How the Rollout of the Euro Can Help Us Unify Our Video Teams, Unlock Savings and More.
The industry is abuzz with both the promise and complexities of video convergence. Beyond all the technology, measurement and currency advancements though, our teams are converging, too. That sounds simple, but designating a team “unified” doesn’t make it so. Huge swathes of our video talent think in households while equally huge swathes think in users.
This user vs household framework is, in fact, the very foundation of each cadre’s mental math throughout almost every aspect of their jobs. It’s so entrenched and reflexive that it’s analogous to whether one has grown up with the Imperial vs Metric system or with Fahrenheit vs Celsius temperatures.
Do we need to – or can we even – decide on users or households in order to unify all our different video teams? The beauty is that we don’t need to. Users and households weren’t adopted arbitrarily, and each is tethered to different delivery infrastructures that are likely to be with us for some time.
We do, however, need to start enabling the legions of people who’ve forecasted, planned, bought, reported and optimized on users (or at least what they thought were users) to get comfortable with household-denominated metrics. We also need to start enabling their compatriots who’ve done the same on households to get comfortable with user-denominated metrics. As to whether the scale and complexity of such a sea change is possible, we need only look back on a real-world example where millions of people changed their collectively entrenched mental math: the rollout of the Euro.
To be clear, I’m not advocating a single currency. If anything, I’m in the multi-currency camp. It’s the rollout that’s important here.
Years before Euro notes were circulated, citizens in each participating country saw prices listed side by side in both their national currencies and Euros. This adaptation period, during which people saw both currencies side by side for long enough, enabled millions of people with different backgrounds, professions, languages, nationalities and beliefs to seamlessly calculate values from their national currencies to Euros and vice versa. Everyone was able to operate seamlessly with both.
Want TV buyers to buy CTV on users across multiple omnichannel DSPs? Or programmatic traders to buy addressable linear on households? Or either of them to work seamlessly across video’s multiple platforms? If so, then interoperability across users and households is key…and not just for industry. It’s also key for consumers and their expectations for relevant, personalized messaging.
Identity tools and their ID graphs, which contain these user-to-household mappings, are already transforming measurement. Measurement, however, occurs after media has run, not before. In order for our video teams to be unified full circle, this user vs household framework can’t just be downstream. It has to be upstream as well. Factoring out and showing identity-based users and households side by side – in enough platforms and across all of their different functions – could help get us there.
How easy or difficult this is depends on the platforms themselves, but having use cases of user-to-household translations that create their own value could stair-step us on our way. Here are a few use cases to get us started. The first is from direct mail and available to us today; the second would require some partnerships and development work on our CTVs, but the benefits would cascade throughout the ecosystem.
Household suppression lists: A lot of the biggest advertisers sell products that, once purchased by a household, aren’t likely to be purchased again by that same household for at least a year or more. Think car insurance, wireless carriers, cable providers, travel OTAs and more. As individual consumers buy such products and services, those purchases become part of their respective advertisers’ 1st-party data. As a result, those advertisers – or their agencies and partners – can then run each purchaser through an ID graph, identify all the users in that purchaser’s household and then suppress the entire household versus just the purchaser.
Most suppression lists are based on users, not households. If industry best practice is to only suppress 1 of the average 2.5 users in a purchasing household, then this use case alone represents a wealth of untapped savings.
CTV Single Sign-On (“SSO”): New CTVs are generally set up via single user accounts. Streaming services, however, offer profiles for each member of or user in a household. As a result, streaming services can target households or individual users at the profile level whereas OEMs are limited to either the household or the individual account holder.
There are both competitive and chicken and egg issues that would need to be sorted out, but SSO has been nearly universal across web content for years. So why not CTVs? Plus, OEMs could build their own SSOs and push them out through their OS updates. An OEM SSO that propagates or syncs multiple user profiles to each of the streaming apps on their OS could not only create user and household targeting parity, but also enable better frequency controls across each OEM’s install base.
Another approach could be the consortia such as OpenAP. If OpenAP were to have a consumer-branded SSO that signed into their members’ streaming apps across different OEMs, they’d be able to manage frequency within their members’ apps across different manufacturers in real-time. Given OpenAP’s move into the currency space, a joint venture with the OEMs could be a possibility, too.
An OEM or Consortium SSO that supports multiple profiles, aka users, would not only enable clearer user and household mappings, but also better targeting, frequency controls and user experiences. Each of these represents a sizeable economic opportunity on its own. Taken together though, the possibilities and potential are even greater.
There are surely plenty of other potential use cases, too. However, our current platforms and ways of working almost always force us down a user or a household path. Thankfully, we have the tools and technology to not only use both, but make them interoperable. Imagine the value we could unlock if we do.
