[Podcast] The Evolution of CTV in the New Media Landscape

The TV ad model is in the midst of a massive wave of disruption.  And with that disruption has come a massive amount of fragmentation in the CTV/OTT ad models and platforms.  This fragmentation means that marketers need to choose trusted partners that can provide them with the necessary reach and scale.

So which platforms are best suited to target the consumers needed to achieve scale? Adding more to the confusion is the number of players jumping into the space to take advantage of CTV’s popularity, affordability, and targeting capability. 

So – what is really important to know about CTV/OTT ad models?

In this Movers and Shakers podcast, host Luci Rainey will interview Peter Jones, Head of Local Sales/Strategic Partners at Premion, an industry-leading premium CTV/OTT advertising platform to discuss the latest trends in CTV/OTT.

This podcast will cover content including:

• Which platform models are better for advertising needs:  SVOD or AVOD?
• How do I measure the value of the CTV/OTT impressions?
• How do I decide whom to target and when?
• Can I use my own first-party data to target or do I need to rely on third-party data?
• How do I assure brand safety and avoid ad fraud?
• Can CTV/OTT provide attribution measurement or show sales attribution like programmatic digital can?

[Podcast] The Evolution of CTV in the New Media Landscape

Speakers

*The following transcription has been adapted from The Evolution of CTV in the New Media Landscape Podcast.

LUCI

Last July, streaming TV viewership, actually slipped past cable viewership.

And with that shift, advertisers or brands have been flocking to advertise on CTV and OTT channels.

The TV ad model is in the midst of a massive wave of disruption.

And while linear advertising has been declining, CTV advertising has been rising, with 14% plus growth, and spend predicted for 2023 alone.

But that growth actually comes with some pain. In a recent survey, 40% of advertisers cite fragmentation as a pain point of CTV. Well, we’re here today to talk about all of that.

And with us today, we have Peter Jones as our guest, head of local sales and strategic partners at Premion. Welcome, Peter!

PETER

Thanks for having me, Luci. I think we’ll have a great conversation today.

LUCI

Yeah. So glad to have you with us today. Can you start us off by telling us about yourself, you’ve spent most if not all of your career and digital marketing, and it’s hard for an old-school marketer like me to believe that. But nowadays, it’s more common than not. So tell us a little bit about your background.

PETER
Sure, absolutely. So, over the last 20 years most of it’s been in digital. What I’d like to say is, if you look at the last, I’d say, 15 years, we’ve seen these massive paradigm shifts in consumer behavior that has dictated where you know, our brands and marketers’ ad dollars need to be placed.

So, 15 years ago, I was having this conversation around Google Search Campaigns, and taking dollars out of, you know, traditional print and other media and putting onto Google Search. Well soon thereafter, we had to have the same conversation around social media campaigns. So, I started off in the Google Search and social realm, and then shortly thereafter, we have seen the streaming space explode. And so, I’ve been with my current company for 11 years, we launched our streaming platform Premion back in 2016, I’ve been here since the inception. And we’re seeing that consumer behavior, again, dictating where our brands and our markers and our agencies need to spend those ad dollars. So, it’s been a wild ride, but it’s just going to continue to get to be a lot more fun in the streaming space, with more platforms launching, and a lot more content to view.

LUCI

Yeah, I get it. You know, the, I’d say, retail media network space is getting hot, too, and in fact, even Porch Group Media, who’s our sponsor of Movers & Shakers, launched a CTV channel within their media network.

And so I said, we talked about this last week when we were catching up.

And you know, fragmentation, you know, there are so many options.

How do you see, CTV evolving versus linear? Linear was, you know, pretty straightforward, you bought your upfront, you know, it seemed clear, you have your plan the whole year. CTV and OTT is very different.

You know, how do you see, you know, this, you know, it’s somewhat new, we’ll call it four years, I mean, there were some before that, but it wasn’t as rampant, and there wasn’t as much spend dedicated before, people were trying it out. But how do you see that? How do you see this channel evolving versus linear?

PETER
Well, I think CTV is a critical part of a strategy for all linear buyers, and we have seen a lot of our advertisers, a lot of our agencies, have adopted and seem to be to be part of that, because they need that incremental reach. We need to make sure that they’re capturing the people that are streaming as well if people are watching non-linear. I mean, if you look at some of the e-marketer, stats were 86% of US households this year projected to be, you know, CTV households. We need to make sure that we’re capturing that. The average household spends almost five hours a day watching TV, and 40% of that is streaming. So, if businesses, or brands, or agencies, aren’t including CTV, in their strategy, they’re missing a pretty big audience that they can only reach through the streaming services.

Contact us to learn more about the Porch Group Media Network, one of the first media networks to offer CTV capabilities to connect you to in-market audiences, including movers and consumers displaying active shopping intent.

LUCI

So, you know, you’ve touched on this a little bit, would you say CTV or OTT is better?

