Why Brands Should Be Moving TV Dollars to CTV
Note: This post originally appeared on the Telaria website.
In 2018, pay TV lost 7 million customers. Another 4.5 million viewers have already cut the cord in 2019. This trend will continue to grow until one day all TV will be CTV.
From the beginning of time it’s been true that where viewers go, advertisers will follow. According to eMarketer, the number of U.S. households with CTV is on pace to eclipse those with pay TV. CTV ad spend will reach nearly $7 billion in the U.S. in 2019 alone, and the growth of programmatic CTV has already outpaced the growth of programmatic spend on desktop and mobile. Linear TV ad spend still brought in a whopping $70 billion this year and is still forecasted to reach $68 billion in 2023. Despite all of the viewing trends, CTV makes up only 10% percent of TV ad budgets.
Brands need to shift dollars traditionally allocated to traditional TV over to CTV. For that to happen, brands must feel comfortable buying CTV programmatically. Here’s why that shouldn’t be a barrier for much longer.
- Programmatic CTV Is Familiar
As viewership grows, brands are starting to understand how CTV can enhance the TV experience. Here are three ways CTV can create an even better environment for advertisers to achieve their goals.
- Addressability: Addressable has traditionally been part of the TV world, but with a growing number of services like Hulu, Sling TV and fuboTV all sitting on valuable subscriber data, the opportunity to tailor a message to a specific audience viewing premium content on CTV is a big opportunity for advertisers to reach the right viewer at the right time. Addressable has historically been limited to household-level targeting on television. Now through Telaria’s Audience Connect suite, advertisers can greatly reduce wasted impressions by using an array of rich data to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time on all devices, including CTV.
- Content: The growing number of streaming services can be overwhelming. It’s not realistic to expect brands to know the details of all the supply available on every platform, but educating them on the various ways they can target content is essential, including the ability to target by category, genre, content length and even content rating. As data protection among platforms improve, a growing number of publishers are more comfortable passing show level data, making buying CTV an even more familiar process for brands.
- Control: It’s important for brands to know that CTV buys will meet their list of requirements and standards. Telaria offers frequency capping, competitive separation, and implementation of do-not-air lists to reinforce the control brands can expect when buying CTV.
- Programmatic CTV is efficient.
CTV is challenging the efficiency of the traditional TV model. Today, TV buyers need relationships with dozens of different partners and need to conduct dozens of 1:1 transactions to obtain sizeable reach. Programmatic saves advertisers time by allowing them to tap into inventory from multiple CTV sources with fewer transactions, without sacrificing quality or scale. Telaria’s direct relationships with premium CTV publishers offers brands the ability to access highly sought after CTV supply from the biggest names in the space.
- Programmatic CTV is fast and flexible.
Programmatic CTV offers brands live data at their fingertips. On Telaria’s VMP, campaign analytics are updated in real-time, giving brands an accurate picture of performance pacing, and making it possible to quickly optimize in time to positively impact campaign performance. This is important for all campaigns, but especially those with short flights or live programming. Telaria empower brands with the tools they need to make the best decisions for their business.
Viewers have already shown us that CTV is the future of TV, but the medium will only realize its full potential when brands feel the same. Advertisers are keeping a close eye on viewer habits, and as their comfort level with programmatic grows, an influx of TV dollars will rapidly flow to CTV.