More and more viewers are choosing to watch major live events on their Connected TVs. This shift makes live events the most valuable ad inventory for CTV publishers and broadcasters.
The challenge? Publishers and buyers have not yet adapted transaction behaviors to fully capitalize on this opportunity. A study by Google and BCG suggests that only 35% of live ad inventory is being transacted programmatically, with the majority still being sold via direct deals1. This limited, direct-only approach leaves significant revenue on the table.
While most major events, like the Super Bowl, will remain direct-sold for now, there is an imminent, seismic shift happening for regional broadcasts, college leagues, eSports, and non-tentpole events offered via ad-supported streams.
With the cost of streaming rights continuing to climb, and viewers demanding more affordable options, broadcasters must quickly incorporate programmatic advertising to achieve the required ROI for sustainable monetization in FAST and freemium environments.
Google Ad Manager is ready to help publishers navigate this transition, offering solutions with yield expansion, strategic targeting, and a robust delivery infrastructure.
Let’s look closer at the outstanding challenges for programmatic ads in live video identified in the Google and BCG study and examine how publishers can overcome them.
Yield expansion
Publishers surveyed in the BCG study ranked competitive fill rates and CPMs as some of the most important criteria for the SSPs and ad servers they use to monetize live CTV1. They demand high performance to ensure programmatic ads don’t cannibalize upfront commitments or erode premium CPMs.
BCG believes yield growth is possible as technology matures and new operating models scale. Their core recommendation is a hybrid monetization strategy that uses mixed deal types, including traditional reservation, programmatic guaranteed (PG), private marketplace (PMP), and biddable/open exchange. This balanced approach gives publishers maximum flexibility to optimize both fill rates and CPMs.
Google Ad Manager empowers you to achieve this strategy, enabling buying across all major programmatic deal types. Our flexible tools can help you take charge of your premium inventory. For example, with Google Ad Manager’s PMP solutions, which include Private Auctions, you control the transaction by selecting the buyers, setting the minimum price, defining the targeting rules, and adjusting the priority of the Private Auction relative to other non-guaranteed deals. This creates a competitive environment for your best inventory and gives you the flexibility of an auction with the quality of a direct deal, ultimately leading to stronger partnerships and higher revenue.
Strategic targeting
CTV is no longer just for brand awareness; buyers are focused on performance. The research confirms that 60% of buyers track ROAS and 58% use media efficiency metrics to measure the ROI of their live, programmatic campaigns1. To meet this demand, publishers must provide precision targeting that allows buyers to reach their high-value audiences.
BCG suggests utilizing engagement data to help deliver this precision. Google Ad Manager’s AI powered prediction models are specifically designed to put this recommendation into action.
Our specialized models provide real-time insights on the value of your users, helping you confidently balance ad personalization and network capacity during large-scale live events with millions of concurrent viewers - all while prioritizing privacy. By managing the targeting load efficiency, Google Ad Manager ensures you can deliver personalized streams to high-value viewers while allowing a seamless fallback to cohort-based ads for others. This enables buyers to reach their most valuable audience segments and meet their performance goals, while always safeguarding user data and privacy.
Robust delivery infrastructure
In live streaming, there are no second chances. Audiences can spike from thousands to millions, unleashing massive bursts of ad requests that will pressure-test every component of your ad stack. This is a critical concern for publishers with 46% reporting that concurrency spikes cause impression drops and 73% experiencing high latency during live events1.
BCG’s guidance is to choose technology partners built for peak viewership with a reliable infrastructure. Google Ad Manager addresses this need with our Dynamic Ad Insertion (DAI), which is designed for speed and scale.
Our DAI delivers both individual and cohort-based ad streams in a low-latency environment. To guarantee speed, we’ve enhanced our Content Delivery Network (CDN) to pull ads from the fastest sources globally. We also receive early alerts about ad breaks to ensure our ads are always ready to go and relevant to the moment.
Our next generation DAI, Server Guided Ad Insertion (SGAI), is built to further enhance the live viewing experience at massive scale. SGAI gives publishers greater flexibility and control over the ad experience to innovate with ad formats that don’t take away from the action of the live event.
Shaping the future of live, together
The research is clear: the future of live event monetization is programmatic. Publishers who adopt a hybrid monetization strategy and demand high-performance technology will lead the way.
To unlock this potential, BCG recommends a three-step strategy:
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Break away from legacy buying models by making hybrid the default.
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Improve inventory forecasting and planning.
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Upgrade technological scalability and infrastructure.
Google Ad Manager is committed to helping you execute this vision by delivering solutions across three critical pillars:
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Expanding your revenue with flexible monetization options.
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Enabling strategic targeting with AI powered prediction models.
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Providing unmatched scale and reliability with our DAI technology.
Let’s build the programmatic future of live CTV together.