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With 2015 coming to a close, ACA is asking the experts to predict the trends they think will shape the industry in 2016. Leading off is Grant Le Riche, Managing Director, TubeMogul Canada.

Perhaps the only thing that the advertising industry enjoys more than celebrating past work is guessing what will happen in the future. With that in mind, here are some of the first – but certainly not last – predictions for Canada’s media industry in 2016.

Connected TV Comes Into Its Own

2016 will see Connected TV (CTV) come into its own as an effective and scaled solution to reach an increasingly fragmented audience. CTV offers marketers a quality, brand-safe environment absent of traditional issues associated with digital advertising, such as viewability or suspicious traffic. But there are two things that need to happen to enable Connected TV as a viable medium for brand advertisers:

First, cross-device audience measurement must be standardized. Fortunately, companies like Roku and Nielsen have made meaningful progress in efforts to establish a common currency upon which marketers can transact across channels.

Second, while CTV is highly desired, inventory constraints effectively prohibit brand advertisers from reaching the scale associated with traditional linear TV channels. Next year will see deals put in place to both aggregate multiple CTV sources and aggregate CTV along with linear and VOD sources in a single platform, providing a wide swath of inventory that provides scale and efficiency.

Programmatic TV Is Ready For Primetime

2015 was the first year advertisers tuned in to programmatic TV. In 2016, it will be ready for primetime. The demonstrated improvements in efficiency and cost-savings provided by automating the planning and buying of linear TV has already convinced marketers that programmatic principles can successfully be applied to traditional channels.

In the U.S., 2016 will propel TV advertising’s renaissance even further with the application of advertisers’ first-party data and more addressable TV solutions like the one recently announced by Dish Network. In Canada, 2016 will signal programmatic TV’s shift from theoretical to real – and meaningful.

Cross-Screen Advertising Incorporates TV

Advertisers will have to put their existing TV plans at the heart of their cross-screen efforts. The key to effective cross-screen advertising is deduplicating audiences across TV and digital devices – or, put another way, reaching an individual on a digital device who has not already seen an advertiser’s TV ads. Marketers can currently use audience data from sources like Nielsen and MRI to build atop their existing TV plans and figure out where they can spend their remaining budget to maximize their reach and frequency in the most efficient manner possible. Moreover, that same audience data allows marketers to move beyond historic measurements like GRPs and graduate to a more effective metric like an incremental, on-target CPMs.

Viewability Debate Continues, But With A New Angle

Advertisers will finally realize that 100% viewability isn’t necessarily a good thing. Marketers that look at viewability rates alone without also considering costs could be misled. Many decisions are made on a viewable CPM (or vCPM) basis – ad networks will often intentionally buy a greater quantity of cheap ads where viewability is lower because the overall cost-per-viewable impression might be lower than a smaller, premium buy.

Paying for 100% guaranteed viewability will – most likely – increase underlying cost. Buying with a guarantee is comforting, but often buying without a guarantee leads to a lower viewable CPM, which is the metric that matters most. Expect this new wrinkle to enter the debate about viewability.