For all of Ad Tech Land’s excitement about new and emerging CTV-specific ad formats, many commercial brands are still hesitant to try some of these new formats for themselves.
But the Advertising Council, a nonprofit that’s been developing cutting-edge public service messages since the early 1940s, is happy to serve as the industry’s guinea pig.
The 501(c)(3) organization is currently in the midst of its first-ever CTV pause ad campaign, which was developed in collaboration with ad platform Kargo and will run through the end of August. The multi-year initiative centered in the campaign, “Tear the Paper Ceiling,” is specifically targeting an audience of business owners, employers and hiring managers across a wide range of CTV content providers, including broadcast-owned streaming services and FAST channels.
“Tear the Paper Ceiling” is intended to promote the consideration of job candidates who don’t have a relevant college or graduate degree but are skilled through alternative routes (or STARs). The new pause format makes perfect sense from a thematic perspective, according to Ad Council Chief Campaign Development Officer Michelle Hillman.
“We’re asking employers to really shift the paradigm on the way they hire,” said Hillman. “When you’re trying to really dig in on an entrenched behavior, a pause is the perfect opportunity to be able to do that.”
Pause for effect
Kargo and the Ad Council have collaborated on other dynamic ad formats before – specifically, squeeze-backs, which surround the content like a frame, and overlays, which appear directly on top of the content.
Both of those formats, however, are built around content that’s still actively running. Pause ads, by contrast, only appear when the user has hit the pause button on their remote.
On the one hand, this means pause ads may appear less frequently than other ad formats that don’t require any action on the part of the consumer. On the other hand, that action means the consumer is paying attention to what’s on screen, something that brands and marketers are increasingly desperate to make happen.
Per a recent survey from the IAB Tech Lab, a majority of both publishers and marketers believe pause ads will be one of the easier new formats to implement and scale and will lead to the greatest increase in ad spend compared to other emerging CTV formats.
According to Kargo CEO and founder Harry Kargman, however, that belief has not led to action. Not yet, anyway.
Every streaming platform currently has its own proprietary version of pause ads, which were never built to be traded programmatically, said Kargman. Nor were they built to be scalable, especially for third-party vendors like Kargo.
Similarly, hitting pause is not a consistent or predictable action on the part of consumers, and not many streamers can even measure how frequently it actually happens. This means the volume of pause ads can vary significantly from month to month, said Kargman. Presumably, this would make buying those placements more of a risk compared to the typical 15- or 30-second ad spot.
“We’re having to do the engineering work to figure out how we integrate these proprietary pause ad placements in a way that allows us to scale and run these ads across multiple streaming CTV providers in a single campaign,” said Kargman.
Stop, confederate and listen
In the short term, at least, a lack of interested pause ad buyers is good news for the Ad Council. It means that their “Tear the Paper Ceiling” ads will have less clutter from other brands to compete against and hopefully be more impactful as a result.
Although neither Kargo nor the Ad Council could share specifics about the pause ad campaign’s results, Hillman said she’s excited by how much the paper ceiling concept has taken off since “Tear the Paper Ceiling” was first launched in 2022.
For most of its campaigns, the Ad Council typically tracks click-throughs, site visits and other engagement-specific metrics, and also conducts surveys to gauge how perceptions and behaviors are changing among those targeted – in this case, employers.
Once this particular pause ad campaign is over, it will also serve as a valuable experiment for Kargo, too. Now, when Kargo makes these ad placements available to commercial clients in the future, said Kargman, they’ll already have a sense of how effective those placements can be.
Some of those ad placements will still go to the Ad Council, though. Kargman has been a member of the Ad Council’s board for almost a decade, and the organization already has a follow-up campaign in mind: “Pause to Heal,” a gun safety initiative that was developed last year with the Illinois Department of Public Health.
In the meantime, Kargo is working with another CTV tech company, ITG (short for InTheGame), to create new functions in pause ads that can scale across multiple providers, like shoppable or interactive elements.
Kargo aims to “confederate every pause ad opportunity into a single exchange,” said Kargman. “We want to be the first to bring that to market at scale.”
