Connected TV (CTV) is emerging as the hero of digital advertising in 2021 for the many benefits it offers advertisers. The industry has been fast witnessing an accelerated move towards CTV viewing as more and more millennials cut the cord from Linear TV to CTV. Brands today are also increasingly aware of the many benefits this format offers to them.
As CTV viewing becomes dominant, brands are increasingly shifting greater media budgets towards it, not only for its unique capability to measure actual consumption but also target other household devices and improve the conversion rates. CTV ad spend rose 70% between Q1 and Q3 2020, according to a study by fraud intelligence and compliance platform Pixalate.
But how can you make your CTV advertising efficient to get the most out of it for your marketing efforts? When launching a CTV campaign, it is important to follow best practices and pull the right levers to make the most of your advertising campaign.
We go through what you need to check both before and after setting up your CTV campaign for efficient results:
1. Set Up Relevant Targeting and Audiences
When you start setting up your campaign, one of the most important levers to check is that you have the right audience pool. Identify unique CTV devices, either by the area they are located, the brand of the device, or the apps they use. Once you are able to identify devices you can target, retarget, blacklist, or suppress those from your targeting.
Not only all of the above, whether it is reaching those users you already have on mobile audiences, or going from CTV to mobile devices using Household Sync technology, cross-screen audiences empower advertisers to reach users in different ways based on their campaign goals.
When using mediasmart’s technology, any audience you target within a CTV type of campaign will be a "cross-screen audience", that is, even if the audience is made of IDFAs and GAIDs, you will be able to find those users on a Connected TV type of device. This is made possible with our IP-based cross-screen capabilities. There are four distinct ways to create cross-screen audiences with mediasmart: location-based, time-based audiences, interaction-based, or audiences from third-party sources.
2. Creatives and Frequency Capping
Linear TV advertising, while hugely popular with brands, allows for limited optimization. User fatigue is also high as creatives are not capped, making viewers to be agnostic to receiving the messaging. With CTV, advertisers can leverage frequency capping for optimized campaign reach. As an advertiser, it is a best practice to place your ads in devices around specific areas or no more than X times on the same device. The other best practice is to leverage Dynamic Creative Optimization or DCO as CTV allows advertisers to create targeted user segments from a pool of large targeting options and refine messaging.
3. Expand Retargeting Capabilities and Use Household Sync to Maximize Cross-Screen Audiences
Until now, when someone wanted to do “TV syncing”, linear TV advertising followed as a synchronized campaign at the same time a mobile campaign was launched. As technology capabilities improve, CTV makes it possible to have a full-funnel approach to marketing, making it possible for advertisers to target and retarget at the household level using first- and third-party data.
Here household sync can help immensely. By syncing your CTV campaign with other devices in the same household, it is possible to automatically select the required targeting and create a cross-device strategy. Advertisers can also set a window of opportunity, i.e, the timeframe you want your secondary cross-screen ad to be shown on the mobile device after the first ad being shown on CTV.
4. Reporting and Measurement
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. The ability to measure the results and the return on investment makes CTV advertising more lucrative and effective for the modern-day advertisers. It is possible to not only check KPIs related to the campaign themselves (including the exact number of delivered impressions), but also to track and attribute systems to measure conversions. One can measure different types of conversions on CTV - app downloads, eCommerce conversions, store visits, or website visits. These measurement metrics can also help advertisers to close the online and offline gap by linking ads on CTV to actual store visits, through technologies like drive-to-store.
As the demand for CTV increases, it is expected that there will be a standard measurement on CTV by 2021, which will further enable advertisers to invest in CTV with greater confidence.
