Increasingly clients are allocating more of their budgets to CTV. While CTV, OTT (over-the-top), and AVOD (advanced video on demand) are currently responsible for 27% of the total advertising pie, surprisingly, CTV only represents 2% of the entire video share. Considering CTV has no exposure to the cookie and is addressable at the household/individual level, you can expect this share to grow dramatically over the coming years.
So how do you ensure your campaign is effective? Below we list a few things for you to keep in mind while planning your next campaign.
1. Audience Construction: CTV isn’t as simple as moving your audience from your display campaign and porting it to CTV. Not to use the cliche ‘data is the new oil’ analogy, but if this is the case, the refining of this oil is different for every medium you choose. To simplify, you wouldn't put jet fuel in an SUV, and you definitely wouldn’t put heating oil in a plane. So why would you think the mobile ID would work in CTV. It won’t. While the input is the same (#data), the output is not (#identifier).
CTV works primarily on IP addresses, and IP addresses are dynamic, changing every 14 days, requiring a dynamic IP graph to maintain addressability. Sure, there are other signals in CTV, including email/login info and IDs provided by the CTV providers themselves, but if you are starting with an identifier that does not map to CTV, you are dead in the water before you have even started.
2. Pricing & Supply: CTV inventory is expensive and increasingly more so. This is a consequence of too many brands chasing too few quality inventory avails. While pricing is dynamic, clients often get too cute with their pricing, thinking they can outsmart the market and achieve their goals at a fraction of the market rate. According to our most recent LinkedIn Poll, over 87% of those who voted suggested you needed a floor rate of $20 CPM or more to deliver. Unfortunately, we still see several clients starting their campaigns at $10. Our suggestion to clients is, to begin with, a higher CPM and work your way down. It's a lot easier to slow a campaign down than it is to speed it up.
Additional resources to help you with your understanding of CTV: