As the marketplace becomes more saturated and competitive, direct-to-consumer (DTC) marketers are under an increased amount of pressure to prove the effectiveness of their campaigns – leaving them to explore new media channels to drive results for their brands and reach new audiences.
David Zapletal, Chief Operating Officer, was featured in The Drum discussing the benefits of connected TV (CTV) as a new media channel for DTC brands to improve campaign performance. Here’s a look at what he shared:
Many of the reasons why DTCs are increasingly upping their CTV investments are straightforward—even intuitive. DTCs, from already doing so much business digitally, have access to the first-party data that enables efficient CTV targeting.
CTV is high-quality media, with low levels of fraud relative to many other digital channels and with 100% viewable inventory. They can use similar KPIs in CTV that they use in online campaigns – online conversions, site visits, and the like. And they can target very specifically, allowing them all the benefits of consumers’ engagement with the TV screen without dealing with the cost of reaching all viewers of a program via linear. DTCs are seeing the value of developing compelling creative for CTV and shifting spend to maximize their budget.
CTV allows marketers to define outcomes and choose a sophisticated attribution model – a custom attribution window allows brands to define their conversion window, methodology (for example, first- and last-touch, and more advanced methods like linear and time decay), and KPIs. From there, they can optimize towards the interactions that drive performance – and effectively measure real-world actions that were driven by the campaign.
When making a push into CTV, DTC marketers need to consider the metrics and outcomes that are important to them and understand where and how to get insights on those metrics and outcomes. CTV offers exceptionally broad insights to help meet DTC marketers’ unique goals. Impressions and video completion rates (VCR) don’t tell the whole story of a campaign. Marketers need to track user actions throughout the entire marketing funnel. CTV advanced reporting measures valuable bottom-funnel actions, including site visits, online purchases, in-store visits, app downloads, and more – not just brand lift and awareness.
CTV isn’t simply the next emerging channel for DTC marketers to explore—it’s a powerful channel that can drive performance metrics where previously “tried and true” channels aren’t cutting it and can inform cross-platform campaign optimization.
Whether you’re a DTC marketer just getting started in the CTV/OTT space or looking to take your current campaigns to the next level, Digital Remedy is here to help. Speak to a member of our team to learn more.
Check out the full article on The Drum, and be sure to follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter for the latest Digital Remedy updates.
A confluence of factors is driving a boom in the OTT/CTV advertising space. With more households watching more streaming content, advertisers have, of course, taken notice, increasingly shifting ad dollars toward OTT and CTV channels. In fact, CTV ad spending is expected to surge 40% by the end of this year, totaling over $14.4b, and is forecast to more than double to $29.5b by 2024.
Naturally, as viewers and ad dollars have shifted toward OTT/CTV, many advertising technology platforms have followed suit, with more providers now offering CTV programmatic buying options with various targeting and attribution capabilities. CTV’s ability to merge the often-separated performance and brand marketing worlds—including its inherently addressable nature—is redefining the digital ad space and giving marketers a way to take their campaign measurement to the next level.
Ben Brenner, VP of Business Development & Strategy, shared six questions with Street Fight to ask to help brands who are new to the performance CTV space:
First, ask yourself: does your brand fall within the bucket of brands that can benefit most from performance CTV, and is your brand prepared to get started? Brand awareness-focused advertisers will not be the best candidate for performance CTV, as it focuses on direct performance, conversions, and attribution. Marketers must decide whether performance CTV fits their brand, strategy, campaign goals, and budget. It’s quite different from buying linear TV—it’s much more granular and requires detailed audience knowledge—so it’s important to be certain you have the data and insights to make it effective.
Before you invest any money, you must first determine which consumer actions (sales, leads, site visits, etc.) matter most for your strategy. Will you consider CTV’s impact within your larger media mix or as a standalone channel? You’ll want to ask partners how transparent they are with conversion reporting. Otherwise, it’ll be difficult to see how it stacks up in return on ad spend (ROAS) and cost per action (CPA) compared to other channels.
