The European Programmatic TV Initiative: Unlocking the potential of programmatic TV in Europe
Measurement, currency, data and identity: challenges and opportunities
Introduction
During the last six months, the members of the European Programmatic TV Initiative (EPTVI) – The Trade Desk, Google, OpenX, PubMatic, Equativ, Magnite, Cadent and Adform – have been working closely and collaboratively to assess the case for Europe’s commercial broadcasters pursuing an accelerated transition to a programmatic marketplace.
Advised by senior executives from leading European TV companies, streamers, pay-TV platforms, trade bodies and major agency groups, the Initiative members have been working together to evaluate the potential benefits, identify areas of misalignment and potential barriers – commercial, operational, technical, strategic – and to develop practical solutions and a roadmap for moving forward.
This article, the first of three that will be published during the coming weeks, focuses on measurement and currency in a programmatic TV marketplace, exploring some of the critical issues facing the industry and developing practical solutions and positive proposals for moving forward.
These and other issues will be the focus for debate and discussion at the European Programmatic TV Initiative Industry Summit in London, on Wednesday March 26th, 2025. The Summit is open to qualified industry participants. You can find out more and register your interest in attending here: https://www.projectxinitiative.com/eptvi.
A market in transition – the future is hybrid
TV viewing in Europe is evolving rapidly, shifting into connected environments and becoming more widely distributed across connected platforms and devices and a growing number of streaming services. Europe’s TV JICs are responding and are investing to upgrade measurement solutions in each market, incorporating big TV data sets into their offerings and expanding the range of services covered to include major streaming services.
Most industry participants remain hugely supportive of the existing TV currencies and measurement solutions. However, a growing proportion of TV ad spend is being transacted outside of the traditional TV currencies and shifting from broadcast inventory to ad-served impressions, creating opportunities for programmatic sales and execution.
This could and should be an exciting opportunity for the TV industry. Programmatic enables a whole new set of measurement solutions and opportunities to transact against new datasets, including scaled identity and audience data solutions, CRM, conversion and retail data, and contextual offerings. Programmatic can enable a measurement marketplace, allowing advertisers to select different solutions to deliver against their unique needs and objectives, from long-term brand building to short-term performance, and even offline sales using retail data.
As measurement and currency systems continue to evolve, the industry has the potential to develop more sophisticated, data-driven solutions that align with the realities of modern video consumption. The successful deployment of these solutions across the programmatic TV marketplace will shape the future of TV advertising in Europe, enabling advertisers to maximize the impact of their investments in an increasingly digital and addressable environment.
The current TV marketplace
For many decades, TV in Europe has predominantly been traded against national currencies maintained by JICs and MOCs in each market. These currencies have been supported by buyers and sellers and are deeply embedded into planning and buying systems, advertising operations and workflows across the industry, supporting billions of pounds and Euros of advertising spend and investment, the majority still committed by the major agency groups as part of their annual upfront or trading deals with major commercial broadcasters.
These trading relationships remain important, for buyers and for sellers. For broadcasters, they help to lock in spending from large advertisers, reducing risk and commercial uncertainty. They also allow agencies to secure discounts for their clients, by consolidating spending across the advertisers they represent, and also help to secure access to scarce inventory.
The same measurement solutions also have numerous operational use cases, including programme scheduling, promotion, and performance measurement, competitive analysis, campaign performance measurement, and so on.
Adapting to a cross-platform future
In most European markets, TV currencies and the audience measurement solutions that support them have historically been based on opted-in panel-based measurement solutions, carefully constructed to provide nationally representative estimates of all TV viewing across the market, with real people at the core of the solutions.
However, as TV viewing has changed and viewing of linear broadcasting has shifted to streaming services, JICs and MOCs across Europe have taken steps to develop and adopt hybrid methodologies for cross-platform measurement, fusing panel data with digital datasets, from router meters, tags, set-top boxes and other sources, to support more granular measurement of viewing across a wider range of TV and video streaming services, including major international streamers like Netflix and Amazon. Increasingly, Europe’s JICs and MOCs are measuring total video, including the major international streaming services, not just TV.
Put simply, Europe’s JICs and the TV measurement providers that support them have innovated, adapted and enhanced their offerings. As a result of these investments and improvements, Europe’s TV currencies generally remain relatively robust and continue to enjoy the support of most buyers and sellers, even as the market has continue to change and develop.
