By Shirish Nadkarni
Getting your ads on the big screen without the big price tags. Reaching cord-cutters and highly-engaged views with your ability to hyper-target your audience. Churning up your marketing mix. Having enhanced targeting options and inventory selection. These are some of the sterling reasons why advertising on Connected TV (CTV) and Over-The-Top (OTT) is growing in leaps and bounds the world over.
For marketers who have used traditional TV advertising for awareness-based campaigns because the channel offers the ability to reach highly engaged audiences, CTV offers identical benefits, but enables greater targeting options and selection from a larger inventory. This helps create an efficient channel to reach a growing market.
In the US alone, more than 50% of the population has a TV-connected device in their homes. With over 164 million US users accessing video content via connected TV devices – a figure that is projected by Insider Intelligence to grow by 24% to 204.1 million users by end-2022 – it is hardly surprising that marketers are looking for ways to leverage the channel.
CTV ad-spend had touched US$19 billion by the end of 2021, as advertisers increasingly used CTV as a means to reach their users, either alongside an existing linear TV strategy, or as a standalone channel. It is axiomatic that, with the ability to hyper-target your audience in the living room, there will at least be a commensurate growth in ad-spend in this sphere in 2022, if not an even more resounding boom.
Hyper-targeting your audience
Audience targeting has always played a substantial role in an effective advertising campaign. Historically, there is a lot of guesswork involved and not a whole lot of data to work with. You might even say that it involved throwing things into the void and bidding for prime-time spots, hoping something would stick.
What if you could consistently get your message in front of your core audience?
“While television has always been a high-reach medium, ad placements on traditional broadcast or satellite TV take a one-size-fits-all approach and lack the capacity to cater to niche audiences,” says Adrian Pennington of NAB Amplify. “Furthermore, the increase in cord-cutters making the jump to streaming services has allowed digital media to overtake traditional media altogether in terms of time spent.”
The increasing popularity of CTV and OTT has led to the phenomenon known as “cord-cutting”, which is the growing trend of customers cancelling their traditional cable and satellite subscriptions in favour of only using these streaming or VOD (video on demand) formats.
The rise of OTT and CTV viewership provides more meaningful ways for you to engage at the right time with the right target audience at the right moments — bringing together the targeting precision of digital with the high impact of TV viewership.
A report, entitled ‘Connected TV: The Ultimate How-to Guide’, from mobile analytics platform Adjust offers advice to advertisers looking to get more meaningful returns on their ad-spend.
“Ad formats for CTV provide marketers with a unique opportunity to combine the interactiveness of digital formats (tracking video completion rates and linking real-time ad exposure to conversions) with the visuals native to traditional TV advertising,” the report says. “With direct CTV ad buying, marketers have opportunities to incorporate UI (user interface) and in-video banners, and even show ads on pause screens or menus.”
Showing ads across multiple devices
Advertisers can also show relevant ads across multiple devices that are connected to the same network, which can give retargeting campaigns a boost, the report adds.
“As it currently stands, the majority of CTV inventory is not sold by mobile marketing networks. As it continues to grow and as verticals like gaming become more prominent, this is likely to change,” the Adjust report asserts.
“Google is very well positioned to capitalise on the fact that they own CTV inventory and are one of the larger CTV networks — you can advertise on the YouTube network via Google’s Advertising network. Apple and Amazon are also well placed, owning their own streaming devices and services.”
Buying programmatically, the Adjust report explains, gives you the greatest level of flexibility in terms of timing, targeting and optimisation. It is possible to rapidly iterate tests in ways that are not possible through other buying methods. This is a powerful approach — which is why an increasing amount of CTV advertising is being bought this way.
There is, of course, a downside to the equation. Without specific agreements in place, there are limitations on the formats and placements that can be bought.
Buying CTV programmatically requires having an agreement in place with a DSP that allows you to run CTV campaigns. There are many options here, with some of the most popular including The Trade Desk, Google’s DV360, OneView (formerly DataXu), and MediaMath.
The second approach to CTV buying is to work directly with a platform. “If you’re working directly with Roku, for example, the agreement would include inventory within the Roku UI as well as in-stream video that you could also buy programmatically,” the Adjust report states. “In this case, however, almost all of this particular inventory is bought to promote apps that function on the Roku OS.”
Adjust says this tactic may offer you premium inventory or better access than you would have received programmatically. The downside of this method is that you are effectively limited to the inventory available within that platform. So if buying directly from Roku, you will only reach Roku viewers.
Working directly with publishers
Another method of buying CTV advertising is working directly with publishers. This involves contacting your desired app or publisher, requesting a proposal and negotiating a deal.
“While some publishers may offer access to third-party segments to add a layer of targeting, others may also have first-party data on their users that would not be accessible programmatically,” the How-to Guide outlines.
What all ad formats on CTV have in common is that, because of their digital nature, they provide you with the opportunity to create strong call-to-actions. A powerful example is provided by Burger King with their QR Whopper giveaway, consisting of three TV commercials with a QR code on the TV screen.
In short, CTV ad formats have the potential to combine the best of two worlds: the visual and messaging potential of TV and the interactive potential of digital advertising.
In conclusion, the choice for more effective advertising is yours — Connected TV, OTT or Linear TV?
However, there are a few daunting challenges that CTV advertising faces. For one, the number of homes with a CTV has not caught up with those that have used broadcast and cable. Many platforms and data providers are not able to match cookies or MAIDs (mobile ad IDs) to IP, which limits the scale of inventory available for IP-based audience targeting.
There is also fragmentation due to under-the-radar account sharing, as also fierce competition among content distributors and companies building and selling CTV devices.
Nevertheless, the plus points weigh more in the balance than the negatives. The biggest gains for CTV advertising are user-controlled viewing experiences that allow advertisers to get in front of the right audiences at the right times, even as user-registration data allows for cross-screen targeting. IP-based delivery permits the application of first- and third-party audience data to target households watching ad-supported content. And that, for advertisers with limited ad-spend budgets, provides more bang for their buck.
Question: How will you adapt, adjust and leverage the unlimited advertising possibilities that CTV can offer marketers at affordable rates?
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