Innovations in attribution have moved the focus away from just video completion rate and toward ROAS and CPA metrics, and even these are still just scratching the surface of CTV measurement. That’s why transparency in reporting by partners is essential. Many vendors in the CTV space are stuck on last touch but effective performance CTV measurement means going beyond last touch—you need to know all touches that drove the desired action. For example, with the right platform you can measure first touch (conversion credit assigned to the first exposure), last touch (conversion credit assigned to the last exposure), time decay (with more credit assigned to exposures approaching the point of conversion), and linear (where conversion credit is evenly distributed across all exposures). But all of these have inherent variables as well. Working with a provider that can help you sort through these variables to define attribution is critical for refining your budget strategy and future campaigns.
To determine the true business value of advertising, marketers must move past clicks and impressions toward higher-value metrics like revenue and net profit—how the marketing spend actually moves the needle. Incrementality allows you to do just that by measuring the lift in desired outcome in the campaign results above baseline native demand. And sometimes the interaction that influences the desired outcome may look more costly, but the impact delivers a higher ROAS. Regardless of whether you’re working with a multi-touch attribution provider across channels, when you’re running on CTV specifically, what works on direct-basis (without an incrementality multiplier) most likely doesn’t work with incrementality multiplier. For example, Creative A might have CPA of $15, and Creative B’s CPA is $20. But Creative A delivers only 50% incremental lift while Creative B delivers 90%. While A is cheaper, you should be optimizing for B based on effectiveness. You’ll want to choose a provider that allows you to measure incrementality to get a true picture of the impact of OTT on your overall ROAS while factoring in other media channels and ensuring native demand is accounted for.
A big part of the value in CTV advertising is that it’s fast and fluid—unlike buying linear TV where the buy is set with an IO and requires you to wait. CTV buying can be much more agile and dynamic, allowing you to optimize spending based on results as they come in. Having all this granular data is great, but what good is it if it just sits on the shelf? That’s why any platform you choose must provide real-time optimization and the ability to change audience targeting parameters on demand. Twice a week isn’t nearly enough—daily is ideal.
In the linear world, when you buy spots on broadcast and cable, you own that spot for however long the IO dictates. And some CTV providers who buy spots direct from the publisher operate the same way. Look for a performance CTV provider that offers flexible optimization that allows you to shift spending across publishers and platforms as you need to. In the performance CTV realm, marketers need to be able to move ad spend at constant, flexible rates—leveraging data-driven campaign performance insights.
CTV allows marketers to take advantage of new ad opportunities, and performance CTV, while not meant for every advertiser, offers a game-changing advantage in the modern media landscape. But taking the plunge into performance CTV can be daunting, especially without the right platform partner. By first learning the basics of how it works and then asking these questions of potential vendors, marketers can leverage sophisticated ad tech solutions to meet their needs without getting in over their heads.
Check out the full article on Street Fight and be sure to follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter for the latest Digital Remedy updates.
With its precise targeting and direct attribution capabilities, OTT/CTV advertising has become a powerful new performance-based opportunity for marketers. As more and more brands have discovered the potential to effectively reach high-value audiences and measure return on ad spend (ROAS), spending on OTT/CTV advertising has skyrocketed and is expected to surge 40% this year to over $14.4b—more than doubling by 2024 to nearly $30b.
With precision targeting and deterministic measurement, performance CTV provides a unique opportunity for marketers to reach highly-engaged audiences. But for marketers who are new to the channel, especially those who are more familiar with linear TV, OTT/CTV might feel a bit disorienting. Our own, Ben Brenner, VP of Business Development & Strategy, was recently featured in Street Fight Magazine, where he discussed some tips for getting started and how to fully maximize your performance CTV strategy. Here’s an overview of what he had to say:
Unlike linear TV, where an ad buy will stay in rotation for a fixed period of time, CTV buys can (and should be) much more dynamic, fluid, and iterative. With CTV, it’s much easier to launch, adjust, and optimize targeting throughout your campaign’s flight.
With CTV, you can use first-party data to target both existing and prospective customers in a variety of ways, including using your CRM list to target existing customers with new product launches, excluding existing users to reach only new audiences for prospecting campaigns, and using known user data to surface look-a-like consumers to connect with new high-value prospects.
