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How can you boost CTV targeting to get better ad performance?
It’s pretty obvious: CTV isn’t going anywhere. 88% of U.S. households own at least one connected TV device, and in the U.S. alone, the number of connected TV users will surpass 200 million this year. CTV ad spend hit $35 billion last year, and it’s growing fast.
But targeting is still an issue, as is measuring performance.
Do you really want to target a household, or do you want to target a male teenager? Trying to get the kid but actually getting grandma is a big miss.
That’s been challenging with channel or DMA-based CTV targeting, but there is an emerging solution: video-level targeting. Video-level CTV targeting uses AI intelligence to understand more about what a specific video is actually about. And it turns out that this knowledge boosts the effectiveness of CTV ads in 3 significant ways:
- 2x lift in brand awareness
- 3x lift in ad recall
- 5x lift in brand favorability
I chatted with Upwave CEO Chris Kelly about these results in campaigns with Iris TV, and — perhaps shockingly — they’re relevant to performance marketers as well as brand marketers. If there’s even a difference.
Check it out:
CTV targeting: from generic audience data to content intelligence
Historically, CTV targeting has relied on household demographics along with other high-level contextual data: a significant downgrade from mobile or web ad targeting.
But video-level targeting allows advertisers to target based on actual content. And because you can infer a lot about an audience based on what they’re watching, that significantly helps.
Grandma’s probably not watching Jackass, for instance. People watching fishing shows are probably good candidates for fishing gear ads, as well as fishing games. People watching streaming eSports competitions are probably gamers themselves. And others who are watching American Gladiator are probably interested in fitness and might be a good fit for a health and wellness app, or fitness supplements.
This isn’t guesswork. It’s real-time analysis of show genre, theme, and even scene-level context — powered by AI and video-level metadata.
Relevant for performance marketers?
Naturally, any performance marketer worth their salt views brand stats like awareness, recall, and favorability with significant, perhaps even extreme prejudice. And I get it: no performance marketer gets paid to “drive awareness,” which inherently feels like an incredibly wishy-washy fru-fru thing that doesn’t accomplish anything real and is the last refuge of the incompetent marketer who can’t boost tangible business results like sales.
Yep, been there.
So, first, cards on the table. In my opinion:
- All performance marketing is also brand marketing
- All brand marketing is also performance marketing
Some performance marketing is really crappy brand marketing because it puts the brand in a really bad light. Sometimes performance marketers get away with it (or think they do) because they think brand doesn’t matter because they’re tiny. And some brand marketing is really crappy performance marketing because it doesn’t move any needles.
The ideal best is obvious: brand marketing that performs and performance marketing that brands.
Which, of course, is easier said than done.
Don’t believe me? Take it from Hannah Parvaz at Aperture, who recently said her agency spend million on ads in the last year, and 1 thing that did NOT work was “big brands spending nothing on awareness.”
Chris Kelly uses the apple orchard analogy to explain the role of brand marketing in long-term business growth:
“ If all you do is pick apples off the trees, then you’re not going to grow.”
Picking apples, of course, is performance marketing: capturing existing demand, driving immediate sales or conversions. And planting seeds is brand marketing: generating both current and future demand by building brand awareness, favorability, and consideration.
Picking all the apples is great, but there’s a limit. Eventually you run out of trees because the orchard has died off, and you’ve killed the golden goose. Short-term metrics matter, but if you plan to be around for a while and grow to a significant size, brand-building matters.
Getting it right on the brand side with accurate targeting delivers real performance results, according to a study that Upwave and Iris TV, the targeting partner, did with Carl’s Jr.
The campaign beat 99% of all fast food campaigns they had previously worked on.
That’s impressive.
“When marketers are paying a premium for targeting,” Kelly says, “ They want to know that it’s building their brand and driving the outcomes that they want to measure.”
That’s good news for marketers looking for fresh channels and marketing partners. But of course it’s something that needs to be tested for your app or product or service, just like anything else.
Much more in the full podcast
As always, check out the full Growth Masterminds podcast for more on both YouTube and all the audio channels.
Here’s what to expect.
- 00:00 Welcome to Growth Masterminds
- 01:07 Understanding Contextual Targeting in CTV
- 03:51 Measuring Brand Outcomes with Contextual Targeting
- 09:04 Performance Branding vs. Performance Marketing
- 12:47 The Importance of Brand Building for Businesses
- 16:43 Connecting Brand Metrics to Sales
- 21:58 The Role of Advertising in Consumer Behavior
- 25:09 Conclusion and Final Thoughts
