See it Now: How Old School Thinking Hurts CTV

Connected TV (CTV) has operated at the center of innovation, but how advertising gets placed, sold, and attributed remains akin to traditional broadcast TV practices. For some media buyers and brands, CTV, traditional TV, etc., has become unimportant distinctions.

After all, it’s just “TV.”

This thinking cuts media buyers short of unlocking opportunities that CTV offers through advanced audience layering and targeting, engagement, and attribution. As streaming services have redefined what it means to watch TV, marketers should redefine how they approach Connected TV, brushing off the routine tactics used in traditional TV in favor of thoughtful strategy and attributable investment.?

Integrating customer data to hyper-target viewers should be at the heart of any CTV strategy. Unlike traditional TV, where ads are aired to the general audience, CTV ads target pre-selected individuals. You are not buying a spot on Wednesday Night’s “Prime Time” feature or to be seen during the “Thursday Night News”. You are targeting and engaging with a very valuable audience to your brand that could be watching content across any platforms, and yet they are receiving a certain ad because they were intended to. Brands and advertisers should create target lists that draw from both first-party data within your customer base and third-party data about your prospective audience. Ads will only be shown to individuals who match the criteria. Having a higher propensity to engage and purchase allows for the ad spend to be maximized on a target audience who are predisposed to interact with the content.

Spots should be optimized for engagement, and in-store and online conversions, something?never done on Traditional Cable or Broadcast TV. BMW capitalized on this perk with its Roku commercial for the X1. Viewers were met with an engaging video and the ability to control a 360-degree view of the vehicle and browse different color options.

Creative interactivity is a welcomed addition to CTV advertising accelerating the customer journey to purchase. While traditional TV may lift brand awareness via passive consumption, interactivity allows for CTV advertising to be more meaningful. Personalized touch points increase the chances of brand familiarity. Compared to traditional streaming ads, interactive ads usually result in a 3.5% higher engagement rate with 85 more seconds of view time according to TV analytics firm Innovid. The element of interactivity creates more data about the customer, allowing for better optimizations as the campaign’s learning cycle develops, helping make an outsized impact on ROI.

The footprint of CTV leads from the screen to the store. With customer journeys becoming complex, media buyers should leverage multi-touch attribution tools to better measure the impact of CTV spend and understand the role it plays in the path to purchase. A CTV ad may introduce a brand to a customer, but their journey may wind before conversion. Multi-touch attribution tools will assign the due credit to CTV ads, justifying the spend and allowing for highly informed real-time optimizations.

With over 80% of all American households using a connected device and “cord-cutting” of traditional TV accelerating, - 50M less households watch traditional TV today compared to four years ago - it's time to harness the power of CTV. Approach CTV today like Paid Social, Search and Programmatic Display. Expect measurable and attributable results: don’t be passive in posing hard questions to your media partners.?

To learn more, click here to see how one of our clients spiked a 24% increase in user traffic by leveraging the strategies discussed in this article.?