This story was originally published in Beet.TV.

The rapid growth of the streaming media audience in the past few years has pushed marketers to look for opportunities to reach these viewers. Media companies are answering that demand with the development of advertising formats that provide targeting at a greater scale.

“We saw so much transformation coming out of the pandemic with all these eyeballs shifting into these new and growing ecosystems, and of course, ad products are now following,” George Manas, chief executive of OMD Worldwide, said in this interview at the Beet Villa during the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. “We’re seeing that investment now behind those eyeballs with more scale I think than we even anticipated just a year, 18 months ago.”

That optimism is partly tempered with an appreciation for some of the ongoing challenges that confront marketers in their media strategies. Each walled garden media outlet aggregates and anonymizes audience data, making it difficult to tell if ads are reaching different consumers or the same people too often. Some of the more popular platforms, such as Netflix and Disney+, haven’t carried advertising, but that’s slowly changing as they seek ways to monetize their content.

“We also of course have the barrier that some aren’t ad-supported still, and there’s a real demand, I think, to have more brand integration, bran,” Manas said. “On the one hand, we’re starting to drive scale in investment into these new streaming platforms, and for the ones that don’t have a scaled ad-supported model just yet, we’re looking at more innovative ways of bringing our brands into the content itself.”