As advertisers invest in connected TV, there’s increased attention on what business results they’re getting from TV ad spend and campaigns – aka outcomes.
And alongside the Consumer Electronics Show taking place in Las Vegas this week there have already been multiple announcements on the outcomes front, including deeper clean room data integrations to support lower-funnel results for advertisers, expanded measurement partnerships to help optimize CTV campaigns towards desired business objectives, and new AI-powered tools to automate the campaign process based on outcomes.
Roku taps iSpot to optimize for outcomes
First up, CTV player Roku, which on Tuesday announced an integration with measurement vendor iSpot to use its Outcomes at Scale product.
Paramount last year was the first to sign on for iSpot’s outcome-based ad measurement tool, but Roku claims it’s the first major streamer to use the platform the explicit purpose of optimizing campaigns based on outcomes – and not just after the fact as is the usual timeline, but in-flight.
iSpot has already been a Roku data and measurement partner since spring 2024, with the optimization features building on that partnership.
Per the announcement, Roku advertisers can use iSpot-attributed outcomes to track ROI and adjust creative strategies in-flight to ultimately increase effectiveness and drive business results and outcomes like web conversions.
Early tests with SimpliSafe have shown success, with Roku citing a 23% boost in leads and a 31% bump in website visits for an optimized group vs control.
“This advancement with Roku and iSpot gives us a powerful way to ensure our advertising spend works as effectively as possible,” said Courtney Strauss Manning, manager of Media & Customer Acquisition at SimpliSafe, in a statement. “Our test campaign delivered positive results, showing significant gains across key performance indicators among the Roku audience. This partnership is clearly improving the effectiveness and efficiency of our media investments.”
In part the move is about providing advertisers with better, real-time measurement to both optimize campaigns towards and attribute TV credit for results their media investments drive, at a time when platforms are aiming and brands are seeking to establish the CTV channel as a more full-funnel vehicle.
“This deeper integration with Roku marks a key moment for outcome-based streaming,” said Stuart Schwartzapfel, EVP of Media Partnerships at iSpot, in a statement. “With iSpot’s trusted attribution powering Roku’s optimization engine, we’re not just measuring performance; we’re helping drive it, ensuring advertisers gain new levels of efficiency and ROI directly on the Roku platform.”
And as Jon Lafayette noted in The Measure, lower funnel metrics like sales will be of interest to some advertisers, but others still care about upper funnel like reach and brand awareness.
“That’s why somebody like iSpot is a great partner, because they’re looking at things full funnel,” Roku Senior Director of Strategic Advertising Partnerships Miles Fisher told The Measure. “Without something like this, publishers would be flying blind.”
Samsung Ads Data+ gets deeper integration with Snowflake
An increased focus on outcomes for CTV advertisers was also seen in Monday’s announcement about a deeper integration between clean room provider Snowflake and Samsung Ads data-as-a-service offering Data+.
Samsung Ads says Data+ is a direct response to brand challenges – one being growing pressure to optimize media buys for lower-funnel outcomes.
With Data+ and Snowflake Data Clean Rooms, advertisers can securely match their own first-party data with Samsung’s first-party audiences exposed to various campaigns.
“Advertisers have long requested easier, privacy-first access to Samsung’s TV data to better understand exposure across linear and CTV,” said Justin Evans, Head of Innovation & Insights at Samsung Ads, in a statement. “With Data+ via Snowflake, we are giving them the tools to act on that data – eliminating waste, proving performance, and driving smarter decisions across the full media buy.”
The partners said the collaboration offers value for advertisers across the full marketing funnel, but the most significant impact is lower funnel metrics, where CTV can now support outcome-based campaigns at scale in a privacy-compliant way.
Among benefits of the deeper integration, Samsung called out insights for advertisers into the full customer journey following ad exposure, “enabling more accurate measurement of lower-funnel outcomes and driving smarter, outcome-based media strategies.”
Use cases also include audience analysis and overlap, customer journey attribution, and performance optimization across platforms.
“As the industry sprints toward full-funnel accountability, our partnership with Samsung Ads directly addresses one of the most consistent demands we hear from advertisers and lays the groundwork for a new standard in advertising,” said Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan, general manager of Snowflake Data Clean Rooms, in a statement. “This is a prime example of how industry leaders can come together to make data collaboration more secure, more scalable, and ultimately more powerful.”
While Roku and iSpot partner to help advertisers optimize for outcomes in-flight and Samsung Ads seeks to answer advertiser demand for lower-funnel outcomes with privacy-compliant data sharing, CTV-focused digital advertising DSP Viant is looking to automate the campaign process from a starting point of advertisers’ desired results or outcomes.
Viant autonomously automates with Outcomes
On Monday Viant unveiled Outcomes, which is powered by the DSP’s proprietary AI Lattice Brain.
It’s the next step in the ViantAI toolkit, delivering on AI decisioning functionality for CTV and AI-powered programmatic advertising.
To use, advertisers start simply with the business result (or outcome) they want to achieve, be it product sales, ROAS, or customer acquisition. Then the ViantAI platform autonomously manages each step of execution towards that outcome, from set-up to real-time optimization.
According to Viant, Outcomes is designed to take away the burden of typical processes like campaign setup, optimization and day-to-day management, while doing so in a transparent way in terms of where ads run and how the performance was achieved.
Powering the new functionality is the Lattice Brain decisioning architecture. Viant said this constantly and simultaneously evaluates multiple proprietary data signals – including Viant Household ID, IRIS_ID, supply quality scoring, historical campaign performance, bid pricing dynamics and real-time delivery data – to decide and execute optimization decisions autonomously or without manual work from advertisers.
“Advertising has spent decades forcing teams to manage complexity instead of results,” said Tim Vanderhook, co-founder and CEO of Viant Technology, in a statement. “Outcomes flips that model. Advertisers declare the outcome they want and our AI Lattice Brain handles the decision-making and execution behind the scenes—using differentiated signals and full transparency into delivery.”