Why Connected TV (CTV) is the Next Big Marketing Channel (and How to do it Right)

The way we watch TV has changed significantly over the last decade. We now have many more options when it comes to catching up with our favorite shows, and the format of those shows has also changed considerably.

One major change is the rise of connected TV or CTV. Today, 39% of adults watch video on a connected TV device every day, and 60% do this at least weekly. On top of this, CTV ad spending increased by 100% in just the past year, according to The Trade Desk.

This new channel presents a great opportunity for marketers to take advantage of this shift and get ahead of the competition, accessing a new and rapidly growing audience. In this article, we’ll dive a little deeper into how CTV works and how marketers can advertise effectively on this new medium.

What is connected TV?

Connected TV is an umbrella of platforms including Roku, Amazon Fire TV, Chromecast, and Apple TV.

It essentially means watching TV directly through the Internet via a smart TV. This is different from cable TV, which requires no Internet connection.

CTV has brought many benefits to viewers — you no longer need to subscribe to a cable provider to watch TV, you get more control over what to watch and when to watch it, and it can be much cheaper. This medium comes with many benefits for marketers, too.

The benefits of CTV for marketers

• It allows you to reach potentially huge audiences. With more than half of all US adults watching CTV weekly and 82% of households owning at least one Internet-connected device, the potential is too big to overlook. What’s more, CTV tends to appeal to younger audiences, with 54% of 18-34 year-olds watching CTV daily. By focusing on CTV, you can capture the Gen-Z and Millennial viewers moving away from traditional TV habits.
• It’s a growing audience. It’s impossible to predict the future, but the trends are pointing fairly clearly in the direction of CTV becoming the dominant entertainment force in our homes. CTV use is skyrocketing, while cable TV presence in households is at its lowest point since 1994.
• It allows you to unify ad buys — giving you more control over who sees ads and how often across multiple channels.
• It’s much easier to collect and incorporate data. The digital nature of CTV makes it easier to access and gather data compared to traditional TV. This allows you to gain deeper insights into your marketing efforts and make changes in response to the information you observe. It’s easier to track a whole range of metrics from rating points to reach so you can take a more data-driven approach to advertising.

How to use CTV effectively in marketing

Get to know your audience

As with all marketing, it’s crucial to start by gaining a solid understanding of your audience. CTV is well-suited to this activity because of its data-focused nature. It’s easy to communicate with your viewers and follow them across various channels and platforms like social media.

You can also carry out user surveys and questionnaires, talk to your audience on social media, get feedback from your sales staff about what your customers typically talk about, and much more.

Use this data to build detailed buyer personas and profiles for your viewers, summarizing things like their age, occupation, pain points, and what they use your products for. This will allow you to create more tailored and effective ads and use them efficiently in the right places in the CTV medium.

Target your audience effectively

With CTV, you have a good deal of control over where your ads are played and who gets to see them. This allows you to tailor them fairly precisely, targeting specific groups of customers with certain ads.

Consider segmenting your market and developing different ads for different groups. Your younger audience members might be interested in different products and appreciate different messaging compared to their parents and grandparents, and with CTV you can target these groups separately to some extent based on their different viewing habits. This allows you to use your ad spend more effectively and push up conversion rates.

Combine CTV with your other channels

One of the biggest differences between CTV and traditional TV is that it’s much more intertwined with other online platforms. This allows you to do things like encouraging your viewers to follow a CTA on their phones or computers after viewing an ad and visit your other channels from the same device they’re watching TV on.

Switching between watching TV and browsing the Internet or accessing other apps on the same device is a common thing to do with CTV. Make sure to take advantage of this interconnectedness and link your channels together where you can.

Make your ads attributional

In simple terms, this means making it possible to find out where your leads are coming from for each ad. This allows for things like cross-device and cross-channel tracking, helping you gain a fuller and more informative picture of your overall marketing strategy and make tweaks and improvements where needed.

Have a clear call-to-action

With CTV, users can interact with ads much more easily than they ever could with a traditional TV. For marketers, this means you have a special opportunity to work calls-to-action into each of your ads.

Unlike traditional TV ads which at best could hope to direct their viewers to a phone number or website, CTV ads can contain a clickable button allowing users to sign up or visit a landing page to learn more. Make sure your ads give your viewers a clear next step to take and don’t be afraid to make it as compelling as possible.

CTV is clearly here to stay, and looks set to become by far the preferred way we watch TV. For marketers, this medium is packed with opportunities to interact with your audience more directly, access and benefit from a wealth of data, and target ads much more effectively.

To find out more about how MediaMint can help you access the benefits of CTV and a wide range of other channels to capture more value and grow your business, contact us.