In the beginning, there was fire - stolen from a neighboring cave, perhaps - makeshift families gathered around primitive campfires for warmth and safety, but also community and entertainment. Then came announcements in town squares, gathering around the gramophone in the parlor, FDR’s radio “fireside chats,” and finally, you guessed it, television.
Like it or not, TV has become our modern-day campfire, where we congregate around Friends reruns, gasp at new episodes of Succession, and roll our eyes as we begrudgingly join Bachelor Nation. Often vilified as a mindless activity sucking the life out of our children, it is now rehabilitated as a nostalgic medium where families can bond over a basketball game or a Sponge Bob marathon instead of staring at Candy Crush alone in bed.
In a world of 5 second soundbites and lonely doom scrolling, no digital channel can pack a story-telling punch like television, which still boasts the highest engagement and view-through rate (97%) of any marketing channel by far.
Long considered a legacy channel exclusively available to brands with huge budgets and long-term omnichannel marketing strategies, television advertising has been radically transformed by a rapid consumer shift away from broadcast and cable, to streaming. The shift had already slowly begun when Covid hit in 2020, but the CTV market growth entered super speed as homebound viewers reassessed their entertainment priorities.
Today, according to a recent survey by eMarketer, over 53% of video viewing on all devices is on CTVs. That means more people are watching streamed content on CTVs than videos on social media and linear TV combined. Woah.
In fact, 85% of all US households with a television own at least one Connected Television device, while Vizio reports that nowadays less than one-third of all TV viewing is linear (traditional tv) compared to 60% from just two years ago. Several major streaming services saw double-digit growth in viewing time, with Netflix, YouTube and Hulu experiencing increases of 26%, 21%, and 13% year over year, respectively.
So what is CTV exactly, and why are advertisers just as eager to allocate budgets to this brand new medium as consumers are to ditch their antennas and cable subscriptions? Well, we thought we’d go ask Vibe.co partner and CTV expert, Gijsbert Pols, Director of Connected TV & New Channels at Adjust, to hear his take.
Full disclosure, we arrived at our interview ready to bash Apple’s ATT and blame it for everything under the sun - Mercury in retrograde, that gross orange juice taste after you brush your teeth, and most importantly, the stunning loss of signal pushing mobile advertisers to CTV in droves, but guess what? It turns out it’s more complicated than that.
First, let’s be clear, Pols agrees with one thing for sure: CTV advertising is surging and doesn’t show any sign of slowing down soon. The reasons for this surge, however, are more complex than the disappearance of IDFAs on Apple devices. For Pols, the top 4 factors shaping the CTV landscape today are:
2. Advertisers reallocating mobile and desktop display budgets to CTV. While digital advertisers focused on video are still definitely spending large chunks of their budgets on display ads, it is crucial to recognize the increasingly large portion of video advertising budgets being diverted to CTV campaigns. Compared to other digital video types, CTV provides more transparency into where ads run: 59% of buyers stated being “very clear” on where their CTV ads ran vs. only 50% and 43% for social video and other digital video, respectively. According to IAB, “Buyers are turning to CTV (which does not rely on third-party cookies) as a privacy-safe way to spend ad dollars efficiently and effectively. Nearly three in four (73%) video buyers expect to fund their third-party cookie/mobile ID deprecation CTV spending increases by reallocating dollars from linear TV.” That’s why Vibe offers transparent, real-time reporting, so clients can optimize their campaigns as they progress.
3. A net new acquisition channel. Forget about the cord-cutters, what about the cord nevers? An entirely new set of viewers are leap-frogging from exclusively consuming digital content to becoming avid CTV consumers. How often do marketers get the chance to unlock a brand new audience? The last time advertisers got to experiment with a radically new digital medium was at the dawn of social media ad monetization, and look at how far that’s come! Adding a new channel to established advertising mixes is slowly becoming the silver bullet for mature industries like gaming, worried about cannibalization and wasted impressions.
4. Inventory growth. An unanticipated CTV audience surge beginning in 2020 led to exponential premium inventory growth on the publisher side, especially for FAST (Free Ad Supported Television) and AVOD (Advertising-based Video on Demand) publishers. Even SVOD companies are now exploring AVOD and FAST formats (hello, Netflix!) That’s great news for advertisers who can benefit from lower than anticipated CPMs (Vibe CPMs hover between $12 and $20) and the opportunity to place their brand next to premium long-form content instead of nana’s 100th rant against “lizard people” on social media.
Ok, now that you understand the reasoning behind advertising budget reallocations to CTV, how do you make the most of it? Well, you don’t manage until you measure, and that’s doubly true with a new tool in a fluctuating market. It’s important to understand that while CTV promises the granularity of digital advertising coupled with the power of television storytelling, advertisers will still need to learn a new “key” of sorts to understand the CTV measurement landscape.
For Pols, CTV advertising is a digital acquisition medium all its own, that probably won’t pay off if you measure results the way you’re used to. Its true value lies in new capabilities that follow a new measurement paradigm:
Building on the strength of groundbreaking deliverability and measurement capabilities, Pols anticipates exciting developments in the next 5 years, some of which have already begun:
Of course none of this means anything without the right partners, which is why Adjust and Vibe.co are partnering to deliver the very best in CTV delivery and tracking.
Earlier this year, Vibe.co launched the first self-serve programmatic CTV platform focused on performance, allowing marketers to go live in minutes with no budget constraints, no contract processing delays, a custom channel mix, real-time reporting, precise targeting, and pixel and MMP tracking.
Meanwhile, our friends and partners at Adjust have launched a brand new CTV Assist dashboard to solve for this very issue. Vibe clients who leverage Adjust as their MMP will be able to determine the holistic impact of their CTV campaigns and assess the impact CTV plays in assisting installs and revenue from users converting via down-funnel channels. For example, you can now break down mobile app users attributed to, say, Google Ads, by how many were also exposed to a CTV campaign. Without such an analysis, a purely last-touch approach to attribution will leave the performance of your CTV efforts feeling sub-par, so don’t settle for less any longer!