Back in June, I had the opportunity to attend the annual IAB Video Leadership summit. My main takeaway from my many conversations there - and there were many other takeaways - is that Connected TV (CTV) advertising has become “four-dimensional chess”. 

You may have noticed I have since written less on the topic I’ve labeled “The 200 vs. The 10 Million”, or the emerging dynamic in advertising of competing demand for CTV inventory between the 200 “retail-cartel” advertisers supplying 88% of U.S. network television revenue (the term “retail-cartel” applies to the brick-and-mortar retailers who have historically bought from networks), and many of the 10MM or so advertisers who buy from Google and Facebook

The reason is simple: “four-dimensional chess” is not the stuff of 1,000-word essays.

But, when clear signals emerge about how the complexity is resolving to simplicity, especially during a recession market, that’s worth everyone’s time to revisit that theme. There are really two signals as of late:

• Signal #1: The slowdown of performance ad buys from the 10MM will boost buys of branding campaigns (which is linear TV’s strength); and
• Signal #2: The audience for over-the-air viewers (“OTAs”) is being undercounted.

eMarketer's "elegant misrepresentation"

I wrote about “a data-driven misperception of Connected TVs” a few weeks back, an essay that highlighted the disconnect between the available data. The most notable chart for the purposes of this essay is this eMarketer chart, predicting linear spend to ...