Key insights from brands, agencies, and publishers on how to grow and become more efficient with Advanced TV in 2025
Published: December 10, 2024On December 5, 2024, industry leaders, innovators, and visionaries gathered in New York for IAB Tech Lab’s I Want My CTV event. This year’s program highlighted critical advancements in Connected TV (CTV), with thought-provoking sessions exploring whether Convergence is real and how to approach it, identity and measurement, contextual advertising, device attestation, and how to improve the streaming experience for publishers, buyers, and consumers. The event was hosted by TVRev’s Alan Wolk, and Tech Lab’s Senior Director of Advanced TV, Raymond Holton.
Kicking off the event, Alan Wolk of TVREV delivered a keynote on the state of ad-supported streaming, outlining its promise and the challenges ahead. Wolk underscored the audience’s evolving expectations: with an average of five streaming platforms per household, consumers see TV as a unified experience, and outlined 7 challenges to the industry meeting that expectation.
🔐 Privacy
👐 Transparency
🦺 Brand Appropriateness
📈 Scale
👍 Data Reliability
🔁 Repetition
⚖️ Measurement
This overview set up the agenda for the day. These challenges are the headwinds to be resolved so that content and advertising can be measurable, consistent, and efficient across platforms. As the sessions discussed how to approach each of these areas in 2025, 4 themes came up again and again.
1. Convergence is absolutely real
Following this opening salvo, featuring IAB Tech Lab’s Jill Wittkopp led a panel featuring Wolk, with Publicis Media’s Cullen Deady, and BBC Studios’ Tim Wastney, that explored the “convergence” of streaming and traditional TV, under the provcative title of “Is Covergence Real?” The takeaway? Yes it is. Consumers care less about the medium and more about seamless, engaging experiences. For advertisers, this underscores the need for trackable, measurable, and efficient strategies across screens.
This theme came up a lot over the course of the day, and explains why, following Linear’s lead, Live Events are set to become a critical component of the CTV ecosystem. Consumers expect to be able to find these events in CTV as easily as they could on broadcast and cable so the technology needs to adapt for this level of scale. Rob Hazan from Index Exchange not only provided a snapshot of why live events are so important, along with an explainer of how the signal gets from the arena to your screen, but also demonstrated the need for a path forward within the OpenRTB spec that is currently under discussion in the Programmatic Supply Chain working group.
2. Compliance, Trust, and Addressability concerns are as prevalent in CTV as anywhere else
As privacy regulations tighten worldwide, CTV faces its own set of challenges due to multi-device and household usage. Didomi’s Jeffrey Wheeler emphasized balancing revenue generation with compliance, as something the industry cannot ignore. Trust is critical for all aspects of the ecosystem, and Amazon Ads’ Vinod Panicker and Haritha Devarakonda made a clear case for finding solutions to the challenge of device spoofing that wastes both impressions and ad spend. Their proposed solution, using Tech Lab’s OM SDK measurement software, demonstrated how a Privacy Pass-based device attestation solution can verify the authenticity of a device—a win for both the buy and the sell side.
The complexities of Advanced TV’s identity ecosystem were front and center. Alliant’s Suvadip Choudhury, ID5.io’s Davide Rosamilia, Madhive’s Darien Ford, and GroupM’s Eileen Elsner explored solutions for navigating fragmented identifiers. The consensus: standardization and collaboration are vital to ensure effective buying and seamless audience targeting.
3. Context Matters
GumGum’s Ken Weiner offered a glimpse into the future of AI in CTV and how it can more effectively unlock the value of contextual targeting that also matches the creative. With advancements in generative AI and multimodal models, content analysis is becoming faster, more affordable, and more powerful, which creates opportunity. Advertisers can take advantage of understanding the likely mindset of the consumer when watching a piece of content, and publishers can use new formats, such as those being evaluated in the Ad Format Hero initiative, to deliver messaging that matches that mindset, which will change during the course of the viewing experience, improving the consumer experience by delivering relevant messaging.
Microsoft Advertising’s Alexa Boncimino followed up on GumGum’s message later in the day, emphasizing the importance of matching ad sentiment with content (and the power of Julie Andrews). This session also showcased how IAB Tech Lab’s Content Taxonomy 3.1 update for Programmatic CTV with mapping guidance (now in Public Comment) can help advertisers achieve greater relevance and impact. Given the results of a Slido poll in the room that showed nearly 40% of attendees still using the deprecated Content Taxonomy 1.0 (!) upgrading should be on the roadmap for a lot of companies in 2025, and this mapping and implementation guidance should help that work happen more seamlessly.
4. Good things happen when the buy side and the sell side work together
With more devices and platforms than ever, Tech Lab’s Ad Creative ID Framework (ACIF) provides an indispensable tool for the industry to address challenges as varied as frequency capping, competitive separation, and workflow efficiency. Experts from AD-ID, GroupM, XR Extreme Reach, and NBCUniversal shared how their recent real-world proof of concept initiative, that also included Paramount, used ACIF in live campaigns. It showed how widespread adoption of the framework will lead to meaningful progress in those areas that will increase campaign ROI and revenue opportunities. A major focus in the discussion was that using ACIF did not impact the actual workflows significantly. Once the buy side and the sell side sat down to outline the existing processes, minor tweaks were all that were needed to create a meaningful positive impact.
The need for cross-industry collaboration to address and solve challenges was constant throughout the day, from the initial panel on Convergence, to one of the most animated discussions of the day: “What the Bid Duplication”. As panelists from The Trade Desk, Paramount, Publica, and Jounce Media discussed this controversial topic, it was clear that both sides of the transaction have very valid concerns for consumer experience, publisher revenue, advertiser performance, and technology scale. It was also clear that open dialog and reasonable compromise, along with more adoption (and possibly evolution) of the “pod bidding” capabilities in the OpenRTB spec offered a path forward that all could agree on.
As I Want My CTV concluded, the message was clear: collaboration, innovation, and standardization are the keys to addressing Advanced TV’s challenges. With tools like Content Taxonomy 3.0, ACIF, and Privacy Pass-based solutions on the horizon, the industry is well-positioned to meet these demands. If you want to help drive innovation in any of these areas, consider joining Tech Lab’s Advanced TV Commit Group, which is leading the charge.
Thank you as always to our sponsors – Didomi, Alliant, ID5, and Human. Without you we could not do this!
Barnaby Edwards
Sr Director, Product Marketing
IAB Tech Lab