In 2022, CPG advertisers spent $8.5b—or an average of $773m monthly—within the industry. According to eMarketer, CPG accounts for over 12% of ad spend share. In North America alone, consumer trends are changing, and we see digitization on the rise regarding purchasing habits.
As the CPG and retail industry continues to grow, here are five things that marketers need to consider when planning their media activation strategy.
It’s still really important to be relevant in the market. Worldwide, we’re seeing supply chain issues across the board, and while that has a massive impact, it should not hinder your marketing activity. It’s vital to stay top of mind, focus on awareness-level metrics, and utilize a partner that can optimize toward the challenges that we’re all experiencing within the supply chain.
Consumers like frictionless experiences. Make it easier for consumers to find and purchase your products in the least amount of steps possible. Utilize custom formats such as shoppable units, quickly engage consumers, and create a virtual shopping experience or click to carts. Ease the path to purchase by monitoring stores in real time so users can be shown up-to-date and in-stock products to make digital content actionable.
Since regional footprint varies, you want to work with an agnostic partner that has access to data that allows you to maximize coverage but also have a wide reach. Different brick-and-mortar stores can attract different demographics, while still having similar product placement, allowing you to drive scale and reach across the board.
Repeat purchases are typically the norm as most CPG and retail items are essential for consumers versus a one-time purchase. For CPG products, you always want to be an extension of the home. These goods are constantly being purchased, so it’s important to drive consideration even with consumers that are loyal to your brand.
Ensure all of your media is attributable regardless of where the purchase is happening and while online sales are easier to track. Working with a partner that can track your offline sales is equally as crucial. You want to understand the full picture, inclusive of both online and offline sales. Ready to take your campaigns to the next level? Speak with a member of our team to learn more. For the latest industry trends and insights, check out our blog and sign up for our monthly newsletter.
In the arena where traditional broadcasters like NBC and CBS stand toe-to-toe with streaming giants like Prime Video and Hulu, the advertising playbook is largely being rewritten.
A new age of television and media consumption has begun — one where linear and streaming platforms coexist, compete, and create new possibilities for brands across the globe.
For the everyday marketer looking to jump aboard today’s TV advertising wave, the following guide provides everything your brand needs to know about linear vs. digital platforms.
70-something years ago, advertising on TV looked a lot like this: You’re watching a regularly scheduled program on a television network (if you were lucky enough to be able to afford a TV), you get a few ad breaks during commercial slots, and you hope your show returns as quickly as possible — unless you were buying what was being sold. Broadcast and cable were pivotal to the average American family, and if you wanted to catch your favorite show like I Love Lucy, you’d better hope you were sitting in front of the TV at 9pm EST after dinner on Monday night.
Over the years, television sets became more affordable and TV networks expanded rapidly, leaving more viewers tuning in and more advertisers racing to the big screen. The “Golden Age” of TV advertising prevailed in the 1960s and 1970s, and advertisers began creating iconic and memorable commercials that became part of pop culture.
Flash forward 60 years, and the TV advertising model has largely reinvented itself with the advent of new tech like on-demand, DVRs, TiVo, and streaming services. Now, viewers can actually choose whether or not they want to watch an ad, with many binge-watching their favorite shows and fast-forwarding through commercials. And with so many shows to watch, advertisers must also adapt to keep viewers’ attention in a saturated content market.
While this new way of TV advertising might make reaching the masses and keeping their attention more challenging, it certainly hasn’t become impossible — it’s just gotten a different look.
Today, TV advertisers are investing in both linear and digital TV, a two-in-one combo that packs the perfect punch for any campaign.
Yes, mass ad spend has shifted to digital in recent years (Insider Intelligence projects U.S. spend on digital video will surpass $25.09b in 2023 alone), but traditional TV advertising is still one of the most effective ways to create awareness about a product or brand. Advertisers across the country remain well aware of this actuality, with linear ad spend also set to reach a striking $61.31b this year.
Both forms of TV are tried and tested tactics to reach consumers, and in fact, many households view it by means of traditional TV and streaming services. According to Marketing Charts, data from Nielsen’s Q4 2022 research revealed the average U.S. adult spends a whopping 294 minutes per day with TV, whether through TV-connected devices, cable, or broadcast.
If you didn’t already guess, that’s an incredible amount of screen time that brands can capitalize on to reach their ideal buyer.
TV is broadly categorized under two larger umbrellas: linear TV and streaming TV.
Linear TV is the traditional form of broadcast television, where content is viewed on a predetermined schedule (TiVo still counts, but this is called time-shift linear where viewers can watch programs at a later date.) When talking about TV advertising, there are two main forms of linear TV, broadcast and cable. Each refers to the way content is aired, either broadcasted or via cable box, a paid-for service.