You know, are just different than linear?

Can you — I’m going to say a dirty word — can you abandon linear and just stick with CTV OTT, or do you still see both channels working together?

I’m sure that you have a little bit of a bias based on what you do, as would Porch Media Group. Especially really focusing on those really targeted tactics, you know more so than the upper funnel. What do you what do you say? What’s your opinion is CTV/OTT better, or just different than linear?

PETER

I mean, TV is still king, right? And so I mean you have to have I mean both strategies are different tactics but absolutely, if you have a linear strategy, you need to have CTV.

You know, linear is always going to be able to get you in front of the most people in the most households because it has the biggest reach.

Now you’re able to layer on CTV, when you add a little bit more different tactics that would be similar to what you’re doing with your digital campaigns. I mean, you have the targeting capabilities. You have the measurability and I know we’re going to kind of get into this…I don’t want to jump ahead, but it’s able to kind of, what I would say is the best of both worlds where you have that nice kind of broadcast message, then you have the digital capabilities.

Related Content: [Podcast] CTV vs. Linear TV Reach

LUCI

Yeah. When you look at platforms, you know, we talked a little bit about platform models, you know, do you have any thoughts on which platforms are better for advertising needs?

It really started out, you know, this model, started out in SVOD, and now, we’re growing, and there’s been kind of this lean toward AVOD. What are your thoughts on this, Peter, you know, being in this industry every day?

PETER

So, I’m trying to speak objectively here. A lot of people are comfortable with the SVODs, and we say, that’s all the subscription-based platforms that you’re looking at, and AVODs are the ones that are typically free. 

So, you’re SVODs…Yeah. People like the brands, they liked the content, they’re familiar with it, they’re comfortable with it.

But I mean if you really look at what the pandemic has done, and it might have been because we were just desperate for content during the pandemic or that we were at home more often, but it basically just accelerated the growth of all these three FAST, or AVOD platforms.

By platforms I mean, if you think about how desperate we were in it and I’m sorry if I’m poking fun, but Tiger King was number one on Netflix for a month.

That’s how desperate we were as consumers for content. So, we try more and more of these different platforms. And I believe, if you look, you can Google it. I think the average household has between 10 and 11 differences between services. So, while we’re starting to see a little bit that subscription fatigue settling in, I mean, I do think that the AVOD platforms and the growth have been massive. I mean, if you look at it, a great example is Paramount. So, yeah, Paramount Plus and Paramount also owns Pluto.

I mean, Pluto is a massive, FAST AVOD platform. They have roughly 79 million monthly active users. And Permion has their own content that’s obviously behind a paywall, so I think that with the adoption of some of these AVOD platforms, advertisers, get a lot more inventory.

You get a lot more reach. The SVOD is still going to be like your, hey, I’m familiar with this brand, or like this content, but remember with CTV, we’re just trying to find the audience, OK? We’re not going to be married to any one individual platform. We want to find the audience whether they’re on a subscription-based platform, whether they’re on the free, FAST or AVOD platform and help drive the business outcomes that they want regardless of where the audience is.

LUCI

Connected TV ad spend has more than doubled really in four years, you know, taking it, I guess through this year, maybe call it five-ish. In your business, having been where you’ve been for the past five years, did you ever expect the ad spend in this space to double in five years?

I mean, at these numbers, it’s not like it’s doubling from, 100 million or a small amount, right? These are billions of dollars, or even one billion to two billion, would be huge in a lot of businesses. Did you ever expect this kind of shift in spending, or growth and spending? And, I mean, you sell this every day, did you ever expect this?

PETER

I mean, we saw early on that, I mean, when I kind of hinted at those, those paradigms, those massive paradigm shifts earlier. When you see that consumer behavior adopt a technology and then shift their behavior that quickly, it’s, I’m not surprised to see this, this amount of growth in this space.

LUCI

That’s great. You touched on this earlier about targeting, and when you and I were talking, you know, you said these words, “Data is the new currency.” Right?

And in, no matter what kind of advertising you’re doing, and, and how you really own your audiences, how do I, as a marketer, decide whom to target and when on CTV? Like, how do I, how do I decide that?

PETER

Well, I mean, first is work with your provider. Work with, you know, the company or your agency to identify, who is my customer? Who am I trying to target? Who am I trying to go after? You’re going to have different tactics and we’ll touch on first party data, but obviously, you’re going to have a different message on existing customers on first party data than you might have on a new client or new customer acquisition.

And I mean to your point, I’m going to double click on absolutely, data is the new currency.

With the idea of updates with you know, privacy laws with you know, the soon to be in the near future, you know the cookies being kind of going to the wayside, data is going to be a critical part of every not just OTT strategy, but every digital strategy for business. So, work with your provider know who your data partners are.

