What is Connected TV?
Connected TV (CTV) refers to any television set or device that can connect to the internet and stream digital content. Typically, they use WiFi to connect to the internet and can access movies, TV shows, music, apps, and more.
Connected TV doesn’t necessarily refer to just TVs. Broadly, it could mean any of the following:
Smart TVs: These TVs have built-in internet connectivity and apps, allowing you to stream directly from services like Netflix, YouTube, and Hulu.
Streaming Devices: Devices like Roku, Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV, and Chromecast plug into your TV and provide access to a wide range of streaming services.
Gaming Consoles: Consoles like PlayStation and Xbox also function as streaming devices, offering access to apps and games with video content.
What is Connected TV advertising?
Connected TV (CTV) advertising is how ads are shown on Connected TVs, which are already connected to the internet. These ads can be shown on Smart TVs, streaming devices or gaming consoles and provide a precisely targeted, high-engagement and data-rich format of ads that are great for brand awareness as well as driving interest and conversions.
How do I advertise on Connected TV?
Don’t know where to begin? Here are the essential steps to successfully launch your first connected TV (CTV) ad campaign:
1. Do your research by defining campaign objectives and target audiences
2. Evaluate and select the right CTV platform
3. Determine your budget and arrive at a good pricing model
4. Develop compelling creatives
5. Choose an effective targeting strategy
6. Monitor and optimize your campaign
Let’s take a look at these in detail.
1. Define Your Objectives and Target Audiences
Why are you running a CTV ad campaign? Do you want to increase brand awareness? Or are you looking to drive website traffic? Or perhaps you want to boost sales? Or even all of this? It’s critical to understand your CTV campaign objectives as that will help inform campaign parameters, messaging, user journeys and creative direction.
It’s also crucial to start with an understanding of who you want to target with your CTV ad campaign (your target audience). Understand their demographics, interests, behaviors, and viewing habits, which in turn will help you identify the platforms and channels they frequent most often.
2. Select the Right CTV Platform(s)
There are many options for the platform you can run your CTV campaign on.
You can run them on streaming services such as Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, on streaming devices like Roku, Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV, Google TV, or even on gaming consoles like the Playstation and XBox.
Ultimately, the choice of platform will depend on their ability to reach your target audience at scale and with precision, ad formats available and of course, price. Keep your campaign objectives and audience profiles in mind when selecting the right CTV platform for your ad campaign.
3. Set Your Budget and Choose a Pricing Model
Budgets can make or break your CTV campaign. Numerous factors can affect this, such as campaign length, target audience size, platform and desired reach.
Choose a pricing model that makes sense for your campaign objectives and your budget so you are paying for the metric that matters most to you. These could be cost per thousand impressions (CPM), cost per view (CPV) or cost per click (CPC).
It’s important to work with a trusted ad partner, who can help you ensure your ad budget goes as far as it can and that your pricing is relevant and fair.
4. Develop Compelling Creatives
There’s nothing that will stop your campaign dead in its tracks than a badly designed and poorly optimized creative. Every campaign objective, audience type, product, service and budget will require you to think about how best to engage your audience, which is primarily determined by the creative you use.
There is no magic bullet here. Long ads, short ads, animations, videos, interactive elements – all can be made to work for your CTV campaign and platform, provided they are visually appealing and tell a strong story. A 20 second ad can establish a brand powerfully as well as a 60 second ad.
5. Choose Your Targeting Strategy
Whole books can be written on targeting audiences, but at the very minimum, think of demographics, interests, viewing habits, regions, cities, neighborhoods (and in some places, even at the household level) and time of day/night when you want your ad to be shown.
Typically, connected TVs and streaming devices will be able to give you the baseline data to be able to make these decisions, so it’s important to ensure you’re paying attention to the details here.
6. Launch and Monitor Your Campaign
As with every other successful digital ad campaign, monitoring campaign performance is a critical component of launching a CTV ad campaign. Look for and inspect all the metrics that matter most to your campaign – whether that’s impressions, vis, clicks, conversions or cost per acquisition (CPA).
Monitoring CTV ad performance isn’t enough. One of the biggest advantages of CTV ad campaigns is your ability to make campaign changes in near real-time. Make sure you adjust your targeting, creative and budget allocation to improve performance.
Conclusion
There is no one-size fits all for any digital ad campaign, and this is true for CTV campaigns as well.
The steps outlined above offer a great template for you to use, but ultimately, you need to determine what other steps would make sense for your goals. These could be things like bespoke ad space on specific CTV platforms, running multi-screen ads that create a more sophisticated user journey, integrated 1st and 3rd party data to get at bespoke segments and much more.
And remember, CTV advertising is just one possible option in the digital advertising arsenal you should be evaluating. In other words, think in terms of a marketing mix, rather than a single channel or single-platform advertising campaign.
