Getting Ghosted By Your CTV Viewers?

Many brands are interested in exploring connected TV options but can’t afford to sacrifice the reach they get with lower-CPM ad formats. Any advertisers looking to keep their media spend low while dabbling in large-screen video should consider CTV Retargeting, a combination of strategies that reaches users both through high-impact video ads and clickable banners.

CTV Retargeting works by initially serving users an ad on a large-screen connected TV device. Then, cross-device capabilities allow for those same users to be retargeted across any of their devices (i.e., desktop, mobile, or tablet) with a different creative type.

This latest strategy leverages the best of both branding and performance: An upper-funnel, CTV format to build awareness, coupled with a higher-frequency of the other creative types designed to drive clicks and conversions.

Newswire - November 2021

A recent op-ed calls into question the efficiency of Big Tech advertising within their own “walled gardens,” closed platforms or ecosystems where a technology provider has significant control (like Google or Amazon). Many “walled gardens'' act as both suppliers and buyers of inventory, leading to an inherent conflict of interest that some marketers regard with suspicion — particularly when it comes to reporting and attribution. (AdExchanger)

While many advertisers see digital users as either “ad viewers” or “ad blockers,” a third segment of 225 million ad-filtering users has been growing rapidly in recent years. These “ad filterers” tend to be younger, digitally-savvy consumers; they’re more than happy to view (and even engage with) advertising, but ad creatives and formats must be respectful and non-invasive to get their approval. (Digiday)

Linear TV and social media receive a far greater share of ad spending — but a comparatively lower amount of consumer time — than online press, online audio, and podcasts. While communications value and creative impact certainly differ between media channels, awareness of these broad spending discrepancies gives advertisers an opportunity to better reach consumers where they spend the most time. (MediaPost)

Say Yes to the Address

One little-discussed alternative to cookie-based targeting is Addressable Programmatic, a strategy that allows advertisers to target at the household level and reach consumers across all their devices.

Traditional Addressable audiences are created by uploading a list of addresses, often the same addresses used in a traditional media campaign or pulled from a CRM. This “rooftop” targeting offers great cross-device reach and many addressable campaigns (depending on the DSP) can even track physical attribution.

Addressable is an obvious fit for brick-and-mortar businesses, but recent advancements in Curated Addressable also make it a great option for any campaign targeting at the household-level. Curation allows advertisers to create hyper-targeted audiences (even without a list of addresses) and refine them based on household criteria like number of children, household income, etc. These audiences can be leveraged to run regular Display campaigns, but also other programmatic campaigns like Native, Audio, or CTV.

Newswire - October 2021

Many digital experts believe that programmatic advertising -- once opaque, jargony, and confusing -- has reached a crossroads, with new market leaders emphasizing clarity and efficiency. For an industry that began by “making up rules as it went along,” this long-term push towards more transparent business practices has been a net-positive for advertisers, publishers, and programmatic platforms themselves. (AdWeek)

Recent surveys show that three-quarters of Americans aged 65 and up spend time online, causing marketers who recognize these signs of generational turnover to reevaluate the strategies they’ve used to reach older consumers in the past. Social media, display, and other types of online ads are increasingly being layered alongside traditional media to better reach this newly digitally-savvy demographic. (Digiday)

The Media Ratings Council recently stripped Nielsen of its national ratings accreditation, news that has dramatically impacted linear TV (which relies on ratings to measure both reach and precision) but has left connected TV largely unaffected. This is because CTV gives advertisers access to accurate, real-time programmatic reporting and the ability to target an audience itself rather than a show or channel with a particular rating. (The Wall Street Journal)

TV Is Targeted Too!

The growth of CTV as a programmatic campaign strategy is quickly changing the nature of television advertising as a marketing strategy. Historically, linear TV has been a mass-media outreach tool, targeting only the broadest demographic and interest groups.

Fast-growing and increasingly accessible, connected TV has many of the same advantages as linear TV, like virtually unbeatable scale and high-quality creative impact. However, CTV layers in the ability to refine reach by targeting niche audiences, using strategies that offer the same degree of accuracy and same granular reporting as any other programmatic campaign.

Location-based targeting is only the latest hyper-focused programmatic tactic making its way into CTV campaigns. Some geo-fenced audiences lend themselves very obviously to CTV campaigns, such as capturing movie theater visitors in order to promote new releases or identifying brick-and-mortar electronic store visitors in order to advertise the latest smart TV. However, with a little creativity, advertisers and agencies can create location-based CTV campaigns that target other premium, niche audiences, like visitors of a luxury auto dealership or families living in higher-income neighborhoods.

Newswire - September 2021

The pandemic has created a “technology-literate shopper base” that spends more time online than ever before, but at the same time 64% of surveyed shoppers say that they still prefer to shop with brands that have both an online and an offline presence. Programmatic campaigns that use location-based targeting and metrics are perfectly poised to reach the consumer where they are (both digitally and physically) while also measuring touch-points and attribution throughout the customer journey. (Wunderman Thompson)

Preliminary results across several connected TV campaigns show that CTV ads using QR codes are more likely to engage and convert viewers than those without. While traditionally considered a top-of-funnel strategy designed solely to build brand awareness, CTV campaigns that are able to successfully leverage QR codes, interactive components, or other strategies designed to bridge the gap between users’ TVs and their phones may also be able to drive engagement or conversions. (Advanced Television)

When switching from audience targeting to a contextual targeting strategy, the majority of advertisers say that “capacity and accuracy of targeting” are their number one concern. Traditional methods of categorizing (and therefore targeting) contextual inventory are manual and generally involve publishers themselves labeling their own pages and content, but newer, technology-assisted classification methods look set to alleviate many of these concerns in the future by improving contextual’s accuracy and scale. (Connatix)