“Back to school” is often a dreaded phrase for students. It signifies the end of summer and a return to long days of classes and hours spent studying and writing essays.
But it’s also crunch time for schools trying to woo students who are still on the fence about registering.
The need for a strong advertising presence during the back-to-school season is one of the main reasons why the American College of Education (ACE) – an online college offering bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees – decided to partner with performance TV company MNTN.
Founded as SteelHouse in 2009, MNTN’s original focus was on display advertising across web and mobile. Now its focus is on performance TV and helping brands – especially those that haven’t advertised on CTV before – take their messaging to the TV screen.
MNTN, which rebranded from SteelHouse in 2021, considers itself “a separate company,” a MNTN representative told AdExchanger, citing the shift to CTV as the main difference between the two.
Finding your people
ACE primarily targets working adults looking to pursue higher education.
To reach them, it adopted MNTN Matched, a proprietary tool that uses generative AI to analyze a brand’s products and online presence. Based on the content it discovers, it builds predictive audiences grouped around keywords that are correlated to specific segments.
These audiences are then subdivided into three groups based on likelihood of conversion, Jessica DeLeon, an account director on MNTN’s customer success team, told AdExchanger: high intent, medium intent and max reach.
In ACE’s case, high-intent audiences are pretty much on the verge of enrolling. Medium intent audiences have shown serious interest but might still be undecided about pursuing a degree or are considering other schools. And max-reach audiences are those who aren’t necessarily considering further education yet but might be interested once they’ve learned about ACE.
ACE uses its first-party data from past and current students to target prospects who work in the education, health care administration, nursing and business verticals. And because its average student is 38 years old, it makes sense to focus on CTV networks that appeal to adults who are already established in their careers – more ESPN than Nickelodeon, as Vince Arezzi, ACE’s VP of strategic performance marketing, put it.
MNTN then identifies the most appropriate segments to target based on age range and interests, Arezzi said.
Each vertical had a unique set of attributes, he added – elementary school teachers and business leaders likely have different interests and plans for the future. MNTN was able to determine which of its thousands of audience segments best suited the various verticals and designed relevant creative for each.
Using these tactics during the end of the back-to-school advertising push last summer, ACE saw a 34% decrease in its cost per acquisition between July and August and a 27% decrease in cost per visit.
Cause and effect
MNTN measured the campaign’s outcomes via Verified Visits, its cross-system attribution tool that tracks when a customer has watched the entirety of a commercial and subsequently visits its website within a given timeframe. (The attribution window is customizable and at the discretion of the advertiser.)
MNTN obviously can’t be 100% sure that the person who visits a brand’s website is the same person who watched the ad, because it tracks devices by household.
But if someone in a given household watched one of ACE’s commercials and then a device in that household was used to access its website that same day or week, there’s a pretty good chance the two events are related.
Live and learn
Before working with MNTN, ACE’s connected TV strategy “wasn’t as data-driven,” said Arezzi.
Now, ACE can see how it’s reaching each of its selected audience segments and weigh that against cost per action and cost per visit, Arezzi said.
In addition to direct conversions, he added, ACE wanted its CTV ads to support conversions across the funnel from awareness to action, which is why it chose to include the max-reach audience – the folks who might not be considering school yet but might be open to learning about ACE.
Reaching people in the awareness stage is as important as reaching high-intent audiences.
“One of the things we’ve been able to achieve,” Arezzi said, has been to “bridge that gap.”