Within this linear landscape, there are two distinct types of advertising, those on a national and local scale. This means a certain percentage of ads are dedicated to national commercial spots, with a smaller percentage dedicated to local commercial spots.
It’s common for advertisers to incorporate both broadcast and cable into their strategy, but choosing national or local advertising depends on the advertiser’s size, audience, and ultimate campaign goals.
Linear TV has been a favorite among advertisers for decades, mainly due to its unique advantages not seen with other mediums, such as:
In the dynamic realm of modern entertainment, streaming has revolutionized how we consume traditional television content. It occurs on CTV devices through an over-the-top (OTT) method, meaning that video and audio content is delivered entirely online.
While there are countless streamers, apps, and digital ways to consume television, not all are available for advertising. For example, some platforms may choose not to invest in AVOD (advertising-based video on demand) models, and even those that do tend to have a lower frequency of ads than traditional TV.
Unlike traditional linear TV, on streaming devices, advertisers are directly targeting households 1:1. And because it’s digital, there’s ample opportunity to track performance and connect data to understand ad campaigns.
Streaming TV advertising has been all the buzz in marketing circles, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic acted as its main catalyst in the 2020 lockdown days. For many marketers, this way of TV advertising is favored for its diverse capabilities, including:
Linear TV is a powerhouse channel for driving unprecedented reach and boosting top-funnel brand performance, while streaming is a high-growth avenue to target your audience and drive conversions.
What does this mean for the modern-day marketer? Tapping into the true power of TV advertising lies at the convergence point of both linear and digital.
Viewership is still evenly split across streaming and traditional TV, meaning advertisers will beat out competitors by reaching their consumers at every touchpoint across linear, CTV, and digital.
There are many moving pieces and parts involved in any marketing strategy, much less one that takes into account both linear and digital TV. But with these best practices from the team at Digital Remedy, you can unlock a world of success in every ad and on every platform:
The future of digital advertising is a cross-channel approach, and it’s our goal at Digital Remedy to provide our clients with a competitive, linear, and CTV performance marketing-driven strategy that is 100% holistic.
With Digital Remedy, agencies and advertisers can run all linear media through us across national and local broadcast and cable. And by utilizing our TV insights platform, you’ll have access to real-time linear TV data, giving you the power to measure and optimize your campaign all in one platform.
Because performance TV marketing is at the heart of what we do, we also enable brands to activate across linear and digital channels — the ultimate solution to creating a comprehensive media strategy that guarantees outcomes.
Interested in learning more about how our linear and streaming TV capabilities can work for you?
Speak with a member of our team for more expert insights, and sign up for our Trends and Insights newsletter to always stay in the loop.
Ad spending on CTV platforms continues with a projected increase of advancements and opportunities in the over-the-top (OTT) and connected TV (CTV) advertising space. As consumer viewing habits continue viewing streaming services ad dollars continue to migrate toward these channels as well.
The industry built tools to better target streaming audiences and measure their viewing behaviors, with the goal of providing the most compelling ad opportunities for marketers looking to connect with valuable consumers. Making up 10% of all digital ad spending, CTV ad spending is expected to reach $29.29b in 2024.1
Connected TV penetration in U.S. households continues to grow, as more households acquire internet-connected devices to watch content.2
CTV’s ability to merge the often separated performance and brand marketing worlds is redefining the digital advertising space as we once knew it. Given the immense ad opportunities that CTV/OTT offers—including precise, digital-like measurability and a high-quality viewing environment and the valuable audiences it draws in—and the significant investment in these channels, advertisers and brands are increasingly focused on proving the effectiveness of their OTT campaigns.
Through next-generation CTV ad platforms, marketers can now understand the CTV exposure-to-outcome impact of their ads. Given the large investment in this media channel, attribution—the process of assigning credit for conversions to various marketing touchpoints along the customers’ journey—has become a must-have for growth and performance marketers. This information is critical to creating more effective ad campaigns and boosting revenue. In measuring conversions following ad exposure for CTV, it’s important to understand which exposure caused the conversion to take place. For example, if a person sees an ad for Jersey Mike’s Subs on CTV and grabs their phone to do a quick search for the nearest location, then clicks on the link and places an order. This behavior will be attributed to Google, while in fact the search and the sale were 100% inspired by the TV ad. This faulty attribution dynamic has played out for years, resulting in hundreds of billions of dollars in valuation being hijacked by last-click digital companies.
While some attribution models use basic analytics data, they only provide a template and often fail to account for important steps in the marketing funnel. While last-touch attribution has long been the “go-to” measurement method, marketers now need to explore different attribution methodologies, given the increasingly fragmented media space and evolving consumer journey. The digital ad space needs to advance our understanding of single-touch measurement models, as they assign 100% of conversion credit to only one marketing touchpoint and often focus on only the first or last interactions, and adapt more sophisticated methods of analysis for campaigns. By leveraging different attribution methodologies, marketers can gain more in-depth insights regarding ad effectiveness to drive future marketing decisions.
