A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away (midtown!), Anthony Wood and his early Roku team showed me an early prototype of their soon-to-be-famous puck. As the head of digital for Bloomberg Media, I was excited about giving more people access to Bloomberg TV, which had a high-end, niche audience that Nielsen’s panel had no data on.
It was then that I started wondering, “Could we measure and optimize ads here the way we did at LiveJournal and Yahoo?” Of course, I had been an avid early adopter of Right Media and the promise of automated ad platforms (shout out to Michael Walrath and Bill Wise!).
For a long time — from the earliest days of streaming — I’ve been wanting and working toward a convergent TV future when we could harness the automation, targeting, and outcomes optimization of programmatic platforms for TV ads.
With EDO’s new partnership with The Trade Desk, our industry is one step closer to this holy grail: TV’s premium sight, sound, and motion, combined with the automation, power, and scale of outcome-optimized programmatic.
Make no mistake about it. Mid-funnel outcomes are essential to the future of programmatic TV — and convergent TV advertising at large.
Due to a lack of reliable and timely outcome measurement, programmatic TV has focused on achieving targeted reach at the lowest cost. The only advertisers with a chance at optimizing their spend based on performance were direct-to-consumer (DTC) marketers with owned-and-operated digital funnels. For the vast majority of brands, offline, gap-filled, and leaky funnels meant it was a race to the bottom at the lowest CPM.
There’s another critical consideration. As any marketer will tell you, every consumer’s purchase decision includes a host of factors outside their control — from product to pricing to inventory to weather and more. Mid-funnel TV outcomes give marketers and publishers the answers they need in the moments that matter, isolating the signal from the noise to determine which ads were most effective.
There’s a reason the world’s most successful advertising companies — Google and Meta — optimize for ad-driven, mid-funnel behaviors like website visits and brand searches, both of which are highly predictive of future sales.
Now, the growth of vertical AI is facilitating massive data-driven attribution models that make mid-funnel lift measurement faster, more accurate, and more scalable than ever before. Rather than arbitrarily assigning sole credit to the final click, convergent TV marketers can achieve the best of brand and demand advertising by confidently assessing the efficacy of every ad that leads to a sale.
EDO’s new partnership with The Trade Desk enables you to do just that. With a single click, marketers can immediately begin measuring digital video and CTV investments — all within their existing programmatic workflows. This integration empowers you to compare performance to industry benchmarks, overlay your own first-party data, and make smarter bidding and optimization decisions. It’s the perfect tool for the outcomes-centric, AI-driven moment that everyone is talking about, and it’s been a long time in the making.
In the ~15 or so years since I plugged in that early Roku device, many of us have been dreaming and working toward a convergent TV marketplace rooted in the outcomes-driven optimization that we’ve seen work so well in search and social.
Our latest programmatic partnership with The Trade Desk is a clear sign that this future is finally coming into focus.