“What ad played where?”, “How many times was the ad shown?” “Did I appropriately frequency cap the ad across my CTV channels?” “How did the ad perform across different screens and media types?” “Is the ad safe and aligned with the brand’s content?”. Now, imagine a framework that can solve all these “keep-me-up-at-night” questions for buyers.
In the first blog post of the CTV summer blog series, we discussed the streaming business model and the current profitability challenge. In the second article, we explored the promise of CTV programmatic in bridging mass appeal and niche content. In the last and final blog post of the series, we are focused on the challenges (and importance) of having a unified view of converged TV across linear, CTV, and digital platforms.
In the fast-evolving digital video landscape, advertisers face a fragmented ecosystem with significant challenges in measurement and standardization. According to eMarketer, nearly $90 billion is projected to be spent on CTV and linear TV by 2028, with CTV seeing substantial growth, expected to rise from $25.1 billion in 2023 to $40.9 billion by 2027. Yet, the diversity of streaming platforms and ad formats coupled with varying data standards contribute to inefficiencies in ad management, measurement, and reconciliation across channels. Gaining insights and understanding of what’s happening in an ad campaign often feels like the work of a skilled investigative agent.
The IAB Tech Lab’s Ad Creative ID Framework (ACIF) offers a groundbreaking solution by introducing a standardized ad creative identification and management approach. ACIF aims to streamline the fragmented digital advertising space by ensuring that a single registered creative ID can be recognized universally across all ad tech platforms, addressing critical issues such as ad tracking, cross-platform reporting and measurement, frequency management and reconciliation.
Challenges in Creative Management and the ACIF Solution
As highlighted in the 2024 IAB’s Digital Video Ad Spend & Strategy Report, major challenges of the video ecosystem include managing creative-level views, ensuring sell-side interoperability, and maintaining consistent standards. Shockingly, nearly 90% of TV/video buyers do not register any ad creative, and only 14% register all ad creative. This lack of tagging and creative-level performance tracking is a significant ROI challenge for 82% of buyers. Furthermore, despite significant time investments in optimizing converged TV ad performance, many buyers feel their efforts fall short, with nearly 60% expressing dissatisfaction with their optimization efforts. This inefficiency underscores the critical need for a unified view of advertising across platforms, which ACIF addresses by offering a consistent framework for ad identification and tracking.
ACIF: A Universal Passport for Ads
ACIF functions like a universal passport for ads, ensuring they are recognized, tracked, and treated consistently across various platforms and geographies. This standardization allows for seamless integration and management of ad creatives in the CTV environment, which is projected to reach a total ad spend of $22.7 billion in 2024. ACIF not only facilitates better frequency management and competitive separation but also enhances cross-platform measurement, leading to more effective and efficient advertising campaigns.
With ACIF, each ad creative receives a unique identifier that acts like a digital fingerprint, maintained across all platforms to ensure consistent tracking and management. This universal approach to ad identification simplifies the complexities associated with digital advertising across multiple channels, particularly in CTV, where the landscape is notably fragmented.
The Creative ID framework is not new and has been instituted for linear TV for many years. However, it aims to apply an existing practice to a new arena: streaming. While it was created for CTV, it will ultimately apply to all ad creative for any video campaign (i.e., social video, shorts, and other non-TV-like video content).
Implementing ACIF
Implementing ACIF involves choosing a recognized ad registry like AD-ID or Clearcast to generate and maintain unique ad IDs. These identifiers are crucial for integrating ACIF into existing ad-serving platforms and campaign management systems, ensuring that every ad creative is tracked consistently from inception to delivery.
Benefits and Impact
The introduction of ACIF is designed to accomplish the following business requirements:
- Frequency Capping and management
- Competitive Separation for Brands
- Cross-Platform Campaign Measurement
- Campaign Reconciliation across different mediums and providers
- Improve Campaign ROI by mitigating spending waste and better campaign management
By reducing the time and resources required for these processes, ACIF enables advertisers, agencies, and tech providers to focus more on strategy and less on operational complexities. For global brands, this means the ability to maintain a consistent, single view across all their existing ID frameworks, which is transformative in managing their worldwide advertising strategies effectively. Ultimately, ACIF not only enhances the effectiveness of individual ad campaigns but also propels the entire digital advertising industry towards greater workflow efficiency and accountability.
As the digital landscape continues to grow and diversify, the role of frameworks like ACIF will become increasingly vital in ensuring that advertising remains effective, transparent, and manageable across all platforms. The adoption of ACIF is a step toward a more unified and standardized digital advertising ecosystem, promising significant improvements in how ad campaigns are conducted and measured in the future.
On October 7, we will release a full ACIF Playbook for business, followed by an AdOps guide on November 12. You can also register to participate in our ACIF Webinar for brands and agencies on November 20 – Stay tuned!