It’s important to understand that attribution is a journey and the consumer journey is ever-changing. Today, a person can be exposed to a brand’s ad across numerous platforms and devices before purchasing. In fact, in the modern age of marketing across platforms, devices, and channels, the typical retail consumer requires an average of 56 touchpoints before making a purchase.3 It is important to assign proper credit to each touchpoint so that marketers can determine where their budget should be spent.
Our award-winning proprietary Performance CTV platform matches and tracks OTT/CTV impressions across premium inventory sources to real-world events, including site visits, store location visits, subscriptions, app installs, form-fills, purchases, revenue, and more to provide a more granular look at the consumer journey. We know, deterministically, at the household level, when someone is exposed to an ad and then takes action—whether it be digitally or physically. With our platform, advertisers can analyze exactly what’s driving desired results among consumers using multiple attribution methodologies.
Our Performance CTV platform takes attribution a step further, measuring every single touch prior to a conversion. Powered by innovative technology, the platform allows users to toggle freely between four different attribution methodologies in real-time to see exactly which touchpoints are driving the most leads, sales, installs, or visits among consumers. Advertisers have the ability to shuffle the distribution of credit according to the following attribution methodologies:
First Touch: All conversion credit assigned to the first variables that the converter was exposed to.
Last Touch: All conversion credit assigned to the last variables that the converter was exposed to.
Time Decay: Credit weighted more heavily across variables that the converter was exposed to as said exposures approach conversion (aka credit increases as time to conversion decreases).
Linear: Credit evenly dispersed across all variables that the converter was exposed to.
Our Performance CTV platform is the one-stop-shop for advertisers and agencies looking to transform data into actionable items that can be leveraged and improved upon in the future. By measuring and assigning credit to different variables in your campaign, our platform determines the true impact of each of them on any KPI—providing a new standard in tracking, transparency, and results via comprehensive attribution insights. Our platform then uses these insights to inform its media buying with a bidder that moves the budget toward the highest-performing campaign variables—lowering CPAs, maximizing ROAS, and making a tangible impact on a brand’s bottom line. Expanding your attribution methodologies will not only help refine your budget strategy but will have a lasting impact on your current and future ad campaigns.
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With the influx of new marketing channels finding their place in the modern digital age, advertisers worldwide are launching campaign after campaign across a broad spectrum of mediums, from Google paid search to linear and CTV.
There’s no doubt that this omnichannel approach does wonders for driving greater brand exposure and customer engagement. Of course, the more screen time you get, the more likely your most valued audience will see your message and decide to act, regardless of what that next step looks like for your specific brand.
But the rise of multi-channel strategies, and even those singular ones, also poses a pressing challenge to the everyday digital marketer: accurately tracking sales and conversions.
Fortunately, the right attribution model will deliver the insights you need to know exactly what is driving your consumers across channels — all the way from initial ad exposure to conversion.
Every digital advertiser benefits from not only determining how a customer came across their ad but also how they progress through the marketing funnel.
Because the average online customer journey now ranges from 20-500 touchpoints, it’s important to recognize that a lot of interaction happens before your customer decides to make a purchase.
With marketing attribution, you can go in-depth to fully understand the impact of different touchpoints along the customer’s journey — from beginning to end — and discover which channels contribute to a conversion.
These findings provide you with measurements of the successes and/or challenges of your campaign’s online presence and help you track your investment to determine your return on investment (ROI). When you leverage attribution models, you’ll have assistance outlining the resources you plan to use in future campaigns more effectively, helping you work towards the goal of actually increasing your ROI over time.
The process of attribution is not an easy undertaking for all, but it is crucial to understand. Without the right methodology, you’ll quickly find yourself in the dark with your campaigns, unaware of what’s truly impacting your brand’s bottom line.
From last touch to time decay, different attribution methodologies offer their own distinct advantages.
That’s why using multiple attribution models is highly recommended for an accurate understanding of the customer’s journey in full.
But to reap the best benefits for your brand, you’ll need to select the right attribution models for your campaign, and that decision starts with acknowledging the specific use cases of each.
The most common attribution model, last touch, determines an estimate of a customer’s last touchpoint with your brand before making a purchase or signing up for a service. Often referred to as “last click” or “last interaction,” this model gives all the conversion credit to the final touchpoint and offers a highly granular glance at your marketing cycle’s conversion points.
Advantage:
Disadvantage:
Just like last touch, the first touch model is another attribution methodology that assigns 100% of the conversion credit to a singular interaction a consumer has with your brand. This time, however, emphasis is placed on the first touchpoint a customer has with your company, with the main idea being that the initial interaction was the primary selling factor.
