Question 1

What is connected TV advertising, and how is it different from linear TV?

Accepted Answer

Advertising delivered to **internet-connected television screens** — through smart TV apps, streaming services, set-top boxes and games consoles — bought like digital inventory rather than like broadcast airtime. It combines television's screen with digital's targeting and measurement, and inherits problems from both.

**How it differs from linear:**

**Buying.** Linear is bought against **forecast audiences** for a programme slot, largely on a fixed schedule agreed in advance. CTV is bought **per impression**, frequently programmatically, with audience targeting rather than programme targeting.

**Targeting.** Linear targets a demographic through the content. CTV can target a household using first-party data, purchase signals or geography.

**Measurement.** Linear uses panel-based audience estimates. CTV reports **delivered impressions** on a device, and can be connected to online outcomes.

**Skippability and format.** Most CTV inventory is non-skippable and completes at very high rates, which is genuinely different from other digital video.

**What is actually good about it:** the attention profile of a large screen, high completion rates, addressability at household level, and the ability to reach audiences who watch no linear television at all — which is now a large and growing group, skewed young.

**The honest problems:**

**Frequency control across platforms is poor.** Each service caps its own delivery, so a viewer may see the same ad many times across several apps — the most common complaint viewers make about streaming advertising.

**Fragmentation.** Reach must be assembled across many services, each with its own inventory and rules.

**Measurement is not comparable to linear**, which makes combined planning genuinely difficult, and cross-media measurement remains unsolved.

**Fraud.** Server-side ad insertion makes device spoofing possible, and CTV fraud has been significant.

**Price.** CPMs are high relative to other digital video.

**Transparency of placement** is weaker than buyers expect.

**The practical approach** is to treat CTV as complementary reach against light linear viewers, rather than as a straight replacement.

Question 2

What is a retail media network, and why is every retailer building one?

Accepted Answer

A retailer selling advertising inventory against its own shopper data — on its website, in its app, in physical stores, and increasingly on other websites entirely. It has become the fastest-growing

Question 3

What is programmatic advertising and real-time bidding?

Accepted Answer

Programmatic advertising is the automated buying and selling of ad inventory through software, replacing the negotiated deals that dominated media buying historically. Real-time bidding (RTB) is the

Question 4

What is out-of-home advertising, and how is it measured?

Accepted Answer

Advertising in public space — billboards, transport, street furniture, retail and increasingly digital screens — and its measurement problem is fundamental: you cannot ask a poster who saw it. The

Question 5

What is podcast advertising, and how is it bought?

Accepted Answer

Advertising inside audio programming, and its distinctive property is that a large share of it is read by the host — which is why it performs differently from almost every other advertising format.

Question 6

What is a media plan, and what does flighting mean?

Accepted Answer

A media plan sets out where advertising will run, when, for how much, and to whom. Flighting is one of the scheduling patterns it can use — concentrating spend into bursts rather than spreading it

Question 7

What is a lookalike audience and how is it built?

Accepted Answer

A lookalike audience (Google calls its equivalent similar segments) is a group of people an ad platform assembles because they resemble an existing group you supplied — your customers, your website

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