How Biddable CTV Advertising Leverages AI and Boosts ROI
What are the key strategies, partnerships, and tech stack elements that make biddable advertising profitable in FAST and other ad-supported CTV platforms in 2025?
Fremantle’s Laura Florence, Future Today’s Tim Ware, and Chris Pfaff Tech Media’s Chris Pfaff break down how each of their companies approach biddable CTV sales in a conversation at the latest Streaming Media Connect 2025.
Join us in person Oct. 6–8 in Santa Monica, CA, for more thought leadership, actionable insights, and lively debate at Streaming Media 2025.
Partnerships and Optimization
Chris Pfaff Tech Media CEO Chris Pfaff opens the discussion with the truism, “It’s all about money at the end of the day.” He invites Fremantle SVP, Global Channels, Laura Florence to be the first to answer the question, How do you make biddable ROI positive, and how does AI help in this regard?
Florence points to Fremantle’s partnership with ElementalTV as the company’s ad server, noting that “we are optimizing [contextual clues] and having to use AI to fill in for a lot of these demand signals that are missing, which is I think a huge opportunity.” Fremantle has also been in touch with Nielsen and others that are trying to normalize how to fill in and optimize missing metadata. “I’d love to find a more seamless way to be able to offer these 70,000 segments and all of these different things to optimize for that,” she says. “It doesn’t really exist right now though.”
Florence shares her current focus on live show and new show opportunities becoming premium opportunities, noting, “I can bring in more shows, but I have to get premium value for them. And it can’t just be through direct sales. We want to do it through biddable,” she says. She mentions another partnership, with The Trade Desk, as an example of how Fremantle is exploring this area.
Selling Value and Doing Data Targeting
Pfaff invites Future Today Marketplace VP Tim Ware to describe his experience, asking him to talk about what he’s doing to make biddable ROI positive with the help of AI.
Ware sees it this way: “It’s really selling the value. And [Florence] said this: It’s selling the value of premium supply.” He adds, “There’s connected TV and there’s YouTube and then there’s everything else. And I think one of the myths I would suppose [that exists] is[,] everything is addressable. Meaning I’m going to target a subscriber and someone who’s logged in. I think maybe half the connected TV audiences are logged in. But the reality is [that] because the contextual signals are more deterministic in nature, we’re not relying on an IP address or a legacy ID, which is also becoming vilified by privacy laws.”
Ware cites technology such as Anoki, which he says does scene-level data targeting and is harnessing AI for connected TV. “So the long [and] short of it is [that] we need to reinforce the quality content.” Ware turns his attention to user-generated content (UGC), emphasizing that professionally produced content is a signature of connected TV, but UGC is establishing value and “creating bid density. It doesn’t necessarily even need to be. Obviously, scarcity helps get bidding up, but quality targets, quality data, that’s getting passed to these targets, whether [it’s] contextual signals, transparency—and it could be geography, it could be time of day.”
Better Performance With AI
AI and machine learning create more predictive segments, Ware says. “So it’s not as simple as say[ing], Hey, we’re going to do contextual, but you’re going to put that in the algorithm with a couple of dozen other signals including taxonomy. So that quality times that level of targeting really is driving results.” He appreciates the work of Proximic by Comscore and Audigent, which was acquired by Experian: “[T]hey perform better, and they drive better results and outcomes. So if you combine that quality with those outcomes and you’ll start to get bidding, and then as the quality of that inventory comes on, the ad tech should take care of itself.”
Pfaff sums up the conversation by bringing up Metcalfe’s law, which can be applied to biddable by saying the quality of the network increases with usage.
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