Advantage:
Disadvantage:
Unlike last and first touch, the linear model is a multi-touch attribution methodology, taking into account several touchpoints along the customer journey. What’s more, this methodology doesn’t just consider all the ways in which a customer interacted with your brand — it also splits conversion credit equally across each touchpoint, offering a balanced look at your marketing strategy in its entirety.
Advantage:
Disadvantage:
Similar in nature to the linear model, the time decay methodology assigns credit to all of the marketing channels that led to a conversion. However, unlike the evenly distributed credit provided by the linear model, time decay places more weight on the later touchpoints, with credit lessening — or decaying — as you look further back into the customer’s journey.
Advantage:
Disadvantage:
Attribution is the math and science of digital marketing, and it’s not always easy to navigate right off the bat.
To effectively leverage attribution data and boost your chances of conversion success, it’s best to:
As the digital landscape continues to advance, marketers need to stay ahead, and those that master campaign measurement with multiple attribution methodologies will be best positioned for success.
To fuel your future media budgets and marketing decisions, it’s critical to identify what channels are driving conversions and understand how your channels work together to influence those conversions.
With Digital Remedy as your media partner, we’ll help you determine the best attribution model(s) for your campaigns with specialized optimization, incrementality, and halo effect methodologies.
Speak with a member of our team to learn more, and check out our full video on YouTube.
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Despite what the 21st-century surge of cord-cutters and cord-nevers may lead you to believe, linear TV and the long-stay impact of its advertising capabilities won’t be headed for demise anytime soon.
There’s no doubt that the era of streaming and OTT/CTV is well upon us—reaching 142 million adult viewers across the globe—but abandoning the traditional TV marketing method might just lead to more campaign losses than gains.
Like most things in marketing, the best TV advertising efforts exist in a unit, and a diversified strategy—using both CTV/OTT and linear in tandem—keeps your brand relevant, in touch with your most valued leads, and seeing greater results.
A decades-old household staple, linear TV boasts a history of success at driving scale and delivering a broad reach for advertisers.
In recent years, however, the industry has experienced a significant disconnect, leaving many marketers looking to tack on other mediums to their strategy, particularly digital and CTV/OTT.
The age of converged media strategies has been a long time coming, and it’s not just because there are more opportunities than ever to get your brand known. Challenges in today’s linear TV landscape are taking marketing teams back to the drawing board, especially when faced with roadblocks like:
The evidence supporting convergence media approaches is here, and the figures are more than telling. According to a MediaScience/Effectv study, viewers exposed to TV and digital ads—versus digital ads alone—spent 3x more time with the ads, had a twice better brand recall, and rose their purchase intent by 15%.
But the power of combining CTV and linear is still unfolding, and advertisers going into this year’s first multi-currency upfront still cite fragmentation and measurement as top challenges in the converged TV space. Despite the industry’s current pain points, forward-thinking marketers are still embracing the potential of what a convergent media strategy can do, what its future holds, and how it can fit into their budget.
Ad dollars are moving, and what’s behind the migration is the eager marketer ready to capitalize on the impact of convergent media.
While search and social, mobile apps, and digital display continue their reign as the preferred channels for direct-to-consumer (DTC) marketers—receiving the largest shares of ad dollars in 1H 2023—a growing number of brands are shifting budgets to support increased spending on CTV/OTT.
In fact, 65% of those investing in CTV/OTT advertising in 1H ’23 report it being their first time funneling dollars into the channel, and over half (57%) of all marketers opting for this digital solution will spend more on it than this time last year.
By allocating extra budget to performance TV, advertisers have a leg up in not only staying competitive and reaching a highly targeted audience but also remaining insightful of their campaigns’ true impressions.
Because of the combined, rich data of performance TV and linear TV, over two-thirds of DTC marketers are leveraging CTV/OTT campaign insights to influence and optimize their linear strategies—and hail bigger results.
TV insights deliver the data you need to refine your marketing efforts and make more informed decisions on the who, what, how, when, and where of a successful campaign. Using these linear and CTV/OTT performance insights, you can enhance your advertising strategy and better resonate with your audience in three different ways:
Whether your main goal is fueling your branding, performance, or both, determining the best ways to go about your strategy is made possible with comprehensive TV insights, particularly when it comes to ACR technology.
The everyday smart TV is one of the primary propellors of granular TV insights. With automatic content recognition (ACR) technology built into these devices, smart TVs are able to identify nearly any content—including linear and CTV—playing on-screen and serve as grounds for immense data collection, helping advertisers with:
Although the total number of ACR-enabled TVs currently on the market is unknown, Vizio accounts for over 21m devices as of April 2023, signaling that marketers have plenty of ACR data sources to tap into for their CTV and linear campaigns.
CTV/OTT without data-driven linear TV advertising (and vice versa) is like developing a media buying plan without an experienced media planning strategist in your corner.
