By Tejinder Gill
Last year, every streaming service backed by a major India network embraced an ad-supported subscription (AVOD) option – the fastest growing category in connected television (CTV). AVOD is closely followed by free ad-supported television (FAST). India’s AVOD market is experiencing rapid growth. By 2028, the users on AVOD are expected to reach over 480 million. Despite this explosion in AVOD subscriptions, ad spend has not caught up.
As users continue to favour these platforms, here are three CTV trends that will reshape advertising strategies in 2024.
Premium content on CTV fosters an effective ad environment not found on user-generated content (UGC) platforms
CTV is now known as the new TV because of how it drives premium content in the same way traditional TV used to. Think about some of the most popular shows this year – Master Chef, Shark Tank, Coffee with Karan, and these are all streaming on ad-supported platforms. There’s no doubt consumers are increasingly shifting to CTV. As many as 64% of over-the top (OTT) viewers use smart TV, spending over one third of their viewing time on this device. Furthermore, growing affluence will drive even greater demand for CTV as users look to transform their TV experience.
Meanwhile, brand-conscious advertisers are hypervigilant about the placement of their ads. More and more brands are realising how impactful it is to have their ads appear next to premium content in an environment where there are highly engaged consumers. Studies have shown that ads on CTV resonate better with consumers, and they are more likely to perceive advertised brands as premium, compared to ads on UGC platforms, which are often skipped and less trusted. In the same report by Kantar, findings also demonstrate that consumers are 22% more likely to recall the brands advertised on OTT/CTV, compared to YouTube.
CTV harnesses the power of data to achieve sophisticated levels of targeting
Unlike linear TV, which allows advertisers to target viewers only at a broad demographic level, CTV enables brands to apply data-driven insights to reach specific audience segments based on their interests and preferences. In addition, first-party data, third-party data providers and retail data can also be leveraged in CTV for incremental reach against linear campaigns.
PepsiCo recently targeted cord cutters aged 18 to 34, who prefer watching on-demand content via over-the-top (OTT) platforms for their Slice fruit drink awareness campaign. Using its rich first-party data and third-party data segments, as well as cross device targeting, the campaign successfully achieved its reach goals for cord-cutters, reaching an incremental 12 million unique users and delivering 13 percent media efficiency.
Logged-in nature of CTV makes it a durable platform as cookie deprecation looms
CTV enables marketers to apply data to their massive TV campaigns, offering precision for brands keen to prove media ROI. What’s also interesting is CTV largely relies on consumer email logins to create identifiers. Cookies are non-existent in CTV and the fastest-growing channels on the open internet such as music streaming and online games.
To be able to effectively reach consumers, an advertiser must know when those consumers saw their ad on a computer, TV or mobile. Knowing that a consumer can have up to 10 different connected devices, how can the advertiser reconcile the identity of a consumer? In CTV, users have a login to watch a film or series on major streaming platforms; but on a search browser, the level of logged users can be very low, making it difficult to reconcile identities.
A strong identity strategy involves reconciling multiple devices and identifiers within the same household. To do this, we must move the Internet from an opt-out system to an opt-in system with an identity solution that works on all channels with logged data. Unified ID 2.0 is one such industry solution. It allows advertisers to manage campaigns optimally across all channels. They can see, for example, if a certain audience group has seen a particular ad on a streaming platform, and then manage the frequency of that ad for the viewer across all channels.
As publishers and advertisers reimagine the role of identity in a post-cookie, omnichannel context, industry identity solutions like Unified ID 2.0 will help them realise the full potential of building authenticated audiences and take us to the next chapter of digital advertising.
The author is general manager at The Trade Desk
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