Mike Baker, investor and strategic advisor
Differences in the way CTV and linear TV manage commercial breaks are driving a need for technical standards for advertising that will improve the consumer experience. The engineering of CTV apps and stream encoding are among the factors that need to be harmonized to avoid repeating ads in pods.
Mike Fisher, vice president of advanced TV and audio at Essence
YouTube, the video-sharing platform owned by Google, is emerging as a viable alternative to other streamed programming as more households hook up their TVs to the internet. That growth has led advertisers to look for a combination of premium content and audiences within YouTube.
David George, CEO of Pixability
The pandemic led people to spend more time at home while driving a significant shift in viewing habits. As YouTube’s viewership has grown, more brands are adopting the video-sharing platform as a bigger part of their strategies to reach consumers.
Grace Smith, senior digital marketing manager at Saucony
Saucony, the sportswear brand owned by Wolverine World Wide, reached new audiences with a CTV campaign that helped to drive higher purchase intent. About two-thirds (65%) of consumers who bought Saucony’s products after seeing its ads on Amazon Fire were first-time customers.
Tony Weisman, advisor and board member; former CMO of Dunkin’
“It’s no longer a question about whether or not you’re going to invest in YouTube,” Weisman said, “but are you going to do it smartly, or are you going to do it with somebody who can really make sure that that investment is wise? Or are you just going to take your chances? And I would not advise anyone to just take their chances.”
Matt Duffy, CMO of Pixability
While YouTube is mostly a brand-safe platform, advertisers still need to consider whether its content is also suitable for their campaigns. Pixability found in a survey that many advertisers rely on third-party vendors to help understand brand suitability.
Rob Norman, advisory board member for Pixability
“We’ve become familiar with the Amazon walled gardens and the Facebook walled gardens, but we’re about to become familiar with device-led walled gardens, operated by people like LG, Samsung, and Vizio,” Norman said. “The use of identifiers in the TV market is evolving at really quite a space. What I’m hoping people are going to do is to stand back and look at other forms of signal other than identifiers.”
You are watching “Driving Reach and Results on Connected TV,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Pixability. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>For Saucony, the sportswear brand owned by Wolverine World Wide, CTV was compelling because of its popularity among younger consumers with active lifestyles.
“We saw that with our target audience, they definitely were there already,” Grace Smith, manager of digital marketing at Saucony, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “They were consuming digital video, whether that be smaller digital video clips or longer-form content like shows and movies.”
Saucony also ran social media and social video campaigns aiming for consumers in the lower part of the purchase funnel, but was disappointed to see that social media users tended to skip past video ads.
“The struggle we saw with social video is that our average view time was only three seconds,” Smith said.
The advantage with CTV was in reaching upper-funnel consumers with 15- and 30-second spots, which were in more compact commercial breaks that viewers knew to expect before watching shows. The longer viewing time gave Saucony a chance to tell a more complete brand story.
Saucony worked with digital marketing agency iProspect to develop its strategy, and with video ad-tech startup Pixability to refine its targeting on CTV platforms such as YouTube, Roku and Amazon Fire.
“Pixability was just above and beyond. Their targeting capabilities, the addition of brand studies to get more data beyond click-through rates [and] completion rates,” Smith said. “They had access to a ton of additional studies and data beyond the front-end media, which was really important to us, too.”
As viewers spent more time consuming media on CTV platforms while stuck at home during the pandemic, Saucony was able to reach new customers. About two-thirds (65%) of consumers who bought Saucony’s products after seeing its ads on Amazon Fire were new customers, Smith said.
“Purchase intent was a big needle we wanted to move. From a results perspective, we saw a pretty big purchase consideration lift in both YouTube and Roku users,” she said. “With Amazon Fire users, we saw that we moved the needle on purchase intent, but also were able to bring in new buyers to the brand.”
You are watching “Driving Reach and Results on Connected TV,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Pixability. For more videos, please visit this page.
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