Connected TV or Smart TV is a relatively new format of mass-media integrating traditional television with the Internet. It enables your home TV network for Internet browsing, photo view and upload, music streaming and on-demand video. One gets it all in addition to the original TV package with traditional broadcasting media. The technology reaches mobile devices including smartphones and tablets.The combined hosting of content generated by TV providers and internet sources broaden the audience even faster.
Quite expectedly, Connected TV platforms also expand the possibilities for businesses in terms of video advertising. While they are already being actively used by major companies like Amazon, Apple and Google, the technology is still evolving. Marketing professionals are only beginning to include CTV into their roadmaps, due to the immense possibilities for programmatic advertising that are unfolding right now.
Programmatic advertising is highly automated. It’s effective thanks to the accurate targeting as well as the instruments to measure attribution and reach. Programmatic advertising is a great opportunity offered by modern technology that uses all the benefits of digital and traditional media combined.
There are four ways to follow in order to incorporate Connected TV platform into your programmatic video advertising strategy.
1. Traditional and Digital Media for Advertising
Connected TV has great capacity to integrate the traditional media outreach with precise instruments of audience targeting, such as first- and third-party targeting, retargeting, cross-targeting and many more. It allows very “surgical” and personalized outreach to the audience. It is possible because your video ads can work precisely on a particular segment of the audience according to the accurate parameters. These are fixed frequency, timeframe, hours during the day, interests and devices. With such a wide range of targeting mechanisms at your disposal, identifying and structuring your audience pose be a problem.
Obviously, Connected TV offers instruments for much more sophisticated targeted video advertising campaigns, in which data and technology are used to engage consumers exactly at the relevant moment that decides everything. It has never been so easy and timely for an advertisement to meet the eye of a customer as it is now with Connected TV programmatic campaign – unmanned and highly optimized both for the advertiser and consumers.
2. Taking Control of Multi-Channel Advertising
Programmatic advertising, can rely on multiple channels of outreach via retargeting and cross-targeting. It is of special significance because today people are more used to receiving overwhelming masses of information from different channels at once. On average their attention span is short, switching from one source to another very quickly. For example, while watching TV people often go on browsing the Internet on their tablet, laptop or smartphone. It is a competitive factor diminishing the chances of your ad to be seen, as people would be more likely to miss the ad. But at the same time, Connected TV can be used for the purposes of brand awareness and then retargeting to mobile devices of people who have watched it on TV.
In addition, there are digital means of measuring the efficiency of the ad running on Connected TV that help to evaluate the efficiency. You can use Google Analytics to analyze the quality of interaction with the audience. You are free to launch and try different advertising strategies in order to compare and decide which of them is more effective.
3. Showing up in the right place, at the right time and for the right audience
Surprisingly, and often mistakenly, Connected TV is not taken into account during cross-platform advertisement. It is a shame, because you are leaving behind an entire medium. The latter manages to capture complicated forms of audience targeting, combining individual user level with shared use of a household television.
The audience can be targeted on the individual mobile user level and to retarget them later on Connected TV devices. For example, while they are at home in their living room surrounded by the family. The purely psychological factors, such as the feeling of comfort at home are huge for the certain types of campaigns. For example, it works particularly effectively with big purchases like cars, houses and expensive technical appliances. The things, which one member of the family cannot decide and they need to be discussed with a wider family.
4. Granular Targeting
Connected TV gives opportunity for even more precise targeting. The granular targeting grants an even more effective set of targeting instruments aimed at separate selected subgroups of people within specific categories of audience. In order to identify them all devices that the person has at his/her disposal and employed in the process of searching can serve to trace and single out particular people according to the spheres of their interests. In addition it spans the standard information, such as keywords showing the partial or full intent of the consumer to buy the product or the information for future purchases. The point is that granular targeting is built upon the accurate division of audience into narrow groups and subgroups by the means of highly elaborate sets of parameters. It uses all data available and applies it together with the criteria overlapping or being parallel to each other in order to hit the right audience. Another thing you can do for that purposes is index certain parameters. The parameters mentioned above are applied, first, at the stage of finding the target audience across multiple devices, and then retargeting them on Connected TV to find the household location. Of course, it gives advertisers a new high-precision instrument of reaching the audience. It makes them firmly equipped with highly functional advertising models. Eventually, granular targeting will become a major sphere of investment for advertisers from all over the world. Granular targeting helps distinguish potential consumers from the rest of people.
To sum it up, no matter which way you choose to follow for the particular purpose you need, it is obvious that Connected TV multiplies the opportunities of marketing mechanisms aimed at reaching consumers tenfold in terms of precision and effectiveness of impact. Undeniably, nowadays Connected TV complements greatly to the standard means of outreach. Its high capabilities of targeting and attribution, which were possible with digital means only before, now merge effectively with TV to widen the sphere and depth of outreach. Today, it is still developing and we are yet to see new instruments better instruments joining the CTV toolset in the future.