An Interview with Johan Kristian Holm at Video & Audio Operation Lead, GroupM
It’s no secret that our industry is in flux. The third-party cookie will be a thing of the past come January of next year. That development happens to coincide with a shift away from traditional TV and radio and into digital channels.
What will advertising look like in the age of CTV and digital audio? Can marketers expect to see the same levels of targeting capabilities, precise measurement and attribute than they’ve been accustomed to in the desktop world?
To find out, Digiseg CEO and founder, Søren Dinesen, sat down with Johan Kristian Holm, GroupM’s Video & Audio Operations Lead in Denmark to talk about existing trends, advertiser needs and how those two things can meet.
(This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)
For advertisers with smaller budgets, the open market can be more affordable, but also more risky from a brand safety and brand suitability point of view. That said, the performance can be just as good as private deals.
Reach is incredibly important to marketers, especially those who come from a traditional media background. With TV and radio budgets moving towards digital, marketers want to know how many more people they’re able to reach? This is a key interest.
At the same time, we’re working hard to show advertisers what else is possible with digital, including higher brand lift and brand recall rates. The digital solutions we have today offer a more exact way to measure metrics like brand lift and brand recall rate via control groups and surveys. It’s still expensive to do that work, mind you, but it’s much more accurate in that we know who’s seen an ad in digital. We don’t know that with traditional TV.
SD: Let’s switch gears to targeting. What types of audience data are available for targeting in CTV and audio today? Can advertisers target on contextual, geo positioning, household characteristics, third-party behavioral, or in market data?
JKH: Honestly, there’s not much. It’s mostly demographic data like age and gender, with some geo-location targeting mixed in, but even then, many publishers offer regional targeting as opposed to city-level targeting. We have a lot of challenges targeting based on in-market intent, interest and behavioral data.
Many of our advertisers are moving towards first-party data; sending their CRM list to their publishers to see if you can get a metric and exclude or include them based on it. But it’s still early days, and a lot of this is still in beta testing. As a result, most campaigns are targeted broadly.
SD: TV and radio are inherently contextual. Can you target based on topic?
JKH: Sure, but reach is an issue because not all publishers have enough CTV inventory to get the scale advertisers want and need. With streaming services, it’s more a matter of affinity than context. In other words, is this streaming platform a good fit for our brand? We’re making progress with the contextual part, but we still have some hurdles to overcome.
It’s really a challenge with digital audio because that channel is highly fragmented between podcasts, audio streaming, and digital radio, which itself is incredibly difficult to do contextual targeting. You can target, say, by a specific playlist, but that’s about it.
Podcasts offer more contextual relevance, however. You can target, say, true crime podcasts or food podcasts. But even that is pretty difficult, and reach will always be a challenge to achieve.
SD: What about in the open market? Can you piece together an audience here and there?
JKH: There are some audience buying capabilities available. For instance, if you buy inventory via the Google platform you can buy Google Audiences, but again, you won’t see a huge decrease in budget. We certainly can’t spend large budgets that way. The death of the cookie will exacerbate that challenge.