Privacy, Data, and Identity for CTV Advertising

Part of the blog post series: CTV Advertising Standards: IAB Tech Lab Standards & Guidance

Executive Summary:

The state of identity on Connected TV (CTV) platforms is in flux.
Current solutions depend on the Tech Lab’s Identifier for Advertising (IFA) guidelines, but privacy concerns are likely to impact this in the future.
The Content and Audience taxonomy and Project Rearc are important relevant efforts at the Tech Lab.

entries per page

Search:

Error Code	Fatal?	Definition	Possible Causes
100	Yes	XML parsing error.	VAST supplied in adm is not a valid XML document.
			URL supplied in nurl does not resolve to a valid XML document.
			Nurl only: Server did not respond with VAST, or at all when player called the nurl
			Perhaps a CORS issue
101	Yes	VAST schema validation error.	The VAST validates as XML, but does not validate per the VAST schema (i.e. there are missing elements or attributes, or combinations of elements/attributes that are not permissible)
			Some possible reasons for invalidity:
			InLine and Wrapper both present
			AdTagURI missing in Wrapper element
			Duration missing
			Offset attribute on Progress event is missing or not a valid value

Showing 1 to 10 of 66 entries

The details:

The key to good ad experiences is being able to deliver the most relevant and engaging ads to the right people. The challenge of course is that this has to be done with end-user privacy in mind. While the “cookie-apocalypse” has been a major point of discussion in our industry when discussing browser-based environments, the CTV world does not run on cookies and so has not been a focal point of the cookie/privacy discussions — though more recent changes to Apple iOS and tvOS invite questions and concerns.

In the meantime, IAB Tech Lab’s CTV/OTT IFA guidelines (released in December 2018) provide an identity mechanism for CTV platforms and publishers to employ today. The guidelines consist of three components: the structure of the ID, a “limit ad tracking” flag to indicate privacy preference, and an “IFA type” to provide more insight into the IFA being passed. The adoption of these guidelines seems to be picking up in recent months and has helped the industry move from a fragmented state. We are currently discussing improvements to the guidelines (for example removing the platform specific “types”, providing transparency around length of time a session ID might last, etc.) based on learnings in the industry over the last two years. So stay tuned for more here!

That said, privacy-centric addressability is likely the most important driver in ad tech’s direction these days, and everyone should pay attention to the conversations happening in the Project Rearc technical working groups, and in the related business and policy-focused working groups underway through the Partnership for Responsible Addressable Media. The implications of global privacy efforts (GDPR / CCPA), and the use of Transparency Consent Framework (TCF) on CTV platforms is a topic that is not completely resolved and is being discussed in the Project Rearc working groups. There also are near-term implications to the vanishing cookies in relation to “cross-platform device graphs,” which are important to understand and work through. The recent IDFA announcement from Apple with iOS14 might also have an impact on the use of IFAs longer term, but it is still early days on that front, and the industry is working through the mobile implications before we get to the CTV implications. Please join the Programmatic Supply Chain Working Group if you are interested in the IDFA/SKAdNetwork conversation, and the work being done to support registered “ad networks” via OpenRTB.

Finally, in the absence of IFAs or IDs, there are three main areas to consider as a part of the privacy-safe future — content/contextual classification, audience classification by 1st parties, and authenticated consumers. This means that the Content Taxonomy and Audience taxonomy are going to be important for targeting and other aspects of addressability. OpenRTB includes fields (Ad.cat, Ad.cattax, Segment) to pass the content and audience categories. The CTV & Video Working Group is currently working on updating the Content Taxonomy to better support the CTV world. We are including more relevant movie/TV genres and video-related categories, and putting together best practices on the use of the categories and other vectors that the 2.x versions of Content Taxonomy supports. Please join the CTV Working Group if you are interested in contributing to this conversation.