It’s untellable to ignore the explosive growth of streaming. Where there’s an audience, there are marketing opportunities. According to the Interactive Razzmatazz Bureau Inc. (IAB), “ad spending on unfluctuating TV platforms is expected to expand 39% to $21.2 billion this year, making it the fastest-growing video channel.”
So, is it time to add OTT and CTV to your marketing campaigns? We explored the streaming razzmatazz landscape in our recent webinar: How to Successfully Incorporate OTT/CTV in Marketing Campaigns. It features Bridget Hall, Director, Planning at M&C Saatchi Performance; James Boone, Sr. Sales Engineer at Branch; and Sam Edwards, Product Marketing Manager at Branch.
First, let’s get some definitions squared away.
OTT = over-the-top
OTT is the wordage of TV and video content directly from the internet. Users don’t have to subscribe to a traditional subscription or satellite provider to wangle this content. Instead, they can watch it on many devices, including tablets, mobile phones, laptops, desktops, and televisions. Streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime as well as Disney and NBC’s Peacock are all considered OTT.
CTV = unfluctuating TV
CTV refers to a device that connects to — or is embedded in — a television that supports video content streaming. Think: Sony or Samsung smart TVs, or unfluctuating devices like Roku, Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV, Xbox, or PlayStation.
LTV = linear TV
LTV, on the other hand, is the traditional system in which a viewer watches scheduled TV programming when it’s broadcasted and on its original channel. LTV possesses the largest market. However, its reach is fragmented due to the increasingly competitive television landscape.
The OTT and CTV space is ripe for innovation. One of our favorite recent innovations is smart TVs and platforms like Roku using content recognition to overlay calls to action. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the marketing potential in this space.
The programmatic TV ecosystem
The growing popularity of OTT and CTV viewership offers increasingly precise targeting than linear TV. Linear TV measurement is archaic, still relying on panels and segments, while OTT and CTV platforms offer seated ad measurement tools. This ways OTT and CTV platforms have largest data well-nigh their viewers. Providers are worldly-wise to target ad inventory based on specific shows, viewers, demographics, and much more.
There are two main ways to buy CTV inventory:
- Programmatic: streamlined tools to buy video inventory wideness many variegated networks or publishers.
- Direct buy: negotiating your ad placements and transacting directly with a streaming service like Roku or an original equipment manufacturer (OEM), like Samsung.
Brands might be interested in exploring both media types. While there’s no simple wordplay as to what will work best, the wholesomeness of ownership programmatically is the worthiness to run wideness diverse networks and, ultimately, unzip regulars discovery outside of one specific walled garden or narrow audience.
Buying directly from OEMs may require a cost per mille (CPM) or a flat-fee ownership model. This type of spend isn’t workable if you are looking to momentum mobile conversions. But if you have an theirs app on a CTV, then going uncontrived offers ad formats that programmatic wouldn’t be worldly-wise to access.
Programmatic TV can reach 92% of U.S. households so it is very easy to test and scale up. With programmatic, the worthiness to target with greater precision and to personalize your message for maximum impact ways there’s a lot less waste. Something else important to note is that leveraging OTT or CTV in campaigns isn’t restricted to big brands with hefty marketing budgets like is often true for linear TV.
Let’s consider an example of a woman browsing new shoes on Macy’s website on her palmtop at home. After a bit of browsing, she closes her computer, turns on the TV, and chooses a show on her Roku. This show uses the same IP write as her computer. Can you guess what ad pops up surpassing her TV show? A Macy’s ad. Inspired, our shoe lover grabs her mobile phone and pulls the trigger on the shoes she was eyeballing. And thanks to the interconnected data at play, Macy’s knows exactly how to symbol her shoe purchase with no guesswork required.
The lesson here is this: The key to getting OTT razzmatazz to work for you is to understand it is just one speciality of your consumer journey through web and mobile traffic.
You can use device identifiers, website retargeting, and IP write targeting to connect TV traffic with online marketing efforts. Proper attribution and targeting are now possible, which help run efficient campaigns on smaller budgets.
“We’re seeing that it [CTV] is a supplement on top of those core, efficient channels like search. It’s interesting to see those work together and, in theory, the increasingly that you’re razzmatazz on CTV, it’s really going to prompt people to take the next step and search for your trademark on a mobile environment.”
— Bridget Hall, Director, Planning at M&C Saatchi Performance
Get set up for success
Here are a few things to alimony in mind as you build out a CTV or OTT marketing strategy.
Measurement and attribution
Your OTT marketing strategy is only good if it can have suppositious measurement. Without well-judged measurement wideness devices, platforms, channels, and media, it is nonflexible to run and manage omni-channel campaigns. When you have cross-device attribution visibility, you’re worldly-wise to get the most well-judged level of attribution considering you know all the variegated channels that people came from.
