CTV has not only inherited digital’s fragmentation challenges across multiple platforms and walled gardens, but also has many unique complexities of its own. In addition to complex sales relationships, distribution deals, MVPDs and OEMs to name a few, CTV is also converging with all of its evolutionary forbearers (Linear, Data-Driven Linear and Addressable) across each of their respective infrastructures at the same time. Talk about building the plane while flying it. No wonder CTV – and video more broadly – is confusing.  

Identity tools and clean rooms are making transformative strides on the measurement and currency fronts. On the operational fronts though – where most of us plan, strategize, buy and optimize – we’re still speaking different languages. If you’re not so sure, answer this simple question: Are you operating on users, households (“HHs”), some combination of the two or could it even be subject to interpretation?

If we can’t definitively answer this question, then we can’t bring the clarity to this space for which everyone is clamoring. Unified video teams will remain integrated in name only, not function; practitioners and clients will continue to be bombarded by caveats, not certainty; viewers will continue to wonder why they get mediocre ad experiences, not better ones. Fortunately, identity tools and the ID graphs that underpin them hold the key here, too.  

To understand how, it’s helpful to reflect on where all our teams are coming from. To someone who’s grown up in digital, the answer to my question is almost always user (even if it’s often technically Cookie, Device ID or User ID); to someone who’s grown up in television though, the answer is almost always household. These differences are infernally confounding now, but they make sense historically. Broadcast came of age when you couldn’t target individuals and digital came of age when you could. Much to our chagrin, CTV straddles both of these worlds.

To complicate things further, targeting doesn’t always operate on either user or household. Some online video (“OLV”) auctions, for instance, still transact on cookies despite their ever-imminent demise. CTV, however, can’t be targeted with cookies at all. Instead, CTV is usually targeted by User or Device IDs when available or IP Addresses when they’re not.

Now here’s where it gets messy. If you’re buying OLV and CTV in an omnichannel DSP that can also buy display and native, are you buying that video on user or household? What if you’re buying OLV and CTV across multiple DSPs? What if one or more of those DSPs allows customer match (i.e., user) for their owned & operated (“O&O”) inventory, but not for everything else? Finally, what if you’re buying Linear and Addressable TV on households, but CTV on users or both?  

Some platforms operate on users; some platforms operate on households; and to be fair, some platforms enable programmatic traders to select users or households. It is by no means universal though, often unclear, tied to specific inventory types or hidden deep within ad group or line-item settings such as frequency capping. The more buried, caveated or tied to operational minutiae users or households is, the more we’re focused on the technology of video versus its business.

This is where identity tools can save the day. Their ID graphs, by definition, sit on the data for all of these different mappings to users and households. Leveraging these ID graphs to package and elevate platform capabilities into clear, unambiguous users and households across the board – from forecasting and reporting to everything in between – would be transformative. Users and households should be a framework, not a setting.  

Not convinced? Ask if your CTV buys are frequency capped by user or household? It’s a simple question that likely doesn’t have a simple answer. Don’t just ask a single person or team, either. Ask around. TV teams and Digital teams. Ad Ops and Analytics. Direct Investment and Programmatic.  Agencies and AdTech. Even different stakeholders at the same client. You’ll likely get different answers. Many different answers. And that’s both for a single setting and because of it.

This complexity isn’t intentional, either. Each platform simply built its own solution. Most omnichannel DSPs have their roots in digital, predating video convergence by almost two decades. Our industry’s talent, broadcast and digital alike, has also been steeped in years, and sometimes decades, of their own respective ways – to which they naturally default when the available tools don’t enable them otherwise; and while the glut of video’s technical and operational differences can easily balkanize our teams, a framework that brings both users and households to the fore can unify them.