Overcoming the Pitfalls of Walled Gardens in the CTV Industry
A walled garden refers to a platform or ecosystem wherein the platform owner has complete control over the content, data and media within the platform and restricts external parties from accessing this information. The CTV space is often said to have many walled gardens because data does not flow freely between different ad inventory suppliers. As such, brands are unable to get a complete picture of their consumer and determine impact.
With viewership fragmented across different platforms, services and networks, this issue is only amplified. US consumers subscribe to multiple streaming services, with the average number of SVOD subscriptions being 4.7 per household (Kantar, 2022). As a result, there is a good likelihood that marketers will reach the same audience multiple times, leading to viewer ad fatigue, oversaturation and ultimately, annoyance.
The graphic above outlines how exactly this plays out in the ad marketplace. Since the various streaming services don’t share data, there is no way to control frequency.
OEMs Device-First Strategy Can Alleviate Visibility Issues For Brands
With advancements in technology, OEMs like LG are able to eliminate some of the ambiguity faced by brands. For example, ACR technology available on smart TV OEMs provides a direct line of sight into everything on the TV screen. With this device-first strategy, brands can understand what a particular household has viewed on TV, irrespective of which platform or network it was watched on (including linear and CTV). This transparency allows marketers to efficiently manage reach and frequency.
Movement Towards Gated-Gardens
To be clear, walled gardens exist even in the OEM space, with no data-sharing between OEMs. LG Ad Solutions has tried to solve for the lack of cross-platform visibility by entering into relationships with third-parties and creating a gated-garden approach. Examples of such relationships include an ACR audience segment sharing agreement with Magnite, a data-sharing deal with iSpot for measurement purposes and another with Omnicom Media Group to bring LG smart TV and cross-device ad inventory to OMG clients. Through our gated-garden, we can control ad frequency and offer both reach and frequency guarantees across connected devices in the LG households.
“The way I like to explain it is that we are a gated community. We are not a walled garden; we are a gated community. We give clients a specific passcode to our data. If you come in, we agree on specific business terms and we will give you our data. A perfect example is a measurement deal we did only with iSpot. It’s not exclusive, but iSpot is one of our clients that actually has access to our ACR data in the US. We are going to give [the data] to the ones that will empower the measurement industry.”
– Serge Matta, President, LG Ad Solutions [Beet Retreat Interview]. Full interview here.
LG Ad Solutions can help brands gain a holistic view of their campaigns across TV services, create a window into walled gardens with our gated-garden approach and track cross-device campaigns efficiently. To learn more, contact us at info@lgads.tv or message us on our contact page.
