With increased pressure to justify ad spend across TV, advertisers can’t afford to waste budget on “black boxes.” When advertisers don’t have access to a holistic measurement tool, they are often forced to make decisions based on patched-together data from multiple sources. This is especially challenging for cross-platform advertising that incorporates CTV. The lack of transparency translates into wasting coveted ad spend, oversaturating the wrong audiences and reducing the advertising effectiveness of already heavily scrutinized ad dollars.
It’s no secret that streaming adoption – by both consumers and marketers – is rising. But as CTV plays a bigger role in both audience viewership and advertisers’ media plans, is the measurement industry set up to account for this growth? When advertisers struggle to understand how many net-new viewers they can reach on CTV compared to linear TV, efficient allocation of media spend becomes a distant, difficult to obtain reality.
Facing increased pressure to prove the value of every dollar spent, CTV emerges as a key platform to deliver on cost efficiencies amidst a competitive media landscape. However, most TV advertisers are still missing out on the incremental advantages of CTV. Instead of tapping into CTV’s cost-efficient potential, many advertisers continue to pay double (or quadruple) for duplicated impressions on linear TV while also missing out on cord-cutter audiences by oversaturating others. Cross-platform findings from NBCU and iSpot’s currency test and learn confirmed that the average share of streaming impressions across the 67 participating advertisers was less than 10%. Yet, the optimal share of CTV impressions to drive greater reach and reduce excess frequency on linear was 30-40%.
Like linear TV, CTV is a useful branding tool, but is also a highly effective performance channel due to its advanced audience targeting and measurement capabilities. By going beyond simple age and gender demos and leveraging deep demographic data from 1st and 3rd party sources, advertisers can enable targeting that reaches their unique customer segments. And, brands looking to test and validate “incrementality” before jumping all in will find CTV is built for effective, data-driven opportunities.
Erasing CTV Blind Spots with Incrementality
Measuring incrementality is critical in the success of CTV. Not only does it enable campaign optimizations, but incrementality also helps justify investments in the flourishing channel.
To support awareness and drive conversions for their brand, marketers want to reach as many TV watchers as they can. To do so, they can’t discount cord cutters. Let’s think about an example. An advertiser develops a TV ad campaign that spans both linear TV and streaming. They need to understand the additional reach and conversion achieved through incorporating streaming into their TV ad buy. The measurement of deduped reach and conversion from a streaming audience is incrementality.
The Complexity of an Evolving Media Landscape
Today, audiences have a sea of content to choose from anytime, from any device across thousands of channels and hundreds of publishers. This fragmentation makes reaching viewers incredibly complex for advertisers and is the root of most CTV challenges, like measuring and managing incrementality. If anything, advertisers are going to be dealing with an increasingly fragmented landscape as more players get into the ad-supported streaming model, like Netflix and Disney+.
Nearly half of advertisers say measuring incremental reach across platforms and publishers is their top CTV challenge. Without visibility into the incremental reach of CTV, advertisers risk wasting spend by oversaturating certain audiences, while missing others completely. This common challenge plagues advertisers when managing TV ad frequency across platforms and publishers.
Beyond reach, without knowing the incremental lift CTV provides, advertisers struggle to justify investment in the channel. At a time when every ad dollar is scrutinized, advertisers that mistakenly pull back spend risk missing out on a performance-driven channel and losing market share to their competitors that stay the course.
Unified Cross-Platform Measurement Combats Fragmentation
Advertisers need to ensure measurement partners cover the following key areas in order to overcome fragmentation and effectively manage cross-platform incrementality.
- Unified, ad-first measurement across linear and streaming publishers. Average network and show measurement is a marker of audience engagement, reach and value. However, measurement and verification of ad impressions independently from programming, is the only way to consistently conduct deduped cross-platform measurement.
- Person-level TV exposure data across linear and streaming platforms unlocks incremental reach and frequency tracking for target audiences. Rather than analyzing ad performance at the household level, advertisers can uncover if they are reaching the right individuals. This granularity significantly increases the efficiency of media buys.
- Incrementality at the individual publisher level for more actionable cross-platform TV ad data. TV ad decisions do not come down to just linear versus streaming, and rapidly changing audience behaviors mean advertisers need incremental measurement across hundreds of publishers within days, not weeks, in order to optimize the opportunities that maximize ROAS.
- Insight into Advanced Audiences with TV ad analytics supports more impactful optimization and targeting decisions. Advertisers can measure incremental reach and frequency across platforms and identify unique first-party segments to get their campaigns even more individually targeted.
- Attribute impressions to actual business outcomes. Closing the loop on ROAS reporting in a matter of days with real-time purchase attribution means advertisers can quickly uncover incremental lift in conversions generated by publishers and platforms to further optimize campaign performance.
Making CTV Ad Investments Count
iSpot Unified Measurement provides a real-time, unified view of deduplicated impressions and conversions across linear and streaming – mapped to the precise demographic makeup of exposed audiences – so advertisers can manage incrementality with ease, identify optimal frequency before campaign performance wears down and minimize wasted spend. Only then can advertisers truly reap the cost-efficiencies available with CTV advertising.