This article looks at how the IAB’s Redefining Media Types Standard might address the streaming ad market’s demand for quality controls.
“The advertising market does not systematically price impressions based on their real economic value.”
That is a line from the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement’s research paper “Quality Matters: Navigating Quality in Media Buying and Measurement.” Published in May, the research paper sums up a growing demand in the TV and streaming ad market: Media quality needs to be somehow accounted for in ad buying.
But how?
The answer may have arrived earlier this month in the form of the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Redefining Media Types Standard. While still a draft currently in public commentary, the framework aims to create a classification system for media quality to be accounted for in ad buying.
RMTS tackles problematic taxonomies such as how to categorize free, ad-supported streaming TV services; whether ads playing on TVs in bars, airports, and other public venues should be considered CTV; and how social video platforms fit into the puzzle. It doesn’t directly address the question of whether YouTube is TV, but it does appear to give advertisers the ability to define that answer for themselves.
“It sounds like it is a good step towards a shared language between sellers and buyers to align on the value of the inventory that one wants to sell and the other wants to buy,” said Jesse Math, a former agency executive who now serves as svp of partnerships at marketing mix modeling firm Engagious Decision Systems.
The framework reclassifies digital video in two main areas. First, based on the device-based viewing environment using three options: big screen, lean back (i.e. a TV screen in a person’s home); personal screen (i.e. a person’s phone); and public ambient display (i.e. a TV in a restaurant or at a gas station pump). Second are categories based on viewing and operational attributes, including whether sound is enabled, if an ad is skippable, what types of targeting signals are available, and the format and timeliness of content (i.e. if a program is live, the first run of an episode, or a rerun).
The point is an ad buyer will be able to programmatically configure a campaign based on what they consider to be quality media. And that configuration might also help address issues where media is misrepresented by a seller.
“In the video landscape there is still a ton of smoke and mirrors,” Math said. He added, “There are a lot of very small to mid-sized agencies that are buying what they think is the big screen, and then they are getting a whole mix of stuff. And CPMs are blended across all ad types, and it is not what they think.”
The definition of what counts as TV has never been blurrier. For example: YouTube is the most-watched streaming service on TV screens, and yet many ad buyers do not consider YouTube to be TV. Meanwhile, streaming ad inventory is increasingly being bought programmatically. This underscores the importance for buyers and sellers to properly assess the quality of media.
“They treat CTV like they treat Meta. Meta has practically conditioned marketers to be like, ‘I just buy Meta, and I don’t really care if it runs next to a 45-year-old mom story or some random creator,’” said Danny Weisman, co-founder of agency Obsessed Media, referring to digital-native advertisers. He added, “Whereas if you just buy CTV, it is like saying ‘sports’ or anything with an umbrella term — there are so many different ways to buy it. There are so many bad ways to buy it, especially programmatically.”
Implementing a taxonomy for media quality also appears essential when looking ahead to the future of ad buying, particularly with the rise of agentic ad buying. Companies including NBCUniversal, Butler/Till, and PubMatic are already using AI agents for streaming advertising. Given how much of the streaming ad market has become automated through programmatic buying, this paves the way for the next layer of automation through AI agents.
But who wants an AI agent to make the call on whether an ad package from Paramount that includes Pluto TV meets an advertiser’s quality threshold? The answer must be no one. But there needs to be a way for an ad buyer to train an AI agent on what the ad buyer considers to be quality media — the buyer’s own recipe. This is where a standard like RMTS can prove extremely useful.
“We have to guide AI more as agentic buying rolls out, and therefore we must set those guardrails in place,” said Weisman.
