Rob C.

Disney delivered a strong streaming quarter that shows real traction in its DTC strategy, but... the results also exposed just how dependent the company still is on a declining linear ecosystem, and how vulnerable that makes it in high-stakes distribution battles. The YouTube TV blackout illustrates the core tension: streaming momentum is accelerating, yet the economics that fund ESPN and anchor Disney’s leverage are eroding faster than the company can replace them. The fight with YouTube highlights a deeper structural reality in which both sides are right, both sides are squeezed, and future carriage disputes will become longer, louder, and more strategically consequential. WHY IT MATTERS: ❏ The economics of sports and affiliate fees are becoming more volatile, and Disney is signaling it will absorb short-term pain to protect long-term leverage. ❏ Distributors like YouTube TV now wield scale and customer ownership once held by cable, shifting power dynamics in every renewal cycle. ❏ More blackouts are coming in 2026 and beyond, making distribution strategy(not content) the next defining battleground of the streaming era.

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📊 One ad format is delivering 100x the eCPM of banners. It's not rewarded video. Here's what the data says. 👇 The average eCPM by ad format in mobile gaming right now: 🔹 Banner ads: $0.10–$1 🔹 Interstitial ads: $4–$15 🔹 Rewarded video: $10–$50 🔹 Playable ads: $20–$100 🔹 Offerwalls: $200–$1,670 🚀 Offerwalls are delivering 10-100x the revenue per thousand impressions of every other format. And they do it with the lowest intrusiveness of any ad unit. Why? 🍄 User-initiated. No interruption. No ad fatigue. The player chooses to engage. 🦕 Retention multiplier. ironSource data shows offerwall users have 5-7x higher retention at D7, D14, and D30. Unity confirms 5x through D90. 🤫 Privacy-proof. Contextual and reward-based. ATT and Privacy Sandbox haven't touched them. Meanwhile, banner eCPMs haven't moved in years. Interstitials annoy users. Rewarded video caps at $50. The mobile gaming market hits $232B by 2032 (Fortune Business Insights). Only ~5% of users make IAPs. That means 95% of your players are monetised through ads. The question isn't whether to use offerwalls. It's why you're still relying on formats that earn $1 when one earns $1,000. #mobile #gaming

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If you are a Performance/Growth Marketer testing or looking to test CTV, this article is a must read. CTV inventory is primarily non-clickable so the industry relies on Cross Device to connect the device visiting the website to the TV in which the ad was served (and vice versa). Here's the problem - most CTV vendors use IP Address (Wifi) as the sole source of truth for cross device tracking. This is both antiquated and heavily flawed, but they do it anyway and hey, it certainly doesn't hurt in-platform performance. Data validation provider Truthset conducted this study on behalf of CIMM (Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement) and Go Addressable to definitively understand the accuracy of IP Address for Cross Device tracking applications (CTV). "Truthset analyzed records from six major data vendors, including 1 billion email addresses, nearly 250 million IP addresses and 164 million postal addresses." Here are some key findings: > IP-to-Email matches: 16% accurate >IP-to-Postal matches: 13% accurate If you are a brand allocating ad dollars to a CTV campaign leveraging IP Address for cross device tracking/targeting, is this accuracy acceptable? “There’s this promise in the industry of completely accurate, deterministic data that matches sophisticated and vast advertising targets and attributes onto individuals and households,” Jon Watts, Managjng Director of Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM) said. “This leads marketers to believe that when they buy against a particular target, they’re reaching that target – and, unsurprisingly, the truth is much more complicated than that.” IP Address Match Rates Are a Joke – And It’s No Laughing Matter https://lnkd.in/gwGa_iBt Keynes Digital #crossdevice #CTV #connectedtv

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Excited to share that Aperiam has invested in Bedrock Platform. Obvious statement of the century: programmatic advertising has a complexity problem. The infrastructure that was built to give media buyers control has, over time, done the opposite. Burying teams under layers of operational overhead, legacy tooling, and opaque supply chains. Bedrock is built on a simple but powerful thesis: what if you stripped away the bloat and rebuilt the stack around what actually matters... precision, transparency, and speed to execution. Their platform combines AI-driven campaign automation with curated, premium inventory across video, CTV, DOOH, and audio, and aims to be flexible and get smarter over time. Plus, the team (Shane, Austin, Ryan, James) has deep roots in the infrastructure layer of ad tech and understands the plumbing better than almost anyone. We believe the next generation of programmatic will be leaner, faster and AI-first. Bedrock is building that.

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Significant and important to understand the power of Amazon's Shopper audiences that underpin this powerful TV opportunity...#primevideo Vector Retail Media

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🖥️✅ Mike Shields / Substack (10/21): “Roku is one of the companies that is bullish on this would-be sector, rolling out a self-serve platform called Roku Ads Manager about a year ago. The company says it’s seeing real growth here - with one key caveat. We’re seeing a new advertiser category emerging,” said a Roku executive on the Next in Media podcast this week. “We’ve got lots of different parts that make up our total platform revenue, and this area is the fastest growing. I think the misnomer for a lot of these platforms is that they think there’s just going to be this onslaught of SMBs that is going to make up some really fast revenue opportunity. And the reality is that onboarding SMBs is challenging. You need to onboard thousands, if not tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands for that revenue to make up anything meaningful.” What Roku is seeing is that performance advertisers, including many of those direct-to-consumer brands, are coming to TV quickly. That’s great, but it’s not the wave of mom-and-pop shops that make up huge chunks of the millions of advertisers drawn to Meta and Google. “Those mom-and-pop shops, they advertise in the newspaper,” Roku said. “They advertise with local radio. Sure, they advertise on social and in search for sure. But they don’t have a sophisticated marketing team. They don’t have a very large marketing budget. Whereas the digital performance buyer is very sophisticated in its methods and its measurement, and is doing its own analysis on revenue impact, total ROAS, their lift and regression analysis. They might be doing incrementality analysis and geo-holdout lift studies and all of these kinds of things. That group is the one that we’re seeing move more heavily into CTV.” ⬇️ #streaming #ctv #ott #avod #programmatic #smb #dtc https://lnkd.in/ewCxfptQ

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