Q&A: Hightouch’s Ian Maier on navigating the fragmented CTV advertising ecoystem

In today’s Connected TV (CTV) advertising landscape, navigating the complexities of data, targeting and measurement has become a significant challenge for advertisers.

Ian Maier, AdTech lead at Hightouch, shares insights on how the company addresses these hurdles with its customer data platform (CDP) and the current state of play in the streaming ad industry.

From tackling siloed data to automating audience targeting, Hightouch is rethinking how advertisers can maximize the effectiveness of their campaigns in the evolving CTV ecosystem.

How does Hightouch view the current state of the Connected TV (CTV) advertising ecosystem? 

Hightouch sees the CTV advertising ecosystem as providing an incredible opportunity for highly engaging ads that are better targeted and less wasteful than linear TV.

However, the ecosystem suffers from heavy fragmentation. Media is bought across a wide range of DSPs, OEM platforms, and streaming apps that bid for some of the same inventory and have exclusive access to others. Similarly, measurement data like Automated Content Recognition (ACR) is split across manufacturers and not easily aggregated.

This fragmentation makes it difficult to execute even simple data-driven tactics – like suppressing active customers or showing personalized ads to specific segments – incredibly difficult without building and buying expensive and complex systems to manage them.

What are the key challenges for advertisers in navigating the fragmented CTV landscape?

Advertisers are faced with several challenges when trying to run effective and efficient campaigns:

• Fragmented buying processes: Advertisers need to navigate multiple DSPs, TV manufacturers, and streaming platforms depending on the targeting, inventory, and measurement data they need.
• Siloed data: Audience and identity data are often siloed across data stores within a company, while TV measurement data is siloed across TV devices.
• Manual activation processes: Audiences often require a manual upload process, leading to excess wasted ad spend as audiences quickly go out of date leading to ineffective suppression of audiences and irrelevant retargeting.
• Cost and complexity: Maintaining the necessary infrastructure to orchestrate first-party targeting, suppression, and measurement often requires significant engineering resources or expensive legacy systems. On top of that, data onboarding platforms like LiveRamp charge additional CPM fees for advertisers to target their own first-party audiences.

How does Hightouch’s CDP address the fragmentation issues in CTV advertising?

Hightouch’s CDP addresses the fragmentation of targeting across platforms by bringing media platforms to the advertiser’s existing cloud data warehouse, eliminating the need to move data across systems. Key features include:

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• Visual audience builder: Enables advertisers to define complex audience segments.
• Instant data onboarding: Matches customer data to CTV devices using its proprietary Match Booster tool.
• Seamless integrations: Connect directly with major DSPs, OEM platforms, and measurement providers.
• Automated updates: Keeps audience data fresh and compliant with opt-out regulations.

For measurement, Hightouch’s CDP partners with leading TV measurement to help customers easily aggregate insights across their first-party audiences regardless of their objective.

What role does automation play in simplifying audience targeting and management for CTV?  

Without automation, customers must either manage targeting manually (which is labor-intensive and slow) or build custom data pipelines (which is labor-intensive and expensive).

Automation is a low-cost and labor-free way of enabling advertisers to more accurately orchestrate audiences across every marketing channel, including CTV DSPs, OEM platforms, and streaming apps leading to a better customer experience across every channel.

How do you foresee the CTV advertising landscape evolving over the next few years?  

As CTV becomes more accessible across both programmatic and direct buys, and as inventory increases with more consumers engaging in ad-supported viewing, the share of media spend dedicated to CTV will increase.

As the orchestration of first-party targeting and closed-loop measurement improves, more of those budgets will be allocated towards middle and bottom-of-funnel campaigns that are easily measured on incremental revenue and ROAS.

What role do DSPs, OEM platforms, and third-party measurement tools play in CTV campaigns?

DSPs like The Trade Desk, Amazon DSP, and StackAdapt facilitate the programmatic buying and measurement of CTV ads across platforms. They offer an easy and effective way of running CTV campaigns with low CPMs.

OEM platforms provide direct access to smart TV advertising inventory, including native ads across navigation screens that are especially valuable to sports, media, and gaming companies who want to drive tune-in engagement and streaming app subscriptions. Some also provide unique access to their Automated Content Recognition (ACR) data, making attribution and tune-in measurement easier.

Third-party measurement tools like iSpot and Dynata offer critical insights across both linear and smart TV devices, allowing advertisers to more fully measure brand lift, tune-in engagement, and incremental sales impact across all of their TV buys.

How does Hightouch collaborate with these entities to enhance advertiser outcomes?

Hightouch integrates seamlessly with DSPs (e.g., The Trade Desk, Amazon Advertising, StackAdapt) and OEM platforms (e.g., Roku, Samsung Ads, LG Ad Solutions, and Vizio Ads) so that advertisers can:

• Activate suppression and first-party targeting in minutes across multiple platforms.
• Automate audience refresh to maximize the effectiveness of campaigns, ensure opt-out compliance, and reduce operational costs.

Depending on the campaign goals, Hightouch enables advertisers to then measure campaign performance on specific first-party audience segments.

• With Dynata, advertisers can measure brand lift across first-party segments.
• With iSpot, advertisers can monitor reach & frequency, track tune-in, and measure attribution across first-party segments.
• With Hightouch Splits, advertisers can run holdout tests to measure incremental sales lift from targeted first-party campaigns.

How significant is first-party data in CTV advertising strategies? 

First-party data is critical as it allows precise targeting, personalization, and measurement.

For example, simply suppressing active customers from acquisition campaigns can save brands millions of dollars per year on wasted ad impressions.

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Similarly, running more targeted and personalized upsell, cross-sell, and win-back campaigns can drive significantly higher conversion rates for advertisers – resulting in more incremental revenue at a lower cost.

What innovations or improvements are needed to enhance identity resolution within CTV? 

Improving identity resolution requires:

• High-quality and unified identity graphs to connect disparate data points (e.g., IP addresses, hashed emails, device IDs, etc).
• Consistent identities are used for both targeting and measurement.
• Faster data onboarding processes to reduce latency.

How does Hightouch’s platform ensure compliance with data privacy regulations in CTV campaigns?  

Hightouch ensures compliance by:

• Only use trusted and consented third-party data to connect audiences to CTV devices.
• Query the advertiser’s audience data directly from the advertiser’s warehouse, avoiding the need to store and process data outside of the customer’s own data store. This ensures that companies can easily comply with regional data storage laws.
• Automatically refreshing audience data to honor opt-out requests.
• Match audiences between the advertiser and CTV platform using secure hashing and/or data clean room integrations to ensure that no PII is ever exposed to the ad platform.

How does Hightouch differentiate its CDP offering from competitors in the market?  

Hightouch is the only CDP on the market today that offers direct integrations with the major CTV OEM platforms.

When compared to data onboarding platforms like LiveRamp, Hightouch is differentiated by offering a modern architecture that provides:

• Easy audience orchestration by providing a visual audience builder that connects to data directly in the customer’s cloud data warehouse.
• Fast data onboarding that enables advertisers to sync audiences to CTV platforms in minutes, not days.
• Low cost of ownership thanks to a solution that does not require engineers or IT teams to manage custom data pipelines. Plus, advertisers are not charged any additional fees for CTV activation.