“CTV found its place in media plans beyond the initial beneficiary of quarantines,” said Ali Haeri, vice president of marketing, MNTN. “It’s matured as an ad channel where everyone now needs it in their media plans as they do paid search and social media.”

Even though CTV has emerged as a mainstay in the marketing mix, some shifts are happening in its view and use. Approaches to measurement are being revisited and refreshed, and even the relationship between brands and agencies is changing.

CTV is now a performance marketing channel

There’s been a significant shift in 2021 — marketers now realize that CTV isn’t simply a brand awareness channel.

“Marketers are in the process of reorienting themselves and seeing this as a channel that can perform, because it’s fundamentally programmatic advertising, and what they love about programmatic are the things traditional TV advertising didn’t have,” said Haeri.

And with that shift comes a change in how CTV is measured. Whereas traditional TV advertising has relied on Nielsen reports, that’s no longer the case in the age of the connected screen.

“We’re in a post-Nielsen world here,” said Haeri. “Those reports are going to feel even more abstract as people continue to change over to CTV. Now, campaigns track site visits that originate from the TV impression through to purchases made on a website. And that’s really the holy grail for marketers.

“When you have that kind of capability, you start using the channel differently,” Haeri continued. “If I know that a channel can report back to me with site visits and site conversions, all bets are off. Now, I’m going to start thinking about that campaign in the same way as paid search campaigns. I think that’s sort of the genesis for this new view of CTV as more of a performance marketing channel — more than anything else.”

Brands are changing the way media plans are done

While brands have historically turned to media agencies for their media buying expertise, the way this interaction is conducted is transforming under the CTV lens.

“Brands are reclaiming some of the decisioning from their media agencies,” Haeri said. “They’re tantalized by all of the available measurement data, so they are resetting the table with their agencies when it comes to their media plans. They are empowered and dictating the terms of how they want TV advertising done.”

At least in part, this stems from brands now being more informed about what CTV can do — and what it can measure. In one analyst’s eye, it’s a welcome step in the evolution of the …read more

Source:: Digiday

Author: Aaron