Major brand marketing spend on platforms such as TikTok has to date remained lethargic despite the rapid growth of short-form social media. However, a new report from HubSpot expects this to rapidly change in 2022, with 67% of marketers planning on increasing their TikTok investment in 2022. Thirty-four percent of surveyed marketing professionals plan to increase influencer marketing in 2022, ranking influencer marketing the fastest growing trend expected for 2022.
Even with signs that marketers are increasingly ready to take a more significant leap into social media and CTV, marketers remain wary of the rise of hateful content and the risk to brands. The recent press exposing Facebook’s leaked internal company documents and subsequent Congressional hearings has only increased marketers’ hesitancy to invest in short-term video social media, which is still viewed the Wild West of digital advertising.
DoubleVerify’s acquisition of OpenSlate is the latest move towards building marketer confidence in CTV. Until now, DoubleVerify served primarily for post-campaign measurement review. OpenSlate’s technology offers controls on pre-campaign targeting through its proprietary suitability and safety ratings. With the acquisition of OpenSlate, DoubleVerify intends to create an “end-to-end” solution for CTV with both pre-activation targeting controls and post-flight measurement. DoubleVerify has affirmed that through the merger, “no other company will be able to deliver a fully owned, integrated solution across the leading social and CTV walled gardens.”
The merger, however, does raise questions. First, with its end-to-end solution, marketers must trust DoubleVerify to grade its own homework and remain unbiased post-campaign. Second, it is not clear the extent to which OpenSlate’s technology is truly driven by AI. The technology seems underdeveloped given the tremendous need for and opportunity to inject AI into this area. Finally, OpenSlate’s summary-level scores provide only a superficial level of actionable information, limiting the granularity of insights needed to develop novel applications in CTV measurement.
CTV measurement remains in its early stages but is expected to evolve rapidly in the next 18-24 months. To effectively scale safety measures, marketers must embrace AI-based technologies. Human review is simply too time-consuming to adequately manage the volume of emerging video content.
In addition, improving contextual detection of video will be even more critical as marketers face a cookie-less environment in 2023. Competition within the CTV measurement market is already heating up, and winning will require technology that can increasingly adapt to new challenges as CTV evolves. Advanced video content detection will be critical, as well as transparency into what constitutes “safe” content. At Netra, we’ve developed a technology that can synthesize all elements of video content and provide granular-level detail that provides unparalleled insights into context detection and safety. Our technology goes well beyond summary-level scores. We’re making video analysis efficient, scalable, and accessible, which will be critical in this rapidly advancing market.
