Connected-Stories Solves Video & CTV Creative Management with NEXT Platform

The rise of CTV and video have forced major changes in how advertisers approach their budgets. In fact, CTV appears to be recession proof, as the IAB has forecast that CTV growth would outpace overall ad spend growth in 2023.

Advertisers have committed budget to the channel. Yet questions remain as to how they are going to commit to CTV and video in new creative capacities.

Technology company Connected-Stories is aiming to bring brands and agencies into a new era of CTV and video creative with the launch of NEXT, the new iteration of its Creative Management Platform (CMP).

NEXT is built specifically around the concept of multimodality. Traditionally, multimodality is the application of multiple literacies within one medium. According to Connected-Stories CEO Claudio Vaccarella, the company uses the term to describe elements unique to its platform, and where the company has gone a step further by adding interactivity and data-driven dynamicity.

“Creative personalization and real-time optimization are critical for advertising efficiency and effectiveness, but adoption still lags industrywide, and is still in its infancy when it comes to the most important formats in video and streaming,” said Vaccarella.

“One of the central hurdles to adoption is that no single platform has put media and creative into a single hub. NEXT finally cracks that code by bridging the gap between media and creative in a single workflow.”

NEXT is currently available to brands and agencies both as a self-serve platform and as the backbone of the managed services available through its Strategic Partner Program. Other technology companies, including Premion, an OTT ad company, are already using Connected-Stories.

“The rise of connected TV has brought new capabilities to advertisers, one of the most powerful of which is dynamic creative,” said Dave Marquard, Head of Product at Premion. “In teaming with Connected-Stories, Premion enables local advertisers to deliver personalized, one-to-one messaging to streaming audiences across the U.S. and we look forward to building on our collaboration.”

Vaccarella describes NEXT as the next iteration of the company’s CMP, thanks to both new capabilities and the critical decision to host the entire platform within the cloud. Advertisers and agencies are also gaining access to an advanced creative intelligence suite that lets them look at dynamic multimodal ads in granular detail frame-by-frame, down to how often consumers interacted with individual elements. This end-to-end offering, which features everything from real-time creative personalization to measurement to campaign optimization, is unprecedented in the market, and will be critical as advertisers expand their connected TV campaigns in 2023.

Connected-Stories is also launching its Strategic Partner Program, a custom managed service offering designed to help brands automate, deploy, and optimize results-driven ad creative in real-time.

Brands utilizing the Strategic Partner Program receive:

• Access to a dedicated team of creative product specialists for creative building and strategy.
• Analysis and insights deep-dives with Connected-Stories data scientists.
• Hands-on support and 1:1 communications covering creative, tech, and insights.
• Access to the Connected-Stories NEXT platform and Creative Intelligence Dashboard

Initially launched in 2016 in Europe, Connected-Stories works with top agency holding companies such as Dentsu, Omnicom, and Havas, as well as McDonald’s, Audi, Mercedes, Bacardi, AT&T, and Sky Broadcasting. Connected-Stories recently completed a $2M Seed round led by BlackSheep MadTech Fund (managed by Eureka! Venture SGR

Other new capabilities in the NEXT platform include:

• Completely cloud-native. Connected-Stories’ entire CMP is now cloud-native, providing unlimited scalability and making it easy to add new features. The platform is also secure by design and sustainable. This also provides interoperability with cloud-based intelligence tools, first-party databases, CRM platforms, and other technology.
• Real-time previews. NEXT enables advertisers to adjust multimodal creative while viewing a real-time preview of how those assets appear together. This simulates real-time signals, testing how creative will display in every context.
• Turnkey creative formats, without sacrificing control. NEXT allows users the freedom to choose from thousands of creative templates, or to make their own dynamic and multimodal content using the platform’s Creative Studio feature.
• Improved UX and workflow. NEXT was designed from the ground up with the end user in mind. Its elegant and updated UX will help to democratize access to AI-powered creative optimization by making it more seamless, intuitive, and zero-code.
• Creative Intelligence and analytics. NEXT is built explicitly for analyzing multimodal content and recognizing atomic objects frame-by-frame. The platform provides real-time insights into the impact of ad content experiences via granular insights and data visualization based on time, context, interaction and audience analysis. Deeper analysis is possible through interactive heat maps, interaction analysis by widget, drop off and interactions by time. Advertisers can interactively compare creatives side-by-side for A/B or multivariate tests.
• Improved optimization. Advertisers can use the new Creative Intelligence features to improve their overall optimization strategies, delivering a better campaign experience for consumers while also driving performance.