Why CTV Is the Platform To Watch for 2022

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It’s the worst kept secret in advertising: 2021 was the year of CTV. According to eMarketer, US residents streamed more than 80 minutes of content a day last year — up 8.7% from 2020. A Roku/Harris poll found that more people than ever are streaming TV (over 213 million a month in 2021) — and they’re watching 78 more minutes of CTV than linear TV.

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As a result, advertisers are doubling down on their CTV commitments. According to a blog post by CTV marketing platform MNTN, CTV ad spend rose by 59.9% to hit $14.44 billion in 2021 and it’s already on track to reach $19.1 billion by the end of this year.

MNTN also finds that brands are diverting budgets from social media, not just linear TV, into CTV.

“As digital performance likely craters due to the disappearance of cookies and the gatekeepers exerting more control over their ecosystems, digital marketers will seek a new channel for their spend,” predicts Advertising Week. The growth in spend in 2022 will be in large part due to a shift from digital to CTV.”

Much has also been made of the bruising ratings agency Nielsen took in 2021, with admissions of inaccurate reporting during the pandemic.

“Experts predict that Nielsen’s struggles with CTV attribution will only continue to worsen in 2022, as they lose further influence in the new media landscape,” says MNTN (while pointing ad buyers to its own measurement platform for CTV). “Advertisers and CTV platforms are looking for a better way to control privacy and security while still providing meaningful analytics on ad effectiveness.”

Fraud is rising as CTV gets more popular. Last year, DoubleVerify’s Fraud Lab detailed the SmokeScreen scam that cheated advertisers out of $6 million in just a few months. Nearly 10,000 devices were impacted daily, generating up to 10 million fraudulent requests a day.

MNTN predicts a rise in third-party organizations that work within the walled gardens of CTV platforms to remove any personally identifiable information and deliver the insights to advertisers.

So while there is work to be done to securely connect the dots, 2022 could be a massive year for CTV as a means of finally uniting content with viewers and with brands.