How Smaller CTV Publishers Can Leverage Innovative Ad Formats
As more innovative and integrated ad formats continue to transform CTV advertising and monetization, are smaller publishers without dedicated ad sales teams in danger of being left behind? What creative strategies can they deploy to seize these opportunities? Fan Serv’s C.J. Leonard and Eventually A Castle’s Andrew Baritz offer practical, strategic recommendations in this discussion with Ring Digital’s Brian Ring at the latest Streaming Media Connect.
Make Evangelizing Part of the Partnership
Ring Digital llc Principal Analyst Brian Ring starts the discussion by posing this question to Fan Serv VP of Publisher Operations C.J. Leonard: “How can non-premium publishers sell innovative ad formats when they don’t have direct sales teams?”
Leonard replies, “So if it’s coming from Clinch or from Transmit, it depends on what format we’re talking about.” If she was consulting for a client that didn’t have a direct sales team, she “would take a hard look at, do I get one seller on contract or something to go out and evangelize that [ad format]? But … just like you’d lean on your SSP demand teams when you’re aligned with the Magnite[s] or PubMatics of the world or OpenXs, I would sit there and say, okay, well it’d be part of the deal. You need to bring me so much demand. You need to insure me X dollars.”
A specific integration for a new type of ad unit can be done on a large scale, Leonard says, but “you have to bring a buyer. And so how do you connect those people together? You either have to get some boots on the ground for yourself or you have to rely on that vendor to have those boots on the ground for you. And I wouldn’t sign a deal ... unless they were bringing me some demand to offset.”
A Tech Platform Provides Full-Circle Unity
Ring notes that the various parts of advertising are coming full circle with Leonard’s idea. For example, SSAI, ad servers, and SSPs are being unified by platforms such as Indicue. “Who knows, maybe down the road it’s SGAI as well, ad server, … different formats,” he muses, that are “mediating between a direct buy and a programmatic, and then the SSP, … the supply, essentially.” Ring turns to Eventually A Castle CEO Andrew Baritz to ask, “[I]f you’re a non-premium publisher, you’re trying to sell innovative ad formats, tell me what you guys are thinking. You have to have a direct sales [team]; you have to have a guy like you orchestrating the tech stack, yeah?”
Consider the Revenue Opportunities and Returns
“I think it comes back to that scale question and the economy of where your business is,” Baritz replies. “You can be a very large non-premium publisher. You could be a very small non-premium publisher. And I agree with C.J. I think that your integrations are going to be dictated by the revenue opportunity of them and the actual returns or diminishing returns of doing that.” For instance, he notes, it’s not logical to spend time and money on an ad unit you won’t see a return on for years.
Baritz is seeing fewer picture-in-picture (PiP) and squeeze-back ads. “You’re putting these into content and they’re often standalone, which requires a lot of scale to reach those high-value of CPMs that you’re getting paid out at,” he explains. “So if you don’t have millions of users, premium or not, is the format viable? Is your opportunity to create revenue there in the first place? And then it comes down to, what is the best path to bringing that revenue? Is it letting the platform sell it? Is it a combination thereof?”
In conclusion, Baritz praises Leonard’s idea of small- to medium-sized publishers “putting pressure on these larger businesses that are creating aggregated sales.” He adds that Transmit is a good example of a walled-garden advertising experience that requires asking, “Are you ever going to be big enough to sell that standalone or should you be doubling down with that partner to help them sell you as part of a larger package?”
Join conference chair Andy Beach and other streaming media experts in person Oct. 6–8 in Santa Monica, CA, for more thought leadership, actionable insights, and lively debate at Streaming Media 2025. Registration is open!
Related Articles
IAB Tech Lab has recently released some new standards for CTV advertising, known as the Ad Format Hero Initiative. The organization asked and received more than 100 CTV ad format descriptions/concepts from the industry on classifying new formats. Next up, they ran an industry survey (completed 16 April 2025) to determine what should be prioritized. The Ad Format Hero Task Force selected eight formats based on the survey results. The idea is to create standards so that sensibly, engineering and operations teams don't have to reinvent the wheel every time they want to insert the right creative.
15 Jul 2025
The expansive growth of the connected TV (CTV) landscape brought with it an explosion of new video content - and by extension, new opportunities for publishers to monetize. And yet, the landscape has been evolving in a direction where publishers don't have full monetization of their video content. So who else is vying for control? Increasingly, it's the CTV device makers - the original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) - and the streaming platforms. Those businesses believe that because they're necessary parts of the ad delivery process, they deserve a share of ad revenue.
01 Jun 2025
On Thursday, May 22, Brian Ring, Principal Analyst, Ring Digital llc, will moderate the Streaming Media Connect May panel "Publishers Pay to Play Free: Next Steps in Ad-Based Streaming Monetization." Increasingly, content publishers are finding they need more control over their ad stack. This panel looks beyond the touted monetization-ready feature sets in streaming playback solutions and drills down with key content providers on how well these solutions facilitate ad signaling and ad stitching and integrate with ad servers, discussing what kind of reporting they provide to measure success. The panel also highlights the differences in ad-based monetization strategies as between CTV platforms, online video players, and mobile apps. And finally, panelists dig deep into critical emerging standards that are changing SSAI this year.
14 May 2025