Methodologies have also become significantly more complex and continue to vary significantly, market-by-market, with (slightly) different methodologies, datasets, and metrics. Linking data from panels with large datasets from numerous other sources and deduplicating across households, people and devices to provide better assessments of cross-platform reach and frequency is a non-trivial undertaking. Changes to the underlying methodologies take time and can have significant consequences, for buyers and for sellers.
Largely as result, each European market has to date maintained its own unique measurement solution. Although there are common methodologies and approaches, there are also important differences between the measurement solutions and currencies deployed by JICs in different markets. In some markets, trading fully encompasses hybrid data, but others are still working towards this goal.
Measurement solutions are proliferating
Alongside the evolution of these national JIC and MOC solutions, recent years have seen a proliferation of initiatives and offerings intended to help advertisers understand reach and frequency and to assess the value or effectiveness of their ad spending. Arguably the most significant development is the WFA’s Halo initiative, which launched in 2019 to improve measurement of ad campaigns across TV, online video and the wider display marketplace. The initiative has developed a set of North Star principles and common components that are now being implemented in various national markets, with the UK and USA leading the charge and discussions underway in other markets.
Alongside the WFA’s initiative, notable developments include CFlight and Lantern in the UK, The Trade Desk’s UID 2.0, the expansion of the AudienceProject across various European markets, the steady adoption of attention-related metrics, a proliferation of agency-specific measurement offerings, new CTV-focused solutions, various market-specific collaborations between various broadcasters, and so on.
As a result, Europe’s measurement marketplace is becoming more complex and diverse, with different solutions, initiatives and offerings available to buyers and sellers, market-by-market.
A programmatic future?
These shifts in the measurement landscape clearly reflect broader changes in how audiences are consuming video content, as viewing becomes more widely distributed across connected platforms and devices, on-demand offerings and streaming services.
As viewing has changed, a modest but growing proportion of TV ad spend is being transacted outside of the traditional TV currencies, against addressable ad formats, HbbTV overlays, impressions and identity datasets. Data is being applied to support targeting and much of the inventory is ad-served, opening up the possibility of programmatic sales and execution.
For some major European broadcasters, these non-JIC transactions account for more than half of all ad sales and volumes are growing in almost all markets. In other words, Europe is transitioning into a multi-currency marketplace – and there is a growing opportunity for programmatic sales and execution.
To date, the development of this marketplace does not appear to have been overly problematic or a huge impediment to advertiser investment. Indeed, many industry participants appear to value the innovation and growing range of choices open to buyers and sellers, arguing that it has stimulated innovation and investment.
And this is where a programmatic future could present tremendous opportunities for the TV industry, supporting the development of a fully-fledged measurement marketplace that facilitates transactions against an expanding range of solutions, data sets and identity offerings. This would allow advertisers to select different solutions to deliver against their unique needs and objectives. As Sven Hagemeier, General Manager of Inventory Development EMEA at The Trade Desk puts it:
"Data-driven TV advertising has unlocked a competitive marketplace with enhanced precision and more diverse, measurement solutions tailored for each campaign. From measuring long-term brand impact to short-term performance and offline sales with retail data, there has never been a more exciting time in TV advertising".
However, it has also created additional complexity. Buyers and sellers are running parallel systems for planning and buying, supporting JIC currencies in one set of systems and data-driven, impressions-based and/or programmatic transactions in another set of systems. Today, integration is relatively limited, making holistic planning and buying more complex. The current state is widely believed to represent a transitional stage, although few anticipate a full transition to a fully addressable and/or streaming marketplace in the near future.
What happens next?
How to move forwards with measurement and currency in a future programmatic TV marketplace? It’s important to note that the programmatic marketplace is dynamic and competitive, with a wide range of demand- and supply-side platforms (DSPs, SSPs) investing heavily in operations, technology and infrastructure, data and measurement solutions. The largest DSPs compete over access to inventory and exclusive partnerships with major broadcasters, streaming businesses, CTV platforms and digital video businesses, differentiating their offerings with proprietary data and targeting capabilities, identity and privacy solutions, AI-powered campaign management and bid optimization tools and dynamic creative optimization solutions.
Although this dynamism has stimulated high levels of investment and innovation, it has also resulted in a complex market with varying technological standards, making it difficult to implement rapid, market-wide changes. The need for interoperability across different systems and adherence to multiple competing standards means that adoption of standards can be slow-moving and inconsistent.
There is no central governing institution with the authority or capability to mandate the adoption of standardized programmatic approaches in TV and digital advertising. While industry bodies such as the IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) and various national regulatory agencies influence policies, they lack the enforcement power to impose sweeping changes across all European markets. Without a centralized body to drive standardization, the industry remains fragmented, relying on individual market players to adopt new programmatic strategies at their own pace.
