In modern media, personalization will become increasingly critical in connecting audiences with content and advertising that best align with their interests and preferences. For brands seeking 1:1 relationships with new consumers, quality audience data has become critical as the digital landscape expands and channel engagement fragments. This is particularly relevant across two fronts: traditional digital media across computer and mobile and connected TV (CTV1).
While the lines between these two environments are blurring, they currently exist independent from one another, which means that marketers need to understand how each is structured and evolving so they can best navigate the intricacies to best capitalize on the promise of personalization.
The digital advertising ecosystem is fundamentally different for CTV than it is for other platforms.
- In browser-based digital media, marketers have used third-party cookies for audience-specific digital engagement for more than 20 years. Now, as the industry moves away from cookies, Nielsen is prepared to use other identifiers such as hashed emails (HEMs) or any other ubiquitous identifiers that the industry uses, as there is no single universal identifier that the ecosystem has adopted that is a true replacement for cookies. Nielsen is recommending the use of HEMs for digital measurement as it is a non-proprietary identifier that can be generated without integrating with other third-party systems.
- In video-based CTV, marketers use a combination of first-party identifiers, unique device IDs and/or household IP addresses for audience-specific advertising.
While complex and evolving, these environments become significantly more navigable for marketers when they have person-based measurement data to tap into for their campaign efforts.
Foundational differences aside, traditional digital media and CTV are similar in that they offer the same value proposition to marketers: a direct means of communicating with specific audiences. While many throughout the industry expected media spending across traditional