LG Ad Solutions Offered Outcome Guarantees. Advertisers Still Said No

Serge Matta, president of global ad sales at LG Ad Solutions, offered a quick-service restaurant CMO a deal that seemed impossible to refuse: pay only for incremental store visits, as measured by the advertiser's own independent third-party measurement partner. The advertiser declined anyway.

"Well, how do I know I can trust them?" the CMO asked, according to Matta. "They're your measurement partner!" Matta recalled thinking, still incredulous. "That's when I gave up," he said. Matta told the story during a session at LUMA's Digital Media Summit earlier this week, in a discussion that felt, by one account, like group therapy for CTV ad tech platforms.

Why do advertisers still distrust CTV outcomes?

Matta's anecdote captures a shared frustration among connected TV sellers. They have spent years positioning CTV (connected TV, meaning television content delivered over the internet and sold programmatically) as a vehicle for driving outcomes, not just reach and frequency. Buyers have not followed.

"We're not there yet," Matta said. "The promise is there, we're pitching it, we have it, but we need advertisers to come on board."

Lou Paskalis, an ad industry veteran and self-described "recovering marketer," offered a theory from the audience. Despite what he called an "inexorable pull down the funnel" toward performance, marketers still see TV as upper-funnel "hero media." Two further obstacles: advertisers often lack the right creative for CTV, and producing it costs too much.

"There are legacy barriers to taking full advantage," Paskalis said, "and [CTV is] just not seen as being as performative as programmatic."

Is measurement actually the blocker?

The evidence suggests it is not. Philip Inghelbrecht, CEO and co-founder of CTV ad platform Tatari, said that when he started the company about 10 years ago, people looked at him cross-eyed when he raised incrementality (the measurement of sales a campaign caused, rather than sales it merely coincided with). Today, many independent third-party measurement companies offer incrementality through a variety of models. Inghelbrecht called that a good thing.

Yet even a guarantee backed by independent measurement failed to close Matta's deal. And some buyer skepticism has merit. Scott Young, co-founder and chief product officer of streaming ad insertion platform Transmit.Live, noted that attribution is, in his words, kind of a mess: every channel, from display to social, tries to take credit for the same conversion. CTV is no different, but it brings one advantage.

"You're getting a higher rate of attention," Young said. "Yes, you might be paying more for it, but you need exposure and attention in order to actually convert."

Whose business problem does the media buy serve?

Vinny Rinaldi, VP of client strategy and growth at The Trade Desk, reminded the room that this debate sounds academic to the people who control budgets. "Not many brands think about all the things that we talk about on a daily basis," he said. Rinaldi joined the DSP (demand-side platform, software brands use to buy ads programmatically) over the summer after a career on the brand and agency side, including multiple long stints at Hershey's in media, marketing and strategy roles.

He used Hershey's to make his case for why the DSP, not the publisher, should have the final say on when and where ads run. At Hershey's, October was like the Super Bowl, but most candy sales landed in the final three or four days before Halloween. When he bought direct from publishers, most impressions ran in the first week of October, well before shoppers thought about Halloween candy, because publishers focused on monetizing their own inventory. Only a trickle remained by month's end.

If pressed, Rinaldi said, publishers "would be like, 'Well, we delivered in full, what do you mean?" But, he said, "I wanted 95% of my spend to be the last week of October, because it would have driven a lot more revenue for my company, not somebody else's."

Earning trust, in other words, takes more than a third-party measurement partner.