Recent conversations in the connected TV industry make much ado about performance.
Marketers nowadays expect streaming campaigns to deliver results further down the funnel than reach and awareness. Many performance-minded advertisers look for online conversions and sales growth to justify any meaningful or long-term investment in CTV.
But what does it really mean for CTV to be a “performance channel”?
At the end of the day, “performance marketing is outcomes-based advertising,” said Jay Trinidad, head of strategy at Moloco and GM of the company’s Asia Pacific division. As a veteran of Google, Disney and Discovery (now Warner Bros. Discovery), he’s seen performance marketing in both the online and connected TV worlds.
And core to CTV performance, he said, is a heavier focus on retargeting.
On target
Performance marketers need to grow return on ad spend to justify continued investment in a particular channel – including streaming.
QR codes are just one example of how to add more direct attribution to a CTV ad buy. Programmers and agencies are also trying other ways of tying CTV impressions to conversions – particularly, retargeting CTV ads to mobile devices, Trinidad said.
The best way to maximize the impact of a CTV campaign is by retargeting exposed viewers on mobile, said Joel Cox, Strategus co-founder and SVP of strategy and innovation.
But signal loss makes CTV-to-mobile retargeting more challenging. Access to Apple IDFA is limited for advertisers (many people opt out), and third-party cookies are going away, which makes it difficult to match a mobile device with a household IP address.
But agencies, publishers and ad tech companies are finding workarounds to continue to feed the demand for targeted advertising. To reach CTV viewers on their mobile devices, Strategus announced a partnership earlier this week with Intent IQ, an identity provider that uses first-party cookies to get info about publisher site visitors, such as IP addresses or browser and device type.
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Now for the credits
But there’s no performance without attribution.
Many performance marketers will only consider shifting budgets into streaming if the channel can share back results as quickly and accurately as other digital channels.
For example, Roku and app monetization platform Unity announced a new integration last month so Unity’s app advertisers can add CTV inventory to the platform they’re already using. Specifically, Unity clients can match their data to Roku’s identity graph for targeting and track performance alongside their other digital ad buys through Unity.
Many brands are interested in buying into CTV if digital-style attribution is there.
Blanket brand Rumpl, for instance, recently started moving dollars into CTV after trying MNTN’s self-serve ad platform, which has a direct integration with Google Analytics and therefore lets the brand compare impression delivery and attribution between CTV and Google-owned channels.
And, naturally, when digital marketers invest in streaming, they typically want to do so programmatically. The sentiment would explain why programmatic growth is also a hot topic in the CTV space right now.
The more the industry pushes to turn CTV into a performance channel, said Moloco’s Trinidad, the more programmatic eats into direct CTV budgets.
What I’m wondering is: Will 2024 be the year of performance marketing and programmatic for CTV? Time shall tell.
📣 ALSO: Don’t miss out! The Early Rate for tickets to AdExchanger’s CTV Connect expires tomorrow, December 8th at 11:59 PM EST. Register now to secure your spot and beat the clock before the price hike and join us in NYC March 13-14!
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