Although considerable progress has been made in reducing fraud and improving transparency, many European broadcasters continue to believe that the programmatic marketplace still presents risks for premium broadcasters. Practices such as inventory misrepresentation, daisy-chaining (where multiple intermediaries resell the same ad inventory), and other fraudulent activities pose serious threats to publishers' revenue streams and brand reputation. Without strict inventory controls, premium broadcasters risk losing control over their pricing and positioning in the programmatic supply chain, potentially devaluing their ad space. Ensuring transparency and direct access to premium inventory is essential to maintaining trust and maximizing revenue in programmatic transactions.
Adding to this complexity, each European TV market is distinct, shaped by its own major broadcasters, regulatory frameworks, and Joint Industry Committees (JICs) overseeing measurement and standards. For instance, the UK’s TV market operates under BARB’s measurement system, while France follows Médiamétrie, and Germany has its own regulatory and audience measurement body, AGF. Measurement and currency solutions vary across these markets.
Furthermore, major commercial broadcasters have already established highly customized ad sales operations and delivery infrastructures. These legacy systems, often developed over decades, are deeply ingrained in broadcasters’ business models. As a result, few broadcasters are willing to transition completely to programmatic solutions in the short to medium term. Many prefer a hybrid approach that integrates automation while maintaining direct relationships with advertisers and agencies, ensuring greater control over pricing and premium inventory management.
Regulatory and compliance considerations further complicate any transition. Many broadcasters operate under strict licensing conditions and data privacy regulations, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which impacts their ability to engage with new partners without strict guarantees on data security, transparency, and control. Unlike digital-first advertisers, TV networks must navigate a more rigid legal framework, limiting their ability to experiment freely with new programmatic models.
However, there are positive signs. The programmatic marketplace is already capable of supporting a diverse range of transactional models and audience datasets, including first-party datasets and clean-rooms to support privacy-safe matching, third-party data and identity solutions from major providers like Experian, LiveRamp and Acxiom, AI-powered contextual targeting solutions, and identity frameworks like UID2. At this stage, there do not appear to be any insuperable barriers to adding JIC and MOC audience data to this list of solutions.
As Wiliam Jones, Senior Director, Head of Advanced TV and Omnichannel Activation, at Adform, says:
“With a mix of IDs being used across the buy- and sell-sides of the market, there needs to be collaboration. We need tools that can harness multiple IDs and data points, to help report on reach and frequency and to build audience segments that can help to achieve client KPIs. There are technical solutions that can support multiple IDs and datasets, while respecting privacy, like Adform ID Fusion, which has worked well in cookieless environments. TV JICs will remain the foundation for TV for the foreseeable future, but we are going to see programmatic solutions that can support ID resolution across multiple spines, across Europe.”
Moreover, although implementation will need to be local in different European markets, there does appear to be considerable scope for establishing common principles and components, to build confidence and transparency. These principles might include: commitments to use panels and big data to support more accurate, deduplicated cross-platform audience projections that are representative of national viewership, including diverse demographic segments; full transparency into datasets, methodologies and potential biases; the adoption of data clean rooms to facilitate collaboration between different players in the ecosystem; and the adoption of scaled identity spines, allowing advertisers to track exposure and engagement at an individual or household level.
Finally, content quality and contextual metrics will be vital. Not all video inventory is equal or alike and buyers want transparency into the advertising placements they are buying, linking content quality metrics to reach and frequency calculations, enabling advertisers to differentiate between premium video content and lower-quality user-generated or social video inventory.
Programmatic TV has tremendous potential, but the evolution of TV measurement and currency is not a one-size-fits-all process. While broad industry principles may guide progress, local execution will determine the success of these initiatives. Each market must adapt its approach based on regulatory requirements, technological infrastructure, and advertiser needs. As stakeholders continue to refine measurement solutions for the programmatic marketplace, collaboration will be key.
As James Grant, SVP Advanced TV at Equativ, notes:
“As TV viewing habits shift across Europe, we see a growing need for more advanced, flexible measurement and currency solutions to utilize the benefits of a programmatic TV marketplace. While challenges remain, there are already great examples in some regions of how to navigate this complexity – pioneering approaches that demonstrate how data-driven innovation can align currency models with modern video consumption. By learning from these successes and fostering collaboration, we can build a more transparent and effective measurement ecosystem that empowers advertisers and accelerates the future of TV advertising.”