In this Q&A, we hear from leading industry experts who are members of the IAB Australia Video Council, sharing their insights on video advertising in 2024 and their predictions for 2025.
Featured contributors include Audrey Michelin, Senior Director Account Management, OpenX, Chris Mottershead, Commercial Director JAPAC, Publica by IAS, Zoe Kostos, Head of Commercial Innovation, Paramount AUNZ and Sebastian Collins, National Head of Programmatic Practices & Solutions, GroupM.
Q. What has been the most significant trend in video advertising for 2024, and how has it impacted the industry?
Audrey: The most significant trend in video advertising this year has been the push for greater transparency in the CTV ecosystem. Publishers who have SSP partners that help them understand the buyer landscape and bid dynamics places them at an advantage when it comes to biddable environments. Transparency initiatives, such as illuminating bid and price density, have also helped publishers better gauge the value and competitiveness of their inventory.
Increased transparency—achieved through measures like eliminating resellers, standardising signals, removing unintentional inventory, and offering log-level reporting—has bolstered confidence in biddable CTV. This creates a powerful feedback loop, where greater transparency drives increased investment, which incentivises publishers and SSPs to further enhance the quality and reliability of their offerings, ultimately elevating the entire ecosystem.
Q. What challenges has video advertising faced in 2024, and what opportunities have emerged as a result?
Audrey: Video advertising has faced significant challenges, including the impact of global and local privacy initiatives, the loss of legacy identifiers, and the growing demand for supply path optimisation. In response, SSPs have emerged as critical partners for both publishers and advertisers, leveraging their unique position to provide tools that address these challenges head-on. The opportunities arising from these challenges have been transformative. SSPs that are innovating when it comes to data, identity, and curation are reshaping the adtech landscape by enabling greater transparency and control.
Chris: As new measurement currencies enter the market, the industry must strive for greater alignment on what genuinely constitutes “Total TV.” Achieving total measurement requires a comprehensive understanding of activity beyond the screen—capturing both online and offline behaviours. Focusing solely on specific apps or environments offers only a fragmented view of the broader landscape. The increasing prevalence of ACR (Automatic Content Recognition) data presents an opportunity for the industry to establish a unified framework for defining Total TV. This will foster greater consensus and support improved alignment on measurement standards, ensuring a more accurate and inclusive representation of viewer behaviour.
Seb: The ongoing fragmentation of audiences is continuing to challenge media planning and buying practices to evolve. Video consumption is becoming more and more individualistic as viewers migrate to a diverse range of social and streaming platforms. This is challenging brands and agencies to work harder to plan and buy across a much broader ecosystem. There is no one size fits all approach so the ideal blend of budgets by platform and format will vary substantially advertiser to advertiser. Adding to this the goal of delivering personalised advertising across a fragmented ecosystem is becoming ever more challenging.
AI has the potential to solve or at least assist with a number of these challenges. It’s easy to focus on the potential for AI to replace jobs but there are so many untapped opportunities to improve media planning and buying that our people simply don’t have the time to fully explore. We have been using our own AI solutions for in-channel optimisation for years but we are now seeing success expanding to cross-platform and cross-format optimisation as well using attention, commerce and other data sources to fuel smarter buying decisions.
Q. How have advancements in technology influenced video advertising this year, and what technologies do you foresee playing a key role in 2025?
Audrey: Advancements in technology have significantly influenced video advertising this year by addressing one of the industry's biggest challenges: content-level transparency in CTV. Despite the ongoing shift from linear TV to CTV, buyers often lack full transparency into exactly what they’re purchasing, with two-thirds of marketers citing a lack of content-object clarity as a barrier to increased investment in CTV. This year, the use of content signals has emerged as a pivotal technology for building trust. These data points, which describe characteristics like genre, language, maturity rating, and theme, help advertisers ensure their ads run in appropriate streaming environments.
SSPs’ access to a complete, unfiltered view of inventory by being directly integrated with CTV publishers allows them to standardise content data into usable categories for buyers. Looking ahead to 2025, technologies that enhance data standardisation will continue to shape the CTV landscape, enabling more precise and confident buying decisions.
Chris: The continued adoption of the OpenRTB 2.6 protocol has delivered significant benefits across the entire supply chain and will continue to scale in 2025. For buyers and brands, it provides enhanced transparency into the composition of ad pods, enabling them to target ad opportunities that align more effectively with their campaign KPIs. Publishers and SSPs benefit from the ability to send podded requests, which improve efficiency, reduce ad selection emissions, support richer targeting signals, and drive better revenue outcomes. Meanwhile, viewers at home enjoy a more seamless ad break experience, with more relevant messaging and fewer instances of repetitive or back-to-back ad creatives.
Q. What are your predictions for 2025, and how should businesses prepare for these?
Audrey: Next year, the video advertising industry will see significant advancements in the standardisation and use of content signals to address fragmentation and enable scalable targeting in CTV. Unifying taxonomies will be essential; doing so will reduce inconsistencies and improve targeting precision across platforms.
We will also face increasing privacy regulations, especially when it comes to advertising to minors. As this happens, it’s incredibly important to partner with trusted advisors who understand the downstream implications of these regulations and who are building innovative solutions that continue to drive performance while protecting both their media buys and data assets. These innovations will drive a more efficient and transparent ecosystem, setting the stage for sustained growth in video advertising.
Zoe: The battle for consumer attention will intensify as competition in video advertising reaches new heights. Businesses will face an increasingly dynamic landscape, with new players entering the market and consumer expectations evolving rapidly. To stay ahead, understanding the competitive landscape will be crucial. Additionally, content rights will become even more critical in attracting audiences, with sports streaming at the forefront. This streaming-first approach will drive new levels of personalisation and interactivity in the fan experience. To capitalise on this, advertisers must embrace customer-centric strategies ensuring they meet the heightened expectations of the sports audience.
Seb: We anticipate the demand for solutions to improve the sustainability of digital media buying will increase significantly in 2025. From the 1st of January many of our clients will be required to include climate action statements as part of their annual reports and we know media is a significant contributor to scope 3 emissions. In preparation for this we have been testing AI optimisation of digital media to balance performance goals with emissions reductions and we see this as a viable technique to apply at scale to measure and reduce. As a starting point it is important for advertisers to partner with a measurement provider to understand the impact of their current media activity on emissions. This will give the insight needed to identify key areas for improvement without impacting results.
In 2024, the IAB Australia Video Council has released the Video Advertising State of the Nation report and the Connected TV Handbook update, look out for our releases in 2025!