Ad delivery to connected TV (CTV) and over-the-top (OTT) TV devices is starting to scale into the programmatic landscape and suffers from the same ad fraud issues we see across all video advertising, whether direct or programmatic. No matter if the objective is brand awareness or sales lift, the first step is making sure you’re reaching real people. And whether malicious or not, undetected IVT can devalue performance metrics, or worse, deplete budgets. Check out the following infographic to learn how CTV advertising works, and how to safeguard your investment.
Connected TV in digital advertising refers to content that appears on a TV screen, whether through a smart TV itself or via over-the-top devices connected to the internet.
There’s been a steady rise of CTV usage in the last few years and the increase has caught advertisers’ attention.
Advertisers have allocated an increasing amount of ad dollars toward this medium over the years, and this trend will continue to grow.
A popular method of delivering advertising via CTV is Server-Side Ad Insertion (SSAI), also known as ad stitching. SSAI enables a seamless user experience like traditional TV. As you can see below, the ads are stitched into the content, so all the viewer sees is a continuous video stream.
Zooming out, we see how SSAI servers fit into the broader ecosystem. This is a complex workflow with many players and opportunities for fraud.
In 2020, StreamScam leveraged a malicious SSAI server that spoofed users, devices, and apps. The SSAI server requested ads from ad servers and fired off measurement events to the measurement server without ever serving any content to viewers or devices.
Mitigating the risks of CTV advertising requires diligence from the whole industry. While standards and solutions are being developed and adopted, we recommend doing the following:
Avoid wasted ad spend and get a more comprehensive view of programmatic threats by using Moat by Oracle. Request a demo.
Kori Hill Wallace is a content specialist for Oracle Data Cloud. She loves appetizers, animals, athletics, and alliteration. (She what she did there?)
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