Navigating CTV OS Fragmentation: A Guide for Marketers

Connected TV (CTV) devices like smart TVs, streaming boxes, and gaming consoles often run on different operating systems (OS) such as Roku, Amazon Fire TV, Android TV, and Apple TV. This fragmented OS environment on CTV can make advertising more challenging for brands and marketers.

Each OS has its own set of technical specifications, ad formats, and measurement capabilities. For example, an ad that looks great on a Roku device might not display correctly on an Android TV or Apple TV. Creating and delivering ads that work seamlessly across all CTV platforms requires specialized knowledge and expertise.

To effectively advertise on CTV, marketers need specialized partners that understand the nuances of each platform and can optimize campaigns accordingly. This can help brands navigate the complex landscape of CTV advertising, including choosing the proper ad formats, targeting the right audience, measuring success, and optimizing campaigns over time.

In this blog, we’ll discuss this fragmented CTV market landscape and how a specialist, like mediasmart, can help you make the most of your CTV advertising campaigns.

Fragmented OS environment: a big challenge for CTV advertising

Generally speaking, operating systems have their own unique technical specifications, ad formats, and measurement capabilities. On top of that, for CTV the same manufacturer can have different OS on different TV models, or users could use different devices (like a set-top box or a console) to access CTV content. If that wasn't enough of a challenge, the fact that we could use mobile with CTV to gain ad interactivity, adds to the complexity of it all. This could become overwhelming for advertisers as they have to optimize ads to work on each platform to ensure they are delivered and measured correctly and achieve the desired outcome.

The lack of standardization across CTV platforms and SSPs means that creating and delivering ads that work seamlessly across all players requires specialized knowledge. A well-executed advertising campaign can be the difference between success and failure in the highly competitive advertising market, making it essential for advertisers to seek out the skills of CTV advertising experts.

How a CTV advertising specialist like mediasmart can help you succeed?

Advertising on CTV platforms is different from traditional TV, requiring expertise in digital advertising, programmatic buying, and data analysis. As such, it is critical to work with a specialist to ensure that your advertising campaigns are successful across all platforms and reach your target audience. Here is why:

1. Understanding the Complexity of CTV Ad Formats

CTV ads come in different formats depending on factors like app, manufacturer, model, and operating system. Advertisers may have to create multiple ads to ensure they work on different devices and platforms.

At mediasmart, we support all creative formats and ensure your ad is optimized for each platform's technical requirements. We automatically resize video ads to match the screen size and placement, which makes delivery seamless and provides a better experience for viewers. We also have connections to over 30 different SSPs, meaning we have access to all major ad requirements for CTV ads.

1. Reaching the right audience

To make your ads more effective, it's important to show them to the right people. mediasmart can help you with advanced data analysis and programmatic buying.

mediasmart can target specific areas, CTV models, and operating systems to ensure that your ads are seen by the right people. Moreover, with mediasmart's proprietary household-sync technology, advertisers can increase engagement by syncing CTV ad campaigns with ads on other connected devices in the same household. Making their CTV ads significantly more relevant by personalizing them and making it easier for interaction; as people buy, browse, sign-up, and download an app, more easily on their phones.

Even if your audience is offline or not using their connected devices, mediasmart can still help you reach them. You can create lists of people based on their location and send them personalized messages. You can reach them on their CTV devices using our cross-screen targeting option and engage them further with better storytelling on CTV ads.

1. Knowing where and when you buy impressions, measure revenue and profitability in a way that is impossible in traditional TV

One of the biggest draws for CTV advertising for advertisers is its ability to bring together the twin strengths of the engaging storytelling associated with TV advertising as well as the targeting and capabilities associated with programmatic and digital advertising.  By analyzing data, a specialist can identify areas that need improvement, and adjust your campaigns accordingly. This ensures that you achieve the best possible results from your advertising spend.

With a platform like mediasmart, you can quantify your TV ads with more than 25 dedicated KPIs (including the exact number of delivered impressions) and track and attribute systems to measure conversions. Our state-of-the-art algorithms make decisions based on more than 35 variables to optimize your campaigns in real-time.

To give you in-depth insights that will make your marketing decisions more agile, we have designed multiple dashboards from which a user can choose.

These display information about all the aggregated KPIs, heatmaps, and publisher results - like hourly analysis on impressions, synced devices, users on synced devices with the users only on CTV, lag analysis that depicts the time that passed between the CTV impression and the synced impressions, and much more.

One of our key differentiators is that we can measure different types of conversions on CTV - app downloads, eCommerce conversions, store visits, or website visits. These measurement metrics can also help you to close the online and offline gap by linking ads on CTV to actual store visits, through technologies like drive-to-store.

Also, through mediasmart, it is easy to automatically optimize advertising content according to weather conditions, and a whole list of variables; ranging from a day to location, time of the day, the language of the device, etc. All are paired with automated performance measurement, allowing for the creation of dynamic content that maximizes user engagement and conversion rates.

1. Staying Ahead of the Curve in a Rapidly Evolving Landscape

CTV advertising is constantly evolving, with new technologies and platforms emerging all the time. A specialist in CTV advertising can stay up-to-date with the latest trends, ensuring that your campaigns are always at the forefront of new developments.

mediasmart offers a range of innovative tools to amplify the impact of your CTV campaigns. Our ability to sync with households makes it easier for users to interact with ads on their phones and allows you to leverage the larger screen for maximum impact, while also providing a "magic" movement of the campaign towards the phone or tablet where interaction can happen more easily. Combined with mediasmart's programmatic ads, allows you to track specific KPIs around connected devices and household locations. 

Additionally, mediasmart offers advanced audience management features such as retargeting, cross-screen capabilities, and 3rd party audiences for CTV like Digiseg's allowing you to target a mobile audience in their households and impact them with a CTV ad. Also, you can effectively acquire new users for your app by tracking installs and in-app events of your CTV apps and Mobile apps in real-time, depending on your specific needs.  

Finally, mediasmart's proximity campaigns, particularly geolocated and drive-to-store campaigns, give you the opportunity to bring together CTV with the offline world and measure visits to your stores.

In conclusion, advertising on CTV is complex due to the fragmented OS environment and lack of standardization. To achieve success in CTV advertising, marketers need specialized partners who understand the nuances of each platform and can optimize campaigns accordingly.

As a partner, mediasmart can help brands navigate the complex landscape of CTV advertising. By supporting all creative formats, targeting the right audience through advanced data analysis and programmatic buying, and measuring success through various metrics and dashboards. Some of mediasmart's unique features, such as household-sync technology, CTV multiplatform app tracking and other cool features such as weather-based optimization, make it an ideal partner for brands looking to maximize their CTV advertising campaigns.