The magic of TV commercials: There’s nothing quite like it in advertising. This ad channel has a certain mystique that you won’t find anywhere else.
Organizations hand out awards for the best commercials. They get ranked in top 10 lists. Most importantly for advertisers, TV ads deliver massive ROI. And in the past, they required equally massive budgets and media plans. That meant they were traditionally reserved only for a certain section of the ad world—a few thousand advertisers among millions.
But let’s not focus on those select few. Instead, let’s talk about those millions of advertisers who have, up until very recently, avoided television. They tend to be small to midsize businesses with big spend on paid search and social. They commit their ad dollars when they can be certain they’ll reach their target audience and see measurable returns. They care about campaign performance because if they nail it, they can scale it and grow their business.
Surely these smaller businesses dedicating a budget to television, with its hazy metrics and limited audience targeting, would be a foolhardy endeavor? Not so fast. The rise of connected TV (CTV) has changed television advertising.
You can target specific audiences and accurately measure results. You can treat it just like paid search and social. You can get your brand on TV and deliver on your performance goals. That’s a pretty big deal for performance advertisers who count themselves among the millions of brands yet to make the move to TV—and a huge opportunity for anyone looking to drive better return on ad spend.
Automated, simple and familiar