How to Incorporate Fast-Growing Channels into Your Media Mix: A Look at Connected TV Advertising
It’s not your father’s advertising world. The days where marketers can craft an advertising strategy and revisit it six months or a year later are gone forever. In today’s world, hot new channels are emerging all the time. That means marketers are constantly realigning their media plans to incorporate new marketing channels. In fact, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), 63% of advertising buyers say they will reforecast their media plans more frequently this year, and most say they expect to reforecast at least once a month.
One of the hottest advertising channels is Connected TV (CTV), where a television is connected to the Internet through devices such as set-top boxes, TV sticks or smart TVs. CTV is one of the most popular ways for consumers to view over-the-top digital video, television or film content.
That’s why it’s no surprise that CTV is today’s fastest-growing advertising category, with spending projected to jump 14.4% this year, according to IAB. That’s more than double IAB’s projected 5.9% growth in overall ad spending. Meanwhile, IAB projects that ad spending in the Linear TV broadcasting and cable world is expected to drop 6.3%.
So that brings up an important question: Is it time to jump on the CTV bandwagon? Or if you’ve already jumped, is it time to invest more in this fast-growing channel? There’s only one good way to answer that question. You need to take a good, hard look at the data.
Connected TV Enables a New Measurement Model
Before I explain exactly what I mean by taking a look at the data, let me back up a minute. When CTV was first introduced, marketers really had no good way to measure its effectiveness. CTV was measured using the same metrics as traditional Linear TV: awareness. All marketers knew was the number of eyeballs they reached – not how many of those eyeballs were buying from or engaging with their brand.
But in reality, the digital nature of CTV allows much more precise measurement than Linear TV. CTV allows the use of key identifiers such as IP addresses, device IDs and cookies to link specific advertisements more directly to actual conversions and/or engagements. You can then link that conversion/engagement data with demographic and behavioral data to see which types of audiences are responding.
Claritas helps companies do just that. Using our advanced data analysis tools and audience data, marketers can not only measure conversions but also link conversions to audience data. This allows them to see exactly how investments in fast-growing channels such as CTV are paying off. For example, we recently partnered with Origin, a creative technology company that helps marketers create CTV advertisements that boost response, to measure just how effective the CTV channel has been at converting audience “eyeballs” into customers for Origin clients. Through the use of the Claritas technology and identity graph, Origin and the Fintech client were able to directly attribute specific events and actions, like website visits and loan applications, back to the CTV media as the primary driving factor or as a contributing factor as compared to other channels included in the media mix.
Why You Need a Multichannel View of Your Marketing Mix
Of course, measuring how effective one particular channel is in the marketing mix is just the first step. To effectively integrate that channel within your media plan, you need to compare its value against the value of other channels within your overall campaign. Using Claritas data and tools, you can get a complete assessment of your campaign’s ROI, both on a per-channel and a comparative multichannel basis. To get this level of analysis, you need to measure conversions across many channels and screens – including advertiser websites, in-store traffic, offline sales (credit card and shopper card data), in-app purchases and CTV /over-the-top viewing data.
But it doesn’t stop there. The next step is leveraging that data to maximize the return on your overall marketing investment. Once you’ve pinpointed which channels and messages are the most and the least effective, you can then optimize your multichannel campaign accordingly. Claritas focuses on consulting with our clients throughout this entire process.
The Importance of Knowing Your Audience
Of course, another key part of optimizing your multichannel campaign is determining what type of consumer is responding to those messages – and targeting more of those high responders. Claritas has a 50+-year history of helping companies figure out what their best customers look like – and helping them uncover prospects that look just like those best customers.
Claritas has classified every household in the U.S. into one of 68 PRIZM® Premier segments, the industry’s most adopted segmentation model. In addition to PRIZM Premier, Claritas has over 2,500 pre-built audiences available and actionable for multichannel campaigns, including CTV. Marketers can even choose pre-built Claritas audiences designed specifically to help them target customers using financial characteristics (P$YCLE® Premier), technology/telco usage habits (ConneXions®) or multicultural data (CultureCode®). Claritas also builds custom audiences for marketers based on the specific behaviors and attributes that are important to them.
That means that once you have analyzed which audiences are engaging with or buying from you, you can tap into Claritas audience data to easily target more consumers who look just like them. In the CTV world, Claritas has even partnered with Advanced TV platform provider Cadent to make it easy for marketers to use Claritas “off-the-shelf” audience segment data to quickly roll out a campaign that targets CTV consumers who are highly likely to buy from you.
And Claritas makes it easy to execute campaigns across other channels as well. Claritas’ Identity Graph allows you to link audience behavioral and demographic data to email, IP addresses, mobile IDs and postal addresses in a privacy-compliant manner. This allows you to easily target specific audience segments not only via CTV but also via email, social media, display, mobile apps, direct mail and many other key channels.
One Bonus Tip for Marketing Success
Once you know your message will be delivered to the right consumer, you still need to take steps to make sure they will pay attention to it, particularly in today’s highly fragmented digital world. American consumers now spend around eight hours a day consuming digital media, according to Statista. But they have many digital media options from which to choose, including CTV and other types of Advanced TV, gaming, online news, social media, digital video as well as many digital audio options, including podcasts, audiobooks and music.
That means it is more important than ever to create targeted, dynamic messages that capture consumers’ attention. That’s why Claritas partners with forward-thinking companies like Origin, which know how to create advertising strategies that engage audiences. Origin’s Slingshot technology has helped CTV marketers improve ads and ad placement to achieve up to an 8X lift in audience attention, a 119% lift in purchase consideration and a 40% lift in actionable outcomes such as store visits.
As a third-party analysis partner, Claritas allows Origin clients to take their CTV performance data and compare it across many different channels using a standardized format. This allows companies to see exactly how impactful their CTV advertisements are in comparison to other channels in their marketing mix.
Can You Answer These Six Questions About Every Channel in Your Marketing Plan?
The bottom line is that building an effective marketing plan today involves constantly readjusting your media mix to incorporate new channels and make existing channels more profitable. That’s why it is no surprise that more than half of media buyers say they expect to spend more time and resources on measurement, marketing mix and modeling this year, according to IAB. But to evaluate your media mix properly, you need to be able to answer these six questions:
1) Can I measure the impact each of my channels has on driving conversions and/or engagements?
2) Can I effectively compare that impact across each of my channels?
3) Am I using the right messages?
4) Is there a particular type of message that works better across a specific channel or channels?
5) Am I reaching my ideal customers and prospects?
6) How much of my media budget should I allocate to each channel to maximize my return?
Answering those questions may sound like a Herculean task. But is surprisingly easy if you partner with the right independent, third-party data and analysis provider. As the leading Marketing Effectiveness Platform, Claritas’ proprietary closed-loop data analysis process helps you systematically identify the right audience, deliver the right message to that audience, and analyze and compare results across channels so you can optimize your multichannel campaigns in-flight.