There is a huge variety of third-party data sources available that can help to target ads on CTV, including data on purchases, viewership, search and browser history, location, in-store visits, and more.
With CTV, you can get full attribution visibility—when someone makes a purchase, you can look back to see which ad they saw on what platform, during which program, and at what time of day. By understanding this sequence and the attributes of every ad exposure, not just the last one, marketers can fine-tune ad targeting and delivery to maximize conversions and identify new users who are most likely to convert.
Look for a partner who can offer both first- and third-party data integrations, directly access a wide variety of streaming publishers, and provide both attribution tracking and real-time optimization, with complete transparency into the process so there are no surprises.
Check out the full article on Street Fight and be sure to follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter for the latest Digital Remedy updates. Interested in learning more about performance CTV? Watch our on-demand webinar or speak to a member of our team.
While U.S. ad spend on CTV is expected to reach $18.29b by 2024, direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands have been much slower to make the move—with most continuing to allocate the majority of their budget to social and search, their longtime go-to channels for customer acquisition.
Product Insights Marketing Manager, Brittany Paril, recently discussed why there’s never been a better time for DTC marketers to invest in the CTV/OTT space—and why working with a trusted, experienced media partner is crucial. Here’s a look at the top reasons CTV/OTT is a beneficial part of the media mix and the unique opportunities it provides DTC marketers:
CTV/OTT doesn’t suffer the same trust issues as social, making it more likely that viewers will interact with ads given the high-quality, lean-in format of these channels.
While the social and search spaces have become saturated, CTV/OTT provides a much broader selection of devices, platforms, and channels for DTC brands to reach audiences on.
Just as DTC customers want the curated, personalized experience they get from their favorite DTC brands, CTV/OTT advertising provides advertisers the same capability for reaching the right audience—offering various targeting levers that they can activate based on their specific goals.
With the right data partner, DTC brands can measure the specific actions (site visits/purchases, store visits, app downloads, etc.) users take as a result of being exposed to the brand’s OTT ad.
CTV/OTT gives them an opportunity to differentiate their brand in a relatively untapped market. Because this channel is still relatively undiscovered by most DTC brands, it’s a prime opportunity to grab the attention of this valuable audience before your competitors do.
You can check out the full article on Street Fight. Whether you’re a DTC marketer just getting started in the CTV/OTT space or looking to take your campaigns to the next level, Digital Remedy is here to help. To learn more, speak with a member of our team—and be sure to follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter for the latest updates.
In today’s fragmented media landscape, attribution is an increasingly valuable tool for advertisers. Recent growth in both consumption and investment in streaming video has prompted digital advertisers to focus on optimizing advertising efforts. Digital Remedy has partnered with leading geospatial and mobility intelligence company Cuebiq, to unlock real-time insights and measure the true impact of client campaigns, specifically on CTV/OTT channels.
Through this strategic partnership, Digital Remedy provides clients with a full understanding of the consumer journey—from first touch to store visit—and allows them to activate against learnings from this journey to maximize their return on ad spend. Using mobile location data from Cuebiq, Digital Remedy’s proprietary performance CTV platform, Flip, directly connects CTV ad impressions to lift in foot traffic to physical store locations—tracking full-funnel KPIs, including brand, visit, and revenue lift, and displaying real-time campaign insights within an easy-to-read dashboard.
“TV has always been thought of as purely an upper-funnel, branding play. With Flip, we’re able to challenge that notion, and with our Cuebiq partnership, we’re able to connect real-world store traffic to those large format impressions. We’re able to let retailers know, definitively, that someone was exposed to their CTV ad and then visited their location. We’ve set our sights on treating CTV like performance media—driving real-world results, not just views.”
– Ben Brenner, VP, Business Development and Strategy at Digital Remedy
Flip, our Award-winning proprietary performance CTV platform, connects the dots between CTV ad views and real-world results—providing a full picture of the consumer journey and ensuring marketers get the most impact out of their budget. To learn how you can get started measuring your CTV campaigns, visit www.digitalremedy.com/flip or schedule a free custom demo.
Check out the full press release here, and follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter for more Digital Remedy updates.
