In the digital landscape, the rapid advancement of technology has proven to be a driving force for many brands to make their online presence wherein, Connected TV comes into the picture and supports them at its best. It has stood out in delivering messages in an interesting and engaging way that has surpassed HD and Linear TV.
What makes CTV unique?
CTV has made advertising practices much easier for marketers because its advanced real-time reporting incorporates programmatic metrics that better optimise the campaign performance and measure its success by monitoring various metrics such as device type, view-through-rate, impressions, inventory and OS and video quartile metrics.
It creates better connections because marketers can reach the GenZ audience and showcase adverts on bigger screens for a more significant impact via precise targeting and a fully immersive experience. This is why, CTV has become the most preferred medium of digital advertising and as per Statista, the global CTV Advertising revenue is projected to be 23.6 billion U.S. dollars this year and will reach 32.6 billion U.S. dollars by 2026. This can be attributed to the change in viewing habits of people since gone are the days when we used to rely on cable for entertainment and now, following OTT, CTV is massively impacting the digital ecosystem.
Impact of CTV on digital landscape
There would be nothing wrong in saying that the fuelling growth of CTV is because of the easy availability of high-speed internet along with the streaming services of OTT. This has also shifted the interests of cord-cutters and cord-nevers towards CTV and together they make up a significant portion of the niche audience that can be targeted by marketers at granular levels. CTV broadens the advertising arena for marketers to tap into such netizens as their paradigm shift in the interest from linear to digital can also help brands with retargeting opportunities across multiple touch points abreast with access to premium inventory.
Advertising on CTV majorly focuses on netizens’ past actions and purchasing habits, lifecycle preferences, data points and a lot more which also helps marketers with plenty of opportunities to advertise better and for effective brand promotion. Advertisers can also create targeted personalised campaigns that are more likely to resonate with the audience and lead to higher conversions.
CTV also provides a democratised, convenient and affordable way for viewers to access the content and facilitates marketers with measurable results. This is why the CTV audience is growing rapidly, enabling campaign managers to easily discover which users and for how long they view ads and can further modify the campaign for its effective performance. This also drives the success of the campaign with real-time actionable insights pertaining to the people’s attention, their watched adverts and triggered actions on it, whenever it happens.
Future of CTV
With the increasing adoption of CTV, it is becoming a new-age digitalised solution for marketers and brand owners because as the advertising industry navigates the shift towards a cookieless world, they have started prioritising their own identity graphs and investing their advertising spend on first-party data sets. That’s why, data clean rooms have become important for marketers as it helps them understand and analyze consumers’ data across different platforms and touchpoints for better accuracy and efficiency in media performance.
Moreover, when it comes to media buyers, CTV allows them to better optimise their media buying and expose the audiences to the content they are most likely to get engage with. Hence, CTV is inevitable and has already started becoming a part of advertisers’ marketing toolkit because of its different advertising formats which results in more effective audience targeting.
Adding to this, I would like to say that CTV Ads and TV complement each other as they produce a comprehensive marketing funnel that enables advertisers to efficiently bridge the gap between household audiences and connected devices. This is because with a maximum number of people accessing CTV, programmatic media and advertising budgets are funnelling from linear to streaming services wherein, data from CTV campaigns can be channelised for precise audience identification and optimisation.
In the digitalised landscape, there is no doubt in saying that the streaming ecosystem is making its benchmarks wherein, programmatic buying is also gaining good traction due to which, the media buying and delivery of ads on CTV becomes more promising and buoyed, resulting in good media performance on digital platforms. Moreover, with diminishing IP-based targeting and phasing out of third-party cookies, the role of content and context mapping would also give CTV advertising an extra edge as it will help marketers to target the right niche audience without infringing their privacy.
It has come with a revolution because where linear TV is found on paid subscriptions via cable, CTV connected with OTT is accessible via the internet, wherein its penetration has also boosted its adoption. This has enabled advertisers to cater to consumers with personalised ads and content to niche households despite the huge masses, driving meaningful measurable results.
By Gagan Uppal, Country Head – MENA, Xapads Media