It meets the mark, but at what cost to your campaign?
These complimentary marketing tactics are best when leveraged together, and it’s not just because they reach a much wider audience. When you prioritize the combined power of a convergent TV strategy, you can:
It’s easy to fall into the trap that the cord-cutting phenomenon is positing—linear TV is on the decline. However, current viewing numbers suggest that we’re not quite there yet, and ditching traditional TV is only jumping the gun since it accounts for just under 50% of daily views. It still remains a highly saturated medium, and by keeping it in the modern era marketing landscape, advertisers are able to maximize their spending in more ways than one.
When you embrace the capabilities of both performance and linear TV, you’ll boost the data at your fingertips, the reach of your campaigns, and the relevance of your brand, all while staying in touch with industry standards.
CTV viewership and adoption continue to grow, and with it comes a proliferation of Performance TV, from ad-supported and subscription models to a hybrid of both.
Using TV insights through Digital Remedy, you can optimize your buys across digital by taking into account real-time linear TV data, increasing transparency in your TV buys, finding those hard-to-reach audiences, and measuring more effectively. With our customized digital media buying solutions, we’ll help you tap into your most telling insights and drive your future campaign strategies in ways that deliver the highest return on your investment.
Even more, advertisers can now run their linear media with us, bringing TV planning, activation, and measurement all under one roof. Listen to our RVP, West Coast, Mike McLaughlin expand on why and how Digital Remedy helps advertisers converge their linear and CTV strategy.
Ready to take your TV campaigns to the next level? Speak with a member of our team to learn more.
In recent years, QR code ads have been getting lots of buzz in marketing circles—with most conversations centering around using them in performance TV campaigns to drive outcomes.
The evolution of QR code formats in recent years has led some marketers to seek a refresher course on the subject.
So, what are QR code ads, and what’s the best way to use them in your digital advertising campaign?
QR codes were created by Denso Wave, a Toyota subsidiary, in 1994 as a way to track vehicles and their parts during the manufacturing process more accurately. While Denso Wave’s creation certainly wasn’t dormant in the years following, QR codes didn’t see widespread adoption until the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, when contactless mobile payment became necessary—leading to the widespread acceptance of QR codes globally.
This, along with the rise of smartphone usage and streaming content consumption during the pandemic, created an opportunity for marketers to pivot to using QR codes in their connected TV campaigns.
QR codes deliver an innovative, immersive, and intent-driven consumer ad experience that matches perfectly with the eye-grabbing nature of television ads.
Pair this with the fact that 70% of consumers use mobile devices while watching TV, according to Marketing Dive, and you have the perfect opportunity for QR code ads to thrive.
For example, in their 2022 spot for The Big Game, crypto tycoon Coinbase created the most talked about ad of the year by displaying a simple color-changing QR code that bounced around viewers’ screens for 30 seconds.
Scanning the code led users to their crypto exchange platform, where they were given $15 of Bitcoin to create an account.
Crypto and tech companies aren’t the only ones using QR codes in their connected TV campaigns. Legacy brands like Burger King and Lacoste are also getting in on the action—proving the simple, efficient, results-driven nature of QR code advertising is here to stay.
QR code stands for “Quick Response Code,” which is probably the simplest definition of what this 2D barcode does.
Similar to barcodes you find at grocery stores, QR codes are made up of black squares and tiny dots representing different pieces of information. Once scanned by your smartphone, these unique patterns translate into human-readable data such as menus, landing pages, and websites.
There are two types of QR codes you should be aware of while developing your ads strategy.
Static QR codes are permanent and cannot be modified once they go live—making it even more important to be sure you eliminate all typos. Because these codes never expire, they are ideal for storing fixed information.
You can use static QR codes for email addresses, texts, WiFi passwords, social media links, and much more.
The three main features of static QR codes are:
Dynamic QR codes can be modified and store more data after posting.
This type of QR code is ideal for those looking for more access to monitoring real-time scans and the location of where people are scanning.
Some, but not all, of the features of dynamic QR codes, include:
The days of static CTV ads are over, and QR codes are leading the way. Including a QR code in your CTV ad on platforms like YouTube TV gives your audience an easy way to visit your landing page and engage with your product. Plus, the ability to measure the traffic from your CTV ad means you can optimize your campaign in real time.
But QR codes aren’t just a novelty—they can significantly impact your bottom line. With the right call-to-action, your QR code can drive highly-targeted audiences to product pages and checkout screens, boosting conversions and increasing revenue. Marketers serious about meeting their lower-funnel KPIs should pay attention to QR codes’ power and other interactive ad formats.
If used correctly, QR codes can spike the curiosity of your customers and prospects alike.
