CTV: A new channel combining the best of traditional and digital

Connected TV and Digital out of home (DOOH)

Introduction:

The year is 2023 many emerging technologies and solutions are appearing and advertisers are seeking new and innovative solutions to reach their audience, in an era where many changes have happened around the world during and after Covid 19 such as evolving of Q-commerce, appearance of AI tools such as ChatGPT, WFH and more, it was clearly apparent that we are in the midst of a new and different world that will require different methodologies and tactics to win consumers.

According to many opinions and an analyst opinion on Statista that in the last decade a drastic change has happened, while traditional channels such as TV, Radio and other offline channels were the most effective but during and after Covid 19 digital marketing is overtaking the scene by offering ability to target audiences using various methodologies, being able to understand audiences in real time and other factors are majors wins in digital marketing.

So what is the future of digital marketing and are there any new digital channels that combine the best of traditional and digital, especially that TV and OOH are there to stay but need to evolve? The answer to that is yes there are lots of new evolving channels such as Connected TV and Digital out of home (DOOH) that can combine the best of traditional and digital.

What is CTV?

The year 2020 was an unprecedented one in many ways, especially when it comes to how we watch television. In fact, we’ve seen accelerated growth in the shift of consumer viewing habits as people all over the globe settled into a new reality.

The ever-increasing speed and access to internet connectivity, along with the exponential improvements of technologies such as multi-use, internet-enabled TV devices such as gaming consoles, dedicated streaming devices, and the arrival and affordability of smart TVs (aka connected televisions) such as Apple TV and Roku have caused an evolution in consumers expectations of content and how they interact with it.

To be able to clearly define CTV it is better to start with Linear TV, Linear TV is a traditional broadcast TV where viewers watch a scheduled and predetermined programming schedule unlike on-demand content where the individual is free to decide what to watch according to his liking and what is suitable for his schedule, Linear TV is the way our parents and maybe their parents used to access content through TV (perhaps in Black & White in the past).

CTV is one of the new things that have seen a tremendous growth in 2020 and after, the improvements in tech along with affordability of Smart TVs and the evolution of content formats led to many changes, CTV is a TV or a device connected to a television able to stream video content from the web, there are 3 categories or types for CTV:

Smart TVs
Streaming device: examples like Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV.
Gaming consoles: examples like PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo

So CTV is a modern way of watching TV in the new digital era which hasn’t completely substituted the traditional experience but at least for the time being it is there with it.

Connected TV benefits:

There are lots of benefits to using connected TV including ad optimization helping advertisers drive performance driven campaigns and optimize, drive video completion rates, ad reporting that has a variety of very important metrics that will help advertisers measure their campaign success and audience targeting.

contextual ad targeting & relevancy:

While all advertisers celebrated that Google delayed cookie depreciation the cookie depreciation will still occur sometime in the future, according to some sources online (e.g: Marketing Dive) that cookie depreciation will be complete by half of 2024, this led to focusing more once again on contextual targeting systems.

So what is contextual targeting? Contextual targeting is a targeting technique utilized by placing ads that are relevant to the content that it is placed on rather than using user’s data and that targeting method results in achieving high rates of relevancy for the viewer as for example the user is browsing a website that has tips for working out and the ad that the viewer gets is for gym equipment, this will help audience get better experience from CTV and advertisers will get better conversion rates in their ads without sacrificing privacy of users.

Conclusion:

Many advertisers argue that at the current time the best mix is to use Linear and CTV together and while CTV is growing all over the world it is still hasn’t reigned supreme as of yet it’s a viable option for advertisers because of many things including great contextual targeting that is compliant with the new cookie depreciation, cost effective when compared to Linear TV, and great and growing reach as apparent by many statistics including a study by Statista where it said that CTV advertising revenue will reach nearly 26 billion U.S. dollars in 2023, an increase of 13.2 percent compared to the previous year.

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