3 Reasons OTT Measurement Is Difficult + How Rockerbox Solves These Problems

Over-the-top or OTT media viewership is stronger than ever and only continuing to grow. By 2027, an estimated 1.6 billion people worldwide will engage in some form of OTT viewing across AVOD (advertising video on demand), SVOD (subscription video on demand), TVOD (transactional video on demand), and video downloads.

Because of their popularity, OTT platforms are a great place for brands to advertise and reach new audiences. As OTT grows in popularity as an advertising channel, so too does the need for accurate measurement. However, there are numerous challenges that stand in the way of accurately measuring OTT advertising performance.

Below we’ll cover a few of the top ways that OTT ad measurement is uniquely difficult.

1. The current OTT environment is highly fragmented.

Alongside the top names in OTT—Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, etc.—there are literally hundreds more OTT platforms available for U.S. consumers alone. While choice improves the consumer experience, it complicates the situations for brands advertising on these platforms.

With so many different OTT platforms, devices, and content sources, it is extremely time-consuming and sometimes impossible to get all of your advertising data in the same place to be able to measure the full scope of an audience’s engagement with OTT content.

2. OTT measurement providers all push different methodologies.

Spend 30 minutes researching the best way to measure OTT advertising and you’ll find numerous “right answers” to the problem. In addition to a fragmented market of OTT content providers, there is a wide range of OTT measurement providers, many of which offer very different solutions to determining OTT impact.

The number of different options and viewpoints can make it difficult to determine which methodology is right for measuring OTT advertising. In reality, the best approach may not be just one kind of methodology (e.g. MTA vs. incrementality testing) but a combination of multiple.

3. It’s difficult to understand OTT’s role in the complete marketing picture.

Any marketer knows that nothing you do exists in a vacuum. If you run ads on Hulu or Apple TV+, those placements might impact your bottom funnel performance. OTT advertising may lead to conversions, but it’s not always the only channel that contributes to a sale.

The problem is that while other channels include persistent identifiers that are then used to track consumer behavior online and in apps, OTT lacks these identifiers. Any marketer that wants to measure OTT alongside other digital channels then needs to solve this challenge

How Rockerbox Can Help

Rockerbox is a platform that is designed to address these challenges and provide an accurate and comprehensive view of an audience’s engagement with OTT ad content.

We have integrations with 20+ TV and OTT partners and are constantly working to build new integrations to meet the needs of our customers. Our unique methodology allows our customers to measure all of their marketing channels to see the overlap of OTT and other platforms as well as overall marketing performance.

Rockerbox offers a comprehensive view of an audience’s engagement with OTT content and the impact of OTT on the buyer journey, allowing marketers to make the necessary adjustments to ensure that their OTT advertising dollars are making the biggest impact possible.