CTV has changed the marketing game, bringing brand and performance together

By MNTN

Between the shift to digital-first marketing and the addition of many new tools and platforms, marketing teams and the way they approach TV advertising has changed — and will continue to change in the near future.

“The brand team is usually looking for the lowest CPM and the performance team is looking for the highest ROAS,” said Ali Haeri, vice president of marketing at MNTN. “This is seemingly two different ends of the spectrum,” but the emergence of CTV is prompting each marketing team to address campaign outcomes in ways they weren’t able to before.

With many performance marketers dipping their toes — or diving — into the CTV space, the new environment and the addition of performance capabilities to what was once purely a brand awareness space is leading to a shift in the way brand marketers approach TV advertising. Not only that, it’s helping to bridge the gap between performance and brand teams and changing how the two work together.

With CTV, brand and performance marketers are finding each other on the same channel

Brand advertisers are usually good at adapting campaigns to generate value from different forms of media, such as billboards, linear TV commercials and more, but their approach to digital channels generally consists of one strategy serving all digital campaigns. Rather than seeing CTV as a unique space, brand marketers have commonly viewed it as just another digital channel and tend to repurpose ads they’ve already run on other digital video channels, such as social media platforms.

“It sometimes lacks the same ingenuity that’s seen with their non-digital advertising,” said Haeri at MNTN, talking about campaign approaches to the CTV channel. “A lot of brand marketers are not utilizing it to inspire people in the same way they did before with linear TV, where they had a captive audience, experiencing some sort of long-form messages that only the TV could deliver.”

However, CTV now allows brands to deliver much more information in a more precise manner than ever before. Meanwhile, performance marketers, it turns out, are putting the focus on the outcome of a campaign and then working backward to identify the best inventory for their goals. This includes leveraging ad tech that automatically optimizes CTV campaign bids and ad placements based on the desired outcomes, such as site visits or ROAS. This allows performance teams to lean into ROAS rather than CPM. In the process, they generally secure more premium inventory — which is better for the brand and the campaign overall. Furthermore, the performance team has come to understand CTV as a channel in which they can target specific segments and measure the actions tied to the campaign via site visits and sales. Therefore the performance teams want in — and so, together, performance and brand teams are revising their whole approach to the environment.

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With CTV’s growing popularity, brand and performance teams are connecting and syncing up more, sharing insights to help each …read more

Source:: Digiday