Accelerating adoption of connected TV advertisements – what brands need to know

We've been marching along a century-long path from television worshippers to cord-cutters. Instead of becoming obsolete with the advent of advanced streaming services, TV devices continue to evolve, gradually adapting to a newer reality. Aside from providing a new way to watch your favourite shows, CTV provides a huge opportunity for advertising.

Television was in charge before we discovered the superpowers of digital ads. During the previous decades, the #1 influencer of consumer purchase intents was a small box with wires, not big boards, radio, or advertorials in local newspapers.

The frequent pairing of OTT and CTV resulted in a revolution in TV advertising. Those who no longer watch TV through cable are unable to view TV commercials. As a result, advertisers devised another method to deliver their advertisements to them.

The only significant difference between connected TV advertising and other types of online video advertising is that advertisers here buy smart TV ad inventory rather than more popular desktop and mobile ad inventory. This is possible if you negotiate the price of ad serving directly with the publisher and use an ad server to deliver the creative.

For several years, connected TV advertising has been identified as a major trend in programmatic. However, none of the ad tech events could serve as a catalyst for connected TV to evolve. The global lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2020, resulting in a significant increase in OTT and CTV popularity. Notably, CTV viewing has increased from 2.7 billion hours before the pandemic on March 2 to 3.9 billion hours during the weeks of March 23, March 30, and April 6. This accounts for 81% of the year-on-year growth.

Elaborating on why connected TV is the next big thing in digital advertising, Brigitte Slattery, Head of Strategic Marketing, APAC | Samsung Ads, said, “Brands that are willing to invest and learn about this growing media will reap the rewards by being forward-thinking and ahead of the trend. The growth of CTV adoption in India is a clear indication that brands need to take advantage of CTV advertising. Audiences are looking for the best content on offer, and CTV offers advertisers the ability to reach highly engaged viewers and drive big impact from their ad spend. CTV provides the perfect environment for brands to marry the big screen, high quality experience of TV ads with the accuracy of targeting and measurability seen already in digital advertising.”

Further adding on what is needed to accelerate the adoption of connected TV advertisements, she said, “Access to audience insights will be key to overcoming many CTV challenges and accelerating its growth. It will require partnership with manufacturers like Samsung who can provide first-party data to advertisers. There are millions of Samsung CTVs installed in Indian households and they will become a fantastic source of audience data. What this means is that we can collaborate with advertisers to position content and brands within the organic TV viewing experience, based on data-driven insights. Planning against real behaviours will enable advertisers to achieve better cost effectiveness and manage fragmentation across CTV. While the Indian CTV market is still relatively young compared to other markets, the current growth rate means it’s hard for advertisers and brands to ignore.”

Speaking on the opportunities that lay ahead for brands and marketers in terms of connected TV advertisements, Vishal Chinchankar, CEO, Madison Digital and Madison Media Alpha, said, “CTV today offers premium audiences having spending power and are predominately cord-cutters. We have seen significant impact on association with the brand message and strong brand attributes among target audience, post a few CTV campaign brand measure studies.”

“CTV enables advertisers to target and reach an audience based on consumers’ content preferences apart from other targeting option and not appointment-based viewing. To my mind, a 20 or 30 seconds brand communication has more powerful impact in the CTV environment over other platforms,” he added.

He further talked about the main challenges with regard to reaching an evolving audience base, and said. “Today, the base is relatively small but growing at significant pace and there may be a premium on the inventory buy, but to my mind these are not concerning areas to reach this audience. The biggest challenge that our industry is facing is common currency measurement between traditional and digital video. While you can measure hard KPI’s like completion rates etc., using third-party trackers, however, there is still a dependency on publishers’ data for outputs as there isn’t a single body that provides deterministic measures.”

Stressing on why connected TV is the next big thing in digital advertising, Shrenik Gandhi, CEO and Co-Founder, White Rivers Media, said, “As the use of smart TVs grows, connected TV (CTV) has emerged as a crucial advertising platform in India. CTV not only provides businesses with access to a captive audience of affluent and enthusiastic viewers but also offers more targeting options and measurability all while being cost-efficient. Recently, we worked on a campaign that involved CTV advertising and the results were promising. For driving pre-release awareness and movie theatre ticket sales for Jurassic Park Dominion, Universal Pictures International partnered with Samsung Ads to reach highly targeted audiences with CTV advertising on Samsung TVs. The campaign reached over 470k households, and the campaign delivered over 1.55m completed video views with a staggering 96% completion rate!”

On what is needed to accelerate the adoption of connected TV advertisements, he said, “For CTV to succeed, marketers will need to keep enhancing the effectiveness of their advertisements. Giving businesses crucial abilities like identifying the precise audience, flexibility in shifting expenditure from one channel to another, and improving ways to measure ad campaigns effectively will be essential to ascertain that a CTV is a brilliant investment.”

The best minds in Data Analytics, Programmatic, Martech, Metaverse, AI/ AR/ VR will offer deep insights into this dynamic and evolving field at the inaugural edition of Adgully’s DATAMATIXX 2022. Click here to know more and to register.

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