Media and ad tech companies won’t rest until they’ve convinced advertisers that streaming is a good place for performance marketing.
On Monday, Roku announced a new partnership with app monetization platform Unity to help gaming and mobile app developers add connected TV to their user acquisition campaigns by giving them performance marketing attribution for streaming.
Unity clients want to advertise on CTV, but only if they can quickly and accurately attribute streaming media by its effect on app downloads and performance on the other online channels they’re using for marketing, such as search and social, said Omer Kaplan, SVP of revenue and operations at Unity.
According to Kaplan, attribution challenges are one of the biggest reasons why performance advertisers hesitate to move budgets to streaming. (You can’t click around on TVs.)
Roku, meanwhile, wants to attract fresh advertisers from the app developer vertical, where it doesn’t currently have many direct advertiser relationships, said Miles Fisher, senior director and head of emerging and programmatic sales at Roku.
Right now, Fisher said, “demand diversification is one of our [biggest] initiatives.”
In comparison, YouTube and Amazon have app developers and, in particular, mobile games spending heavily on ads.
Ad tech unites
But to attract new demand, Roku must prove to potential brand clients that CTV campaigns can be connected to more than just basic reach and frequency.
One option is for Roku to plug its ad tech directly into Unity’s API integrations with search and social channels, since Unity is a hub for those kinds of app developer marketers.
Through the integration, Unity ad platform users match data to Roku’s identity graph for targeting. As performance marketers, they’re also trying newer ad formats with some responsive elements.
Specifically, Unity marketers can buy either classic 15- or 30-second spots on Roku inventory, or they can buy Roku’s Action Ads offering, which overlays calls to action, such as a QR code or prompt to download an app, onto CTV ads. When viewers scan QR codes, Roku links that conversion to the ad exposure.
Attribution fusion
But TV is a lean-back experience. People aren’t usually inclined to scan QR codes on TV screens, even with their phone in their hands, Fisher said. Instead, if people are interested in an app they saw advertised on TV, they generally look it up on search or social.
The problem is, without a direct-response action (like clicking or scanning a code), traditional last-touch attribution models don’t know when to give CTV ads credit for an app download. That’s why streaming and especially linear TV results are often underappreciated in data-driven attribution.
And if digital advertisers can compare campaign results with the same metrics they’re using on search and social, Kaplan said, they should realize CTV can – and does – generate conversions and higher return on ad spend.
With better proof that CTV is a performance channel, Fisher said, a wider array of advertisers will start investing in streaming media.