Here are some tips for maximizing campaign performance:
Regardless of your digital campaign objectives, finding a partner that can seamlessly optimize your strategy is essential. With Digital Remedy, you can leverage dynamic creative video, including adding and optimizing QR codes for CTV and inserting a QR code add-on to a raw asset CTV file. This helps to further engage with users in a CTV environment and prove your conversion was because of direct interaction with an ad.
With our always-on ad serving, personalization, and measurement, we can help you choose the best QR code campaign to maximize your ROAS.
Digital Remedy partners with a leading offline-to-online (O2O) tech platform powered by next-generation QR codes. Decide on custom designs; we’ll help you decide on the best place to send consumers after they scan and optimize for maximum scannability. Data dashboards and reports can be customized based on your KPIs. Reporting includes variables to test, data insights, and overall learnings. We provide real-time analytics, geo-location data, and attribution across screens.
Ready to take your CTV campaigns to the next level with QR codes? Speak with a member of our team to learn more.
As the direct-to-consumer (DTC) space becomes increasingly competitive, marketers are under constant pressure to understand campaign performance and prove the value of their efforts. Now accountable for driving outcomes through their campaigns rather than building general awareness among consumers, many brands are rethinking their media mix—exploring new channels that can effectively deliver on their campaign goals and maximize their budget.
Digital Remedy partnered with Dynata, the world’s largest first-party data company, to field a marketing-focused survey with the goal of gaining a deeper understanding of DTC marketers’ top priorities, current campaign practices, and media partner preferences.
Download our report, which provides valuable insights, including:
For the latest industry trends and insights, check out our blog and sign up to receive our monthly newsletter.
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. Discover how your brand can garner greater brand impact, generate more outcomes, and turn TV into a powerful performance channel. For additional information, visit www.digitalremedy.com/ott-ctv or schedule a demo to see our award-winning platform in action.
Behind every paid digital ad is what seasoned marketers know as a media buy.
Gone are the days of simply throwing money at digital ads and hoping it sticks. Digital ad buying, also known as media buying, is a process that requires strategy, thought, and creativity — making it much more than just putting a flashy message in front of audiences at scale.
With the right media buying tips and tricks, you can create a fruitful strategy that drives real returns on your investment, no matter what your campaign goals look like.
Your ad may be visually appealing and get the message across, but without the right media buy, it won’t get you very far.
Media buying is a science. Strategy is crucial—and it starts before you even start buying. Media buying is all about finding the proper environment, time, and context to run your ads. The goal is simple: to get ad space on the most relevant channels to your target audience at the most optimal time — all for the least amount of spend.
Today, there are several ways to purchase media for your ad campaign, including:
No matter how you do media buying, one thing is standard: It’s a multi-step process that goes beyond the simple act of buying ad space. Media buying, especially in the performance TV and CTV age, requires careful consideration and planning to effectively bring your innovative ideas to fruition and keep up with the rife competition.
In short, it’s no longer enough to just have compelling copies and visuals. Because media buying can affect your company’s bottom line, your ads need to be placed in the right locations and at the right times and frequencies so that the right audiences see your message.
An effective media buying plan helps you get the most out of your advertising, but to see the results you’re after, you need to go about it the right way.
Here are a few tips for maximizing your media buying strategy:
According to Marketing Evolution, $37b is wasted in ad spend each year from ads that fall short of engaging the target audience.
The takeaway?
Understanding your target market in any campaign you take on can make or break your media buys. This starts with knowing their age, gender, income, location, interests, and more — and putting all that data to good use.
Ensure that your ad buys are delivering a solid ROI and expand your market size by choosing who you want to deliver your ads to. By discovering potential prospects, you’ll be able to uncover practical ways of targeting select user pools to generate the most qualified leads.
Big or small, startup or seasoned — whatever your brand looks like, it can’t be without a campaign objective.
What are you hoping to achieve with your media buy? Are you a newer company trying to raise brand awareness? An established brand looking to remarket one of your products? Was there a dip in ROI last year that you’re trying to mend this time around?
When looking toward the media buying process, you need clearly established goals before planning the creative. Consider your intentions and how you want to measure success, including any relevant KPIs.
Media plans only work if you strategize toward distinct and well-defined goals.
Today, 88% of U.S. households tune into at least one video streaming service, whether it’s to binge Prime Video or catch the next big game without paying for cable.
This is where doing the most to reach your audience becomes crucial.
To stand out in an increasingly saturated market, you need to ensure your ads appear on brand-safe inventory sources at relevant, accessible, and visible times.
How? By choosing media channels that will have the most significant impact on your target audience.
With an integrated media planning approach, you can focus on buying the right mix of media to maximize your investment, whether that looks like OTT/CTV and paid search, social, or whatever else may fit the bill.
Media buying isn’t just a one-and-done success story. It’s an ongoing optimization process that involves four key tactics — learning, analyzing, testing, adjusting, and repeating — to make a real difference in your campaign’s performance.
