CTV Has Room For Improvement in Ad Pods

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.

YouTube Drives Significant Share of CTV Viewership

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.

More Brands See CTV Opportunities on 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.

CTV Ads Help to Drive Purchase Intent

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.

CTV Success on YouTube Takes Know-How

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.”

Brand Suitability More Nuanced Than Safety on YouTube

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.

Consumer Intent Emerges as Key CTV Audience Signal

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.

But now YouTube is the number-two streaming media platform on TVs and amongst the largest beneficiaries of connected TV advertising spend.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Pixability advisor and former Dunkin’ CMO Tony Weisman charts YouTube’s rise – and why it is so important to marketers today.

The small acorn

Weisman, who was also CEO for DigitasLBi in North America, reminisces about early YouTube NewFront presentations, when the platform was simultaneously education ad buyers and trying to win their spending commitments.

“Nobody even thought about having YouTube as part of it,” Weisman recalls. “The next thing you know, it became sort of the tent pole of NewFront week.”

Still, it nevertheless took buyers a little time to understand YouTube’s unique proposition.

“We met these creators who most of us had never heard of,” Weisman says. “And then we’d go outside, and there were literally thousands of largely teens waiting outside because word had spread that had creator they loved was there.

“It was an ‘a-ha’ moment for me that these creators were going to be able to command huge audiences and, as a result, massive advertising budgets. And that they had tapped into an audience that most of us were seeking for one reason or another but weren’t aware of how to reach.”

CTV gargantuan

That’s all changed now, of course.

Nielsen Streaming Meter says, of the 25% of TV time spent with streaming video, 20% goes to YouTube, making it the second-most-watched digital video platform after Netflix.

Accordingly, YouTube’s CTV ad revenue is growing fast. YouTube is up there with Roku but behind Hulu for taking CTV ad dollars.

YouTube is critical

“YouTube in particular that has gone from being interesting to big, to critical,” Weisman says. “YouTube is a critical component of every media buyer’s buy right now.

“They’ve made enormous strides in searchability and safety in reliability. They’ve done really, really smart things to build the brand and the offerings. It’s no longer a question about whether or not you’re going to invest in YouTube, but are you going to do it smartly?

“Or are you going to do it with somebody who can, you know, 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.”

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.

“If we keep serving the same product to the same consumers in the same way, over time, we’re going to go the way of a lot of other retail brands in recent years,” Weisman told Beet.TV in an interview at the ANA Masters of Marketing Conference. “No one has a forever right to live. The ones who are winning are the ones who are paranoid about changing and evolving fast enough to meet consumer needs.”

And customer expectations are changing quickly, says Weisman. That holds Dunkin’ to a high standard to offer great experiences not just for a casual restaurant brand, but for any brand. The Dunkin’ app, for example, has to be as good as Spotify, Uber and Amazon’s apps, not just good for a QSR or restaurant app, he says. But that doesn’t mean Dunkin’ is trying to be something that it’s not for customers. It fills a specific need, which revolves around fulfilling customers’ needs quickly. “Everything we do is about speed,” says Weisman. “There are plenty of places you can go to write the next great American novel. Not Dunkin’.”

Speed is at the center of Dunkin’s pitch to consumers, but change and innovation is at the center of the brand’s strategy. According to Weisman, the company has a blueprint for growth that covers every aspect of the business, including product innovation – Dunkin’ introduced more modern products like healthier breakfast bowls and Beyond branded sausage sandwiches – and marketing. Most blatantly, the company changed its name from Dunkin’ Donuts in 2018 to re-establish itself. Product packaging and advertising followed suit. It’s all part of a bigger company update that touches everything from the appearance to the app to the method of getting products to customers, like delivery.

What hasn’t changed is the efficacy of broad-reach channels like TV. Video is critical to Dunkin’s strategy, and while Weisman says traditional TV isn’t as targeted as he may like, affordable reach is a big selling point when Dunkin’s most targeted customer group is 65 million people wide. This is a group Dunkin’ considers “switchers”: They’re daily coffee drinkers who haven’t rejected Dunkin’ (like the rejectors – people who don’t like the Dunkin’ coffee or brand) but may not always go there as their first choice (like the loyalists – people who go there every morning with the same order).

To figure out if messaging to this group is working, Weisman says device-enabled, geo-based tracking is useful.

“If you come into our store, you buy something,” says Weisman. “So we want to know if you were exposed to a message and made a trip. That’s a good way to measure conversion.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the ANA Masters of Marketing Conference in Orlando, 2019.   The series is sponsored by iSpot.tv.  For more videos from the series, please visit this page.  

“These are all part of the continuing evolution of trying to make our brands as relevant as possible to consumers,” Weisman says.

Weisman says he is not a fan of native advertising.

“If it matters to a consumer, be relevant to them in the time and in the space that matters to them,” he says. This style of advertising, Weisman says, is not interupting the consumer’s experience and fits in with the philosophy behind Digitas’ propriety agency platform BrandLIVE: relevance has a deadline.