I mean you know we’ve built out, Premion builds out audience first packages. So, we try to leverage different data providers to build out different personas, behaviors that are going to align with certain verticals. I mean, take, you know, if you’re looking at home improvement or DIY, we can probably marry a lot of different personas and data providers to look at homeowners, believe it’s the age of home that they’re trying to reach, because they want to do work on homes that might be 10 years or 20 years that are old.

You might have to leverage certain data providers that have access to those homes, or those audiences are those households.

So, you also want to make sure that you’re very transparent, so whatever data provider you are working with for OTT, or agency, ask them what data providers are they using. How often is that data refreshed?  Make sure you’re not just hitting the same audience month after month and just recycling all day.

LUCI

Yeah. So actually, that’s a nice service that Porch Media Group offers is in that homeowner, mover area, pre-mover and so on. And I can assure you, they are recycling their data often, so, and that’s a great point that you brought up. So, I’m so glad, you know, that just that one data question is such a great question to ask your data providers. I’m so glad you brought that up, Peter.

Can I use my own first party data to target on CTV and OTT or do I need to rely on third party data?

Connected TV Advertising Success Kit

 Learn more about how to get started with CTV advertising with the latest tips and strategies.

Get My Free Kit

PETER

It’s going to be a combination of both.

I mean for any business, if they haven’t done it already, they need to start collecting their first party data now. It’s going to be kind of a, you know, a crawl before you can run type of strategy because you have to collect a lot of records to make it scalable.

And what I mean by scalable, I mean, if you have, I’m making up a number, but a thousand customers, and you’re in a big DMA I’m actually in Houston this week, or one thousand customers in the City of Houston is not a big reach. So, you need to get 10, 20, 30,000 customers, people that have done business. Maybe its service contracts. Maybe it’s different projects you’ve worked on and have a different tactic to go after existing customers. Then you can leverage the third-party data providers to try to reach a new customer or a new audience.

So, OTT is not a one size fits all strategy. I mean, there’s going to be different tactics and different strategies that you’re going to have to go after and that’s why it’s important to make sure that you’re working with you know, a reputable company that can help you kind of piece together your strategy for it.

LUCI

Yeah, one of the things we also talked about, and I think was a big lead in to this discussion was fragmentation.

And as I was leading in, you know I mentioned the innovative research where they found that 40% of advertisers cite fragmentation as their top pain points.

Tell us a little bit about that fragmentation and why this is happening.

PETER

Yeah. And unfortunately, and, yeah, I think it was from the research you were mentioning. There are so many different platforms out there that you can’t just work with one platform and reach the entire audience. Some of, you know, the biggest tech companies that have streaming services, some of those platforms have five million subscribers nationwide.

Once you layer in geography, relocation, and then you layer in households or, you know, household audiences, that becomes an extremely small reach or platform to use. And that’s where you have to make sure you’re leveraging multiple platforms, multiple publishers, probably need a partner, an agency, someone to help you navigate the space. Because when you do it by yourself, I mean it easy to, to waste money. I mean, this is, you know, it’s the early days of what was going on with display back in the nineties when people are, just, you know, throwing impressions all over the Internet, hoping that something would stick. And trust me, when people try to do it themselves, they end up spending a lot more money and wasting a lot more money.

I will say that all impressions are not created equal. I’ll make a reference back to the days of doing a Google Search Campaigns. One of the early KPIs doing a Google Search Campaign is, what’s my cost per click?

And everyone was curious, will likely get cheaper cost per clicks.

Related Content: [Article] CTV Advertising FAQs

What we quickly found out, is that, if you want cheap clicks, anyone can go out and buy cheap clicks. You can buy cheap clicks off the Google Display Network and get cheap clicks from other websites, but it’s not going to drive conversions, is not going to drive qualified web traffic, it’s not going to drive the outcomes that you want.

The exact same thing is taking place in the OTT space.

You know we have a lot of clients’ needs that are looking at well, what’s my CPL?

I’m telling you that all impressions are not created equal. You want cheap CPLs, you can get cheap CPLs. You can get dirt, cheap, CPLs. But you’ve got to worry about ad fraud. And you’re going to worry about bots. You’re probably going to be on sites or publishers that might not be brand safe.

Um, so, it’s not going to drive the outcome that you want, so make sure that you’re driving traffic and you show impressions from publishers that are going to drive a result that you want, that you’re going to get the engagement, and it’s worth paying for the impression, because the impression is going to drive the results.

Sorry, I’ll get off my soapbox. I was kind of going down a rabbit hole there.

LUCI

I think it’s really a cautionary tale, especially for those of us who have joined us today and that all impressions or all views aren’t created equal. And it’s worth it, you know, I guess, test your vehicles, test your channels.

Resources You May Also Like:

• [Success Kit] Connected TV Advertising
• [Podcast] How to Engage Different Audience Segments
• [Article] What is a Retail Media Network?

Did you find this content insightful? Join our podcast mailing list: