Bringing Harmony to the CTV Marketplace. Together.

Tuesday at the New York Stock Exchange, we introduced our Harmony initiative for CTV advertising at Innovid’s Connected Vision 2024. Joining us on the event stage were industry leaders from the ANA, 4A’s, Ad Net Zero, Goodway Group, Marketecture, PMG, and Roku.   

We built this event around Innovid’s vision — that TV should remain open for everyone and controlled by no one. As TV rapidly transitions to a fully digital future, there is a clear opportunity to avoid the mistakes of digital advertising’s past. We believe CTV advertising has reached a critical inflection point, and we as an industry must act. Together. 

“It’s very inspiring and helpful that we have so many industry partners in the room,” Dani Cushion, CMO, Innovid, said at the event. “...  It's important for us to actually be able to learn from what these folks are putting out and always try to keep best practices in mind about how we can make this ecosystem great.” 

On stage, the industry leaders identified many challenges with the CTV ecosystem. Ashwini Karandikar, EVP Media, Technology, Data, 4A’s, likened CTV to a “Pandora’s box” that offered both challenges and opportunities. “Fraud is what (CTV) looks like,” she said. “But the addressability is also what it looks like.”

Bill Duggan, Group Executive Vice President, ANA, citing his organization’s report on issues in the advertising supply chain, said that only 36 cents of the media advertising dollars reaches the consumer, with much of that dollar going to middlemen, who make money with every “hop” in the ecosystem. 

In addition to reducing the actual working media, dollar those “hops” create excess carbon emissions, John Osborn, Director, Ad Net Zero, pointed out. “We can start to mitigate the carbon emissions en route to lowering our overall industry carbon load,” he said.

These challenges are not insurmountable. Working together with the industry, we aim to optimize CTV advertising at the infrastructure level to improve efficiency, enhance transparency and control, reduce carbon emissions, and increase ROI to ultimately provide better viewing experiences.

At the event, we unveiled Innovid’s Harmony initiative and product innovations, purpose-built to realize our vision for TV. Harmony addresses some of the biggest challenges facing CTV advertising today to build a better CTV advertising future tomorrow.  

Our new product, Harmony Direct, offers you the most direct and efficient way to launch guaranteed, non-biddable media — and advertisers are not charged a percentage of media to activate. This streamlined supply path redistributes substantial working media dollars back into the ecosystem, benefiting both publishers and advertisers by reducing time, effort, fraud, and environmental waste.

“Harmony Direct increases working media value increases publisher yield, optimizes the delivery path, and has a positive impact on the environmental footprint that we have in the industry,” Blair Robertson, Head of Product Strategy at Innovid, said at the event. 

Roku participated in the beta test of Harmony Direct. Miles Fisher, Head of Emerging and Programmatic, Roku, said at the event, “We talked a lot about all the hops in the ecosystem and how $1 into the machine doesn't end up in the publisher’s pocket and doesn't deliver $1 of dollar value to the advertiser. So for us, the more working media that we can get or the more working media the apps on our platform get, the better it is for everybody.”

Overall, our beta tests showed that advertisers saw their working media increase by 8%. On the sell side, publishers experienced yield increases of as much as 15%. 

“PMG is a very outcome-focused organization, and we want to drive customer cash registers and sales,” said Mike Treon, Video & Connected TV Strategy Lead. “We try to lower your costs and increase your performance. And we're trying to do both of those at the same time — figure out what works and figure out the best way to do it. And that's supply path optimization mixed with campaign optimization.”

Shamim Samadi, Harmony Product Lead, Innovid, said, “So why does that all matter if we create this sort of more efficient supply path on a programmatic guaranteed basis to CTV publishers? We think as an industry this year alone, if we worked on this together, starting now, we can unlock $1 billion of working media putting that back into the CTV ecosystem.” 

So this is not pie in the sky. Harmony is available now. 

As Shamim said on stage, “We’re open for business. If you are an agency or an advertiser in the US, we're open for business starting today. If you're a CTV publisher in the U.S., we're also open for business.”

With Harmony, brands, agencies, publishers, technology providers — none of us have to put up with the issues within the CTV ecosystem any more. As Jay Friedman, CEO, Goodway Group, said, “Brands who tolerate this mess — just don’t.”  

Because of Harmony, I believe we are moving in the right direction, but we can’t do this alone. I’d like to thank again the industry leaders who appeared on our stage at the NYSE to discuss the future of CTV: 

• Bill Duggan, Group Executive Vice President, ANA
• Ashwini Karandikar, EVP Media, Technology, Data, 4A’s 
• John Osborn, Director, Ad Net Zero
• Ari Paparo, CEO & Contributor, Marketecture
• Miles Fisher, Head of Emerging and Programmatic, Roku
• Mike Treon, Video & Connected TV Strategy Lead, PMG
• Jay Friedman, CEO, Goodway Group

Harmony will be a journey. Learn more about how to come along for the ride.