Is Streaming Delivering the Audience Data Publishers Demand?
Vevo’s Natasha Potashnik, TVIQ’s Sara Sinclair, NPAW’s Bruno Giner, and Reality Software’s Nadine Krefetz discuss the key data points publishers demand to understand their audiences better and where and why what streaming delivers continues to fall short for some publishers in this clip from Streaming Media 2025.
Making Sense of the Existing Data
Krefetz, head of Reality Software and a contributing editor at Streaming Media, opens the discussion by asking, “When you work with your customers, what’s the most important thing you can tell them about data? Or what is the data that they have the [most] questions about?”
Giner, VP of sales, global, at NPAW, a streaming video analytics platform, says his company tracks everything: “all the behaviors of all the users, all devices, all the impressions, all the conversions,” and more. Making sense of data is the main goal: “why this user is interacting with this ad, why this placement works better than that other placement, why this content offers better results with this kind of publisher, and so on.” He says those kinds of correlations are most interesting. “And usually the challenge is to be well-supported by standardization, metadata, and so on that gives you the capability to understand, really, what happens.”
Potashnik, head of data, research, and measurement at Vevo, a streaming video network, jumps in to add, “I think in this more adtech context, we might lose sight of another really important data set for monetization, which is CRM and OMS. The data sets about the people … who are managing the campaigns, but then who are ultimately selling, that’s a very important data set that’s extremely messy because of all the human manual data entry involved, but it’s critical for any media company that has an ad sales team.”
Krefetz turns to Sinclair, VP of ad platforms at TVIQ, a CTV adtech company. “Are you the odd person out right now? So, data can be any number of things, but is there something else that you want to add that these guys didn’t yet touch on?”
Sinclair replies that “there’s often a conversation about the lack of data from platforms or in monetization and the frustrations around that for even identifying who their audience is or what their content is doing, so we have quite a few conversations about frustration for this promised land of data.”
A Lack of Data
Krefetz decides to focus next on the largest industry trends, jumping off of what Sinclair mentioned about a lack of data. “I think that one of the things that people think about is, I can target things now … really well, because there’s data somewhere. Is that actually just a fallacy that everyone has to stop putting forth, that there’s areas obviously where there is no data?”
Potashnik provides a perspective from “the agency side,” when she used to work “with a lot of different clients on targeting solutions, incorporating data sets. One thing that I noticed is an incredible reliance on Meta and Google ads. And those folks have very high-fidelity audience segments, because it’s their first-party data—what people are searching for, what … social media posts they’re engaging in.” Translating that to CTV could be identifying audiences such as “pet owners” or “horror movie fans,” Potashnik continues. “And you just assume, if you are a more naive buyer, that is as high quality of an audience as you would purchase on Meta. And it’s not.” The point is to find out if the existing data is high-quality data: “Is it really going to be performing, ultimately, for the advertiser? That’s a big question mark. And the answer can vary I think depending on the vendor you’re talking about.”
Krefetz asks Potashnik to summarize why data may be missing. She points to fragmentation, adding, “And I also think it’s the way distribution works, at least for the FAST-channel ecosystem. A lot of that is gatekept by the partners that are distributing, and it’s their data and they want to hold onto it.”
Sinclair requests to jump in, and Krefetz obliges. Sinclair wants to build on Potashnik’s last point. “The first thing [you do when] you buy a new TV, you download an app, [and] they ask for your email address, so your name or your age, that never makes it to the publisher, right? That is gatekept; it’s first-party data that it’s super important for them … having an authenticated user.” Sinclair says that this data is siloed, especially in FAST, and “you don’t have the same first-party access that the platform does when they’re making the same sale.”
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