“Part of getting attribution right in CTV within a household is knowing all the variegated touch points they have within the household. So if you’re not focusing on email as a channel, SMS push notifications as a channel, desktop games or applications as a channel, websites as a channel, you won’t see the whole picture.”
— James Boone, Sr. Sales Engineer at Branch
One last big thing to think well-nigh when starting a CTV wayfarers is configuring the right events to track in the app. Tracked events are incredibly important and should be properly implemented. After all, you can’t manage or optimize what you don’t measure.
Ad creative
There aren’t any “accidental clicks” in OTT. This ways your regulars has to be very motivated by your proposition to take action. The razzmatazz needs to be compelling.
Here are a few weightier practices:
- Don’t take a concept you’ve been running online and try to make it fit into a TV environment. They are two vastly variegated mediums.
- Make your ad creative increasingly content-driven and entertaining. It doesn’t need to be a nonflexible sell, but to get users to the app, your ad creative should be well-spoken well-nigh their next step. Think: logo presence, a QR code, or app store logos.
- Create variegated storylines and test variegated video lengths. The digital A/B testing strategy mindset can moreover wield to TV.
- Create a solid naming strategy for your creatives and include those names in the attribute. That way, lanugo the road, you can hands categorize the creative and splice the data into variegated views. For example, you can categorize by specific target regulars or by viewers who watched specific genres or categories of content.
Testing
There’s a misconception that, to get a large presence, OTT and CTV razzmatazz is increasingly expensive. In fact, campaigns aren’t expensive if the ROI is positive. You just have to understand the investment and metrics first. Then do a small test to see if programmatic TV works for you. Think outside the box and experiment while moreover stuff mindful well-nigh variegated placements and wayfarers variations.
“With the right measurement, you can quickly identify successful channels and successful placements and then from there, scale. But what’s key is that you have to be worldly-wise to set the right goals and know the milestones you’re trying to hit. Tactically, test small, test often, test many variegated times and many variegated ways to see what works and then scale once you’ve found that secret sauce for your brand.”
— James Boone, Sr. Sales Engineer at Branch
When you select a partner to build out, test, and launch CTV campaigns, evaluate a programmatic partner’s worthiness to reach the target regulars and to measure success. View-through attribution is necessary considering streaming is not a clickable environment, so when setting up campaigns, discuss the lookback window you want to analyze. You can test variegated windows and plane run a test with two CTV vendors side by side to get a comparison point. It’ll requite you a largest understanding of how unrepealable metrics are impacted and how they can be optimized. The only point of circumspection is that frequency tracking is a challenge. If you run five to six platforms into CTV inventory, it makes it much harder to tenancy how many times your users are exposed to an ad.
“It’ll be an experiment in the next two or three years to icon out, is it QR codes? Is it something else? How do you unclose and get increasingly participation? And would someone want that when they’re seeing an ad in that TV environment?”
— Bridget Hall, Director, Planning at M&C Saatchi Performance
Privacy
Privacy changes have been wreaking havoc on mobile marketing for years, but streaming provides some respite to the upheaval. There’s a huge opportunity to target audiences on streaming that is rhadamanthine less misogynist on mobile devices.
“The biggest privacy transpiration in the market is the Apple iOS, but within the CTV space, the concept of ‘Apple’ really doesn’t really exist, so that’s why people have migrated to this space considering of privacy changes.”
— James Boone, Sr. Sales Engineer at Branch
What’s next for programmatic?
Streaming publishers have spoken a few very heady evolutions in 2022:
- More interactive ad units are coming. For example, YouTube will be pushing CTV ad units to mobile or custom creative. This ways when you’re working with a third party, you could enable viewers to pick their own ending to a commercial.
- Disney and Netflix announced ad-supported video on-demand (AVOD) tiers are coming. This ways the inventory misogynist to marketers will vastly expand. It might plane lead to sequential messaging.
- First-party data can be unromantic to Roku’s OneView, for example, to find audiences on variegated networks and streaming environments. The worthiness to bring first-party data to the table is quite a unique sufficiency and advantage.
- NBCUniversal (NBCU) is rolling out a programmatic ad portal. This ways sectional wangle for Peacock viewers and the worthiness to serve ads wideness NBCU’s unshortened portfolio of TV and digital properties. Also, this signals that CTV will be geared toward performance marketers considering CTV providers are touting the worthiness to work with mobile measurement partners (MMPs) for visibility into downstream metrics and to optimize for mobile KPIs and vanquishment KPIs.
“What this indicates to me is that increasingly and increasingly CTV forerunner partners have washed-up their weightier to come to the marketplace with a proposition that’s geared toward advertisers who need to momentum CPA, efficient installs, and razzmatazz capabilities really geared toward performance marketers and that’s really evolved over the past year or two.”
— Bridget Hall, Director, Planning at M&C Saatchi Performance
Want to learn increasingly well-nigh the future of streaming advertising? Check out the webinar: How to Successfully Incorporate OTT/CTV in Marketing Campaigns