Crackle Plus touted $2 billion worth of content and the launch of a new ad-supported network called “Chicken Soup for the Soul” during the NewFronts earlier this month.
But as more ad dollars flow into connected TV (CTV), marketers are struggling to assess the impact of their spend.
Crackle is advancing its measurement capabilities with a new tool that allows marketers to measure campaign effectiveness – from brand awareness to customer acquisition – and help determine whether their CTV investments are paying off. Upwave, a California-based analytics platform for brand marketers, created the tool because of a lack of CTV-built solutions in the market.
The product appealed to Crackle because it helps to prove to marketers the value of its content – with original shows like Ashton Kutcher’s “Going From Broke” – as it works to set itself apart from its competitors as a pure-play AVOD streaming service (the company is owned by Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment).
“People are moving into CTV because it has the reach of linear with the measurement capabilities of digital,” added George Castrissiades, executive director, ad products and partnerships at Crackle Plus. “What Crackle Plus is trying to do is to bring data to that conversation to say, well, it’s a premium product, here’s why it’s premium and why this audience is actually going to go out and buy these products.”
Crackle Plus is among the first streaming providers to use Upwave’s CTV-specific solution, called “Customer Lift.” It provides marketers a look into whether a targeted viewer will likely become – and remain – a customer.
Castrissiades said Crackle can use Customer Lift to show clients whether a viewer in a particular household is in the market for a product, whether they were converted to a customer after seeing an ad and even if the person is still buying the product six months later.”
The real-time tool comes as marketers are trying to figure out “how to wrap their heads around CTV measurement,” Upwave CEO Chris Kelly told AdExchanger.
“How we measure CTV is still the wild west,” he said.
Marketers often combine their top of funnel branding traditionally used in linear with lower funnel customer acquisition tactics in digital, Kelly said.
But that has been challenging in CTV, where investments are intended to drive outcomes both during and after a campaign. That’s because brands and their media partners have to navigate a trade-off between bottoms-up and top-down measurement methodologies.
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Customer Lift, Kelly said, bridges that gap between mid- and post-campaign customer acquisition to brand campaigns at a granular level.
Upwave collects data around consumers’ behavior and intent – including which brands they use and whether they intend to switch – by conducting consumer interviews. Upwave also works with partners to bring in household, census, publication and device metadata, but doesn’t yet use a brand’s first-party data.
While the tool works on linear TV, web, mobile, and streaming audio campaigns, it was built with CTV in mind.
“That’s where we heard the noise from platforms that said hey, we can’t just copy and paste the measurement that worked for linear … you can’t just take reach measurement from linear and say that’s going to be enough for CTV,” Kelly said.
