and so will the challenges with fragmentation. Audiences continue to move freely across streaming services, devices and screens, while data and measurement remain disconnected. The key to solving these fragmentation challenges largely boils down to identity. Having a solid identity resolution framework in place—one that does not rely on IP addresses—gives marketers the ability to actually know who they’re reaching across streaming platforms.

Download the guide to learn:

• Why IP addresses are not reliable identifiers
• Why identity can help solve the fragmentation challenge
• How measurement becomes much easier across streaming platforms when you get identity right
• The importance of personalized creative for CTV