Broadcasters in today’s digital-first media landscape are expected to deliver seamless, high-quality viewer experiences while also maximizing return on investment through ad revenue. This balancing act has made dynamic ad insertion (DAI) a must-have technology, offering personalized advertising at scale and maximizing monetization opportunities. But there’s more to it than simply stitching an ad into a CTV stream. Badly executed implementation can damage the viewer experience and brand trust. On the other hand, well-executed strategies can open up more inventory and exciting new ad formats.
The most effective ad insertion strategies are set apart by their ability to work well across every platform, for every viewer, with minimal friction. As a result, a key aspect is their ability to scale. For example, if a broadcaster is showing live sports events, where unexpected edge-of-your-seat moments draw in sharp increases in viewership. The technology must be able to keep up with the fluctuating traffic to capture every last dollar of ad revenue. Every unmonetized stream, every unsupported device, and every timed-out ad request results in a blank ad slate, representing a missed opportunity—poorly implemented adtech results in money left on the table.
Here are five areas where dynamic ad insertion can unlock significant CTV ad revenues.
1) Viewer experience is central to the success of any ad insertion strategy. Audiences aren’t settling for less than seamlessly delivered, relevant content – the same goes for advertising. Therefore, the ad insertion tech must ensure smooth ad transitions and no jarring audio-visual shifts.
Furthermore, one-to-one addressability is, of course, critical to ensuring relevance and high viewer engagement, as well as controlling frequency capping. Addressability doesn’t stop at viewer targeting. It should also enable real-time viewing data that underpins trusted, IAB-certified measurement to attract ad dollars from other digital platforms like social media.
2) Maximizing device reach requires technical compatibility. Ad insertion can only reach its full potential if applied to as much of a broadcaster’s audience as possible. This may appear to be an obvious statement to make, but it’s a lot harder to achieve than you might think.
The dynamic ad insertion must support several different streaming protocols, which often work in different ways on legacy devices, including pre-2000 smart TVs, which still account for a significant share of viewership.
3) New inventory opportunities that can be unlocked with the latest ad insertion technologies, such as server-guided ad insertion (SGAI). Squeezebacks and in-picture ads offer great potential for new, highly valuable ad experiences.
Contingency ad pods can be applied during live events to generate additional inventory at opportunistic moments without disturbing scheduled breaks. Meanwhile, short-term, event-specific channels (or “pop-up” channels) often remain under-monetized due to their operational complexity; yet, they can be efficiently supported with orchestration tools that manage ad insertion at scale across several channels at a time.
Utilising replay and rewind modes as a tool for further revenue capture is also an often-overlooked best practice. It’s easy to understand why: storing hours’ worth of rewind content for each viewer is pretty server-intensive and expensive. However, with around 12% of Yospace’s live streaming sessions entering rewind mode, this represents a significant missed revenue opportunity. The good news is that SGAI, which is less server-intensive than previous ad stitching methods, means this inventory can now be tapped, in many cases, for the first time.
4) Scalability, as mentioned already, cannot be forgotten in an effective ad insertion strategy. Streaming audiences are growing, and the technology and infrastructure must keep pace with this growth. Major live events, especially those with unpredictable audience spikes, require robust solutions to avoid failures in ad delivery.
Take the Euro 2024 pan-European soccer tournament as an example; in one match between Germany and Spain, an 89th-minute goal took the game into extra time and drove a 33% increase in viewers right before the ad break. Without extra support, ad servers and onward SSPs and DSPs won’t have enough time to process all the requests, resulting in blank responses to the ad insertion system and filler slates instead of ads. A prefetch system here is essential to pace out the ad requests in an intelligent way that takes account of the ad server’s capacity and provides it with enough time to return the highest value ad.
Measurement is the final piece of the puzzle, without which monetization potential cannot be fully realized. None of the ad stitching methods – client-side ad insertion (CSAI), server-side ad insertion (SSAI), or server-guided ad insertion (SGAI) inherently support accurate viewer measurement, which means that measurement methods for CTV ad views is a bit of a Wild West with ad insertion vendors each having their own solution with varying degrees of accuracy and transparency.
In an ideal world, ad performance is shared in real-time via live dashboards using active log data that allows for the tracking of errors, timeouts, and fill rates. This enables broadcasters to optimize campaigns on the fly, ensuring they can adjust as necessary to maximize potential revenue. This has proven to be effective with DIRECTV, which achieved its highest-ever technical fill rate using this approach.
In the end, dynamic ad insertion is, and should be recognised as, more than just stitching ads into a stream. Any limitation, from device reach to poor viewer experience to lack of measurement, will negatively impact revenue. Broadcasters can resolve these limitations, but only by keeping ad insertion tech at the centre of their streaming and adtech infrastructure, workflows, and platforms. With this, and best practices adhered to, no ad revenue need be left on the table.
