How advertisers are using data to drive creative refresh for CTV

By Ben Holding

Sponsored by MNTN

Reaching the right audiences with relevant creative can make or break a campaign’s success, and TV advertising hasn’t always been well-equipped to meet this challenge. For example, linear TV advertising has long been constrained by the need to provide mass appeal, leaving personalization out of the picture and impacting relevance.

With linear TV advertising, part of the challenge from a creative standpoint is that you need to make sure that the ad is general enough to satisfy all of the potential viewers of the ad,” said Ali Haeri, vice president of marketing at MNTN. 

The landscape is changing. CTV advertising has emerged as a crucial channel for relevance, bringing with it a targeting advantage, drawing on a plethora of audience and outcome data. This data has become a launchpad for creativity. 

“With connected television, you’re targeting by audience,” Haeri said, “and the audience can be quite precise. That can introduce the opportunity for some really interesting creative based off of the targeting.”       

However, with engaging creative comes a new imperative: CTV ads must remain dynamic and fresh over time, and they must be highly relevant to viewers to have the most impact. Creative refresh — a data-leveraging process that informs the creation of multiple variations of a CTV ad unit to target different audiences — allows marketers to exercise their innovation in a metric-informed and iterative way. Utilizing creative refresh is a powerful tactical approach toward reaching the right audiences and keeping them engaged.   

Using creative refresh to optimize outcomes

Creative refresh is a data-driven feedback loop, and audience data acts as the starting point of the process. Using this data, marketing teams can create different versions of an ad according to viewers’ demographics, interests or stage of the customer journey with a brand. 

“We’ve seen some advertisers shoot largely the same creative but leave about 5% of it to be altered based on the different audiences that they’re targeting,” explained Haeri. “Maybe it’s just the change of a single line in the advertisement that makes more sense in a certain geography or to a certain target audience. So they just slightly shift that creative around, depending on who’s actually seeing that ad.” 

The different versions of an ad are then delivered to viewers, and then the performance results come into play. As Haeri explained, “If you have core variations to the same creative, you can just run the ads and see which one yields the better site visit rate or actual conversion performance.”

Armed with that performance data, teams can iterate their approach to the creative by refreshing aspects of it to better connect with their target audiences. From there, the cycle of creative refresh continues as marketers leverage their past learnings to make creative decisions that have the most impact.   

This iterative, customizable process allows marketers to flex their creativity with CTV advertising in a way that is impossible with the constraints of maintaining traditional, linear TV’s mandate for mass appeal in one attempt. “With the personalization capabilities, what’s great is that advertisers are kind …read more

Source:: Digiday

      

Aaron
Author: Aaron

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