Advanced TV in 2023
A Digilant Get Smart Series, Part 1: Dig Deep into Data to Reach Your Audience
In our newly released whitepaper, Advanced TV in 2023: The Trends, Technology, and Tools You Need to Succeed, we outline everything advertisers need to know about the rapidly expanding and evolving video advertising landscape. Over a five-part blog series, we’ll dive even deeper into these trends and solutions. To start, we’ll outline the advantages of advanced audience targeting available through Advanced TV ad buys.
And, make sure to head to part two which dives into the different Advanced TV ad formats available to advertisers. Check it out here.
Download the full whitepaper here.
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Major U.S. cable TV and satellite TV providers have lost more than tens of millions of subscribers in total since 2016. As a result, advertisers are left with lost dollars and fewer eyes on their Linear TV advertisements. Rather than losing out, advertisers are pivoting to Advanced TV – the overarching term encompassing any advertising that occurs before, during, or after a video stream on the internet – as streaming services and general increases in video consumption take hold.
Despite the many benefits of Advanced TV, it is a very different animal when compared to the linear TV market. Some of the most common challenges we hear about the space include:
- Barrier to entry
- Lack of understanding of how the data works
- Gaps in data make it hard to understand success
- Difficulty attributing customer conversions to specific campaigns
- Siloed data leads to a reliance on demographic or content viewership information.
Digital advertising, after all, is still an emerging space which means advertisers are still figuring it out. While solutions enter the market to combat these common challenges, there is a widening amount of CTV inventory, creating prime opportunities for advertisers willing to work through some of the kinks and reap the benefits of Advanced TV advertising.
The Market Opportunity in Connected TV Advertising
In today’s advertising world, video is everything; it’s the preferred method for consuming content. So, tapping the potential to advertise across video is a huge opportunity.
Look at the numbers behind CTV and OTT opportunities alone. The potential audience reach is virtually endless as more people are streaming TV than ever before. ~85% of U.S. households having at least one streaming TV service, and each household has an average of four streaming service subscriptions. Plus, the number of platforms streaming content is growing.
In terms of budget, more advertisers are now opting to invest in digital forms since the price point can often be less across Advanced TV advertising when compared to linear. Advertisers can save money in production costs because digital advertising allows you to repurpose video assets across different channels such as social, CTV, and in-stream.
How Advertisers Can Implement Data-Driven Targeting Access Advanced TV
Now that you understand the opportunities and future of Advanced TV advertising, it’s time to take action. Here are five ways to best maximize ad opportunities as CTV takes center stage.
1. Understand Your Audience Consumption Habits
The first step in any successful Advanced TV campaign (albeit digital advertising in general) is to understand your audience and the content they are looking at.
If you’re accustomed to Linear TV buys, you know they took a broader approach to audience targeting – making purchases based on network or genre. This is where the benefits of Advanced TV come into play. You have the tools and data to dive deeper into your audience, their preferences, and habits to ensure you reach them exactly where they consume content. This is especially important as there are more channels and platforms than ever before.
Gone are the days of hoping you reach your audience; with Advanced TV audience analysis tools, you can see exactly which channels and even programs your audience is viewing. While this is helpful in general, it also provides peace of mind in the fast-paced environment we work and live in. If a new, trendy, enticing channel pops up in the market, these tools enable you to understand if your specific audience is even on these platforms and, as such, if they are worth the investment.
2. Implement Top Tier Data Solutions
Once you know where your audience is spending time, it’s essential actually to get your ad in front of them. This is where top-tier Advanced TV data targeting and segmentation come into play.
The power of CTV data enables you to purchase ad placements based on targeting attributes like audience, behavior, or content, just as you would with programmatic ads. At Digilant, we build targeting options with top-tier, quality data such as:
- Automatic Content Recognition (ACR): Extracting audio and still images from pictures and analyzing content with an algorithm to categorize / segment.
- First-Party Data: Targeting users from a CRM list to the household level.
- Demo or Interest: Mapping audiences available from providers to the household level.
- Contextual TV: Gathering content from publisher to target based on content language, rating, length, show name, etc.
- User Activity: Mapping audience activity (online or offline) to correct household.
- Unique Targeting: Targeting based on Real-Time Audience and Linear TV Capabilities.
3. Don’t get complacent, track your goals and continue to enhance your data
Advertising is often trial and error. Determine the best data to layer on, whether that be audience or content data — or both. Test out multiple data sets to see which ones perform the best. As with most advertising campaigns, experimentation will help you reach your goals more effectively as you learn from previous examples and find what works (and what doesn’t) with your target audiences.
Take time to set up parameters and KPIs that will enable you to see how well an ad is performing. You can also look at audience reception, time watched, and the number of clicks or completes. Ultimately, the goal is to gather enough data so that you can accurately create more effective advertising campaigns and put your programmatic video ad spend to the best use.
How Digilant Can Help with Your Advanced TV Strategy
Fortunately, this process is made easier when you rely on experts like Digilant. Contact us today to learn more about our omnichannel marketing strategies and see how CTV can be a viable next step in your marketing strategy.
Looking for more information about setting up an Advanced TV strategy? Check out the second part of our blog series, “Align Ad Formats with Your Goals,” here.