Whether it’s adjusting frequency and bids to maximize performance or shifting spend toward top-performing devices, you should be optimizing your ads in real-time to ensure your programmatic campaign is set up with appropriate parameters throughout the flight.
By doing so, you’ll have greater control over the outcome of your ad buys and verify they’re doing what you intended them to do.
Buying media ads may seem like an easy feat, but DIYing your purchases often ends up with a campaign that only half works. To maximize your efforts, it’s best to partner with a knowledgeable media buying partner.
Experienced media buying strategists help you get the best ad placements, deals on your buys, and more with a reservoir of technology, expertise, and best practices to inform your campaign.
When you work with a skilled and trustworthy buying partner, you can benefit from solid, already-established relationships with outlets and publishers to successfully place, buy, and reconcile your ad spend.
That way, you can achieve the best possible results by driving quality impressions at a lower cost — without the extra heavy lifting.
At Digital Remedy, we execute our clients’ media as if it’s our own.
Leveraging over 23 years of industry experience, we strive to overachieve outcomes that maximize performance and efficiency for our clients by utilizing reporting data and testing various solutions.
With our digital media solutions, we seek success from uncommon data and solutions points that yield strong performance.
When you partner with Digital Remedy on your digital media planning and buying initiatives, you’ll gain:
To learn more about how we can help you meet your digital ad buying goals, reach out to a member of our team to schedule a demo today.
If you want to get your message out there with the perfect punch, it pays (literally) to plan ahead. Maximizing your digital advertising success isn’t a guessing game—it’s a calculated strategy that starts with leveraging the power of a detailed media plan.
From beginning to end, a media plan sets the stage for your campaign and ad buys, helping you determine how, when, and where your audience will receive your brand’s next message.
When you work with a media planning & buying strategist for your campaign, you can stay ahead of the curve with impactful benefits that transform results in significant ways.
Getting your ads run on YouTube TV, Hulu, or any other hotshot OTT provider may be your campaign’s end-all-be-all, but you won’t get there without help from an expert media planner.
Offering valuable market and competitor research, premium inventory, complete transparency, and more, media planners keep you informed and efficient throughout your campaign planning period, providing your team with a variety of compelling benefits, such as:
Data is the primary ingredient of a media plan, just like any advertising campaign.
However, media planning isn’t just data science—it’s a fine art that allows you to take the latest campaign and audience insights and drive your marketing efforts in an informed way, ensuring better results at every turn.
Media planners are pioneers in this strategic realm of campaign oversight, identifying trends and patterns using historical data obtained directly from media vendors and previous campaigns executed within your vertical. With intuitive media planning tools, media planners can effectively analyze the performance and results of your past marketing efforts to apply findings to your future strategies.
In doing so, you’ll be able to improve your targeting and increase the chance at an improved overall ROI based on data that keeps on compiling.
The Digital Remedy Approach: We leverage data across a multitude of verticals to base your proposals on. With 23 years of experience running successful media campaigns under our belts, we’ve put together tens of thousands of proposals and counting. We’ve worked with agencies and clients, big and small, on a broad array of digital campaigns focused on a spectrum of KPIs. Our access to historical data can help inform your proposals and springboard off use cases we’ve seen work—and work well—in the past. This approach vs. the blind “let’s throw it all at the wall and see what sticks” angle helps maximize your budget and see the results in your ROI.
CTV ad spend is growing, with a 14.4% uptick expected in 2023. As more marketers race to programmatic TV and media buying options become more available than ever before, it’s never been so important to invest in high-quality, brand-safe video inventory.
With premium inventory, you can ensure your ads are being run on reputable platforms with high levels of traffic and engagement, mitigating the risk of wasting your budget on a low-quality site that offers no return.
Media planners take the guesswork out of primary inventory, establishing relationships with platforms and identifying the right placement for your message so that you don’t have to. With a media planning agency in your corner, you can avoid high publisher direct minimums and open exchanges that cause financial and reputational harm to your brand, all while working with a team that ensures your message runs in the most optimal setting.
The Digital Remedy Approach: Media agnostic, we sit across 14 demand-side platforms (DSPs) and are plugged into multiple supply-side platforms (SSPs). We are connected, so you don’t have to be. With our established partnerships, you’ll be able to:
You’re a marketer that has a goal over your head. Unless you have a specific media planning background and are fully up to date with the capabilities of a full-service programmatic agency, trying to plan media will be quite stressful and time-consuming.
When you delegate your proposal to an experienced media planning team, you’ll have help:
With the heavy lifting off your plate, you get more time and capacity to focus your attention on other objectives that keep your brand pacing toward your goals.
