The dream is a powerful one. 

Instead of having the TV business rely mostly on a few hundred big traditional brands— the carmakers, fast-food-sellers and wireless firms that have long dominated the airwaves, what if TV could cater to thousands, if not tens of millions of brands of every size? What if, instead of the $70 billion TV ad market simply moving over to CTV, what if the opportunity was there for TV to also capture tens of billions in e-commerce revenues and direct to consumer spending, a la Facebook and Instagram? 

It all makes sense. That is, until you run into the reality of trying to expand a marketplace right in the middle of massive changes with systems to handle demand that are literally being built on the fly.

As you’ll see here in this excerpt from our latest report, FASTs Are The New Cable, Part 2: Advertising, dreams are never simple to achieve. The good news is that the FAST market has the potential to facilitate this vision over time— and eventually change TV advertising forever….

—Mike Shields

Some DTC Brands Will See The FASTs As An Ideal Marketing Vehicle 

One of the great promises of streaming is that because it represents a combination of the best of TV advertising (sight, sound and motion on a big screen in the living room) and digital advertising (comprehensive measurement, precise targeting, flexibility), that the medium will one day soon be able to cater to not just a few hundred major advertisers, but thousands or millions. The dream, among some in the industry at least, is that TV will become democratized, and like Google and Facebook, it will cater to millions of advertisers.

A potential windfall for streaming could come from direct to consumer brands, many of which have thrived on platforms like Instagram — that is, if they are able to replicate their success in TV.

The FAST environment could provide the volume of inventory and programmatic infrastructure to cater to these brands- theoretically.

While there are many DTC brands that have become so large that TV is a natural next step for their brands — think Casper or Warby Parker — the DTC to CTV wave is still in its infancy.

There are some marketers, such as the digital payments tech company Bolt, that are actively trying to replicate their social buying strategies on streaming, using programmatic partners like MNTN. And it's true that most of the major TV media companies have rolled out data clean rooms and proprietary targeting systems. Yet according to Joel Cox, Co-Founder; SVP Strategy & Innovation at Strategus, these tactics are not being leveraged by the vast majority of brands.

Most TV advertisers are seeking to replicate traditional TV metrics and buying techniques in CTV.

Some of his DTC clients are pushing into streaming, but their budgets are relatively small. Strategus is able to apply some measures to track the effectiveness of these campaigns, but most DTC brands are not able to achieve the precision and optimization they are accustomed to — at least not yet. Cox has been encouraging more clients to test running DTC campaigns in FAST environments, given the relatively affordable pricing and inventory availability, and he expects that more brands will go this route if the economic environment remains uncertain.

We still see most brands talking a big game with data and targeting, and then leaning on the metrics they know when buying CTV. It's not nearly as precise or measureable as it could be at this stage. That's not to say that we're not seeing great success for the DTC brands that are experimenting. It's just very early in the market's evolution. —Joel Cox, Co-Founder; SVP Strategy & Innovation Co-Founder; SVP Strategy & Innovation at Strategus