The Digital Remedy Approach: Our team is an extension of your team, helping alleviate the stresses that come along with planning the intricacies of your advertising efforts. Aside from working with you in building your campaign, we’ll also advise you on the best flight dates based on your campaign goal and provide different pricing options (CPM, cost plus) that meet your budget. Think of us as your guiding light, helping you avoid shortfalls or mistakes and quickly pivot and revise should the media not produce the results you were after.
Looking to run a podcast campaign to three zip codes, layer on behavioral targeting, and have a ROAS goal of 4000%?
That may be tough.
Of course, you want to see the numbers move with any advertising effort you take on. But setting unrealistic expectations about what your campaign can actually do will only send your team back to the drawing board—in a strategy overhaul.
Media planning strategists provide a transparent solution to scalability, offering insight into avails across geographies, audience segments, and platforms that can contribute to a more informed and feasible plan of action. With a real-time pulse on how scalable your ads are, you can identify the areas where your efforts should be focused to achieve your desired results.
The Digital Remedy Approach: We are transparent about scalability and realistic about how campaigns will perform, given their targeting parameters and where they are running. The last thing you need is your media planning strategist overpromising and underdelivering. We can provide accurate ad avails across segments, geos, and channels to help inform the best media plan to make your KPIs work.
You’re dedicated to creating a campaign that converts. A media planner is dedicated to making that vision a reality.
But strategy is only half the battle. To secure media buys that stand out and claim the attention of your audience, you need a media planner that is committed to the success of your campaign from beginning to end—and on to the next one.
Experienced media planners know the ins and outs of the industry, from advancements in ad tech and yearly holiday trends to new emergers in the CTV/OTT landscape. Leveraging their expertise, insights, and media planning tools, these marketing aficionados help you achieve your goals with a strategy that is both competitive and personalized to the goals that are most top of line.
The Digital Remedy Approach: Our dedicated media planning team is here for you, 24/7. We provide expert guidance into capabilities and solutions, explaining exactly how this all works and why it’s important for the bottom line of your campaign. We are here to make revisions and recommendations and, ultimately, be your partner in creating a media plan that achieves the KPIs you’re looking for. As your guide in your media planning, we’ll use our expertise to steer you in the right direction when it comes to how, when, and where you’re reaching your audience.
When developing your media plan, you need a strategist that offers best-in-class solutions to help you identify and reach your ad campaign objectives in the most streamlined ways possible.
At Digital Remedy, our team of media planning and buying experts have the industry knowledge and expertise to help you create a multi-channel media plan that captures the attention and business of your target audience without sacrificing your budget. As your media planning agency, we will work with you to stay ahead of your competition with ad buying opportunities that deliver real results.
Speak with a member of our team to learn more about how we can put our media planning tools to work for your next campaign.
Through sophisticated measurement capabilities, marketers can now understand the impact of CTV exposure-to-outcome on their ads. Given the significant investment in this media channel, attribution—the process of assigning credit for conversions to various marketing touchpoints along the customers’ journey—has become a must-have for growth and performance marketers. This information is critical to creating more effective ad campaigns and boosting revenue. In measuring conversions following ad exposure for CTV, it’s important to understand which exposure caused the conversion to take place.
Through incrementality analysis, we can evaluate all the conversions that wouldn’t have happened without our media. However, in many instances, other media channels had an influence. In fact, every touchpoint your audience has with your campaign influences a conversion—no matter the partner or channel.
If a Digital Remedy campaign played a part in a conversion that involved other media exposures, clients want to understand how the exposure to Digital Remedy played a role in improving the efficacy of the media. In this case, the OTT campaign influenced the conversion, but the second partner’s attribution modeling wouldn’t take that into account, and it would get full credit for the conversion.
All media works together. None of your advertising works in a vacuum. Conversion reporting/attribution is only one of several ways to analyze whether specific media works for you. With halo effect analysis, clients can understand the campaign boost Digital Remedy is providing. If we played a part in a conversion that involved some other media, we’re essentially improving the efficacy of that media type with our own media.
Incremental channel lift, or halo effect, is a way to measure the boost in performance of your search, social, and affiliate channels provided by your CTV campaigns. In other words, the halo effect shows how much more likely someone is to convert if they see CTV ads AND any of your search, social, or affiliate ads versus ONLY seeing ads on those other channels.
Halo effect analysis takes a more holistic approach to attribution, focusing on incremental conversions across media channels and campaigns. With this analysis, you can connect your CTV spend and see just how much of a boost these campaigns are providing for all of the other media you’re running.
Rather than having to take credit for the direct performance of our media, we are able to assign that credit and take indirect credit instead through halo effect analysis. Search lift, social lift, affiliate lift, native lift; you name it, all of this can be done through this same process.
Leveraging halo effect analysis through Digital Remedy, advertisers can measure the true incrementality of their marketing initiatives and refine their campaign mix to deliver a better ad experience for their customers (and better results for their business). Benefits include:
Speak to a member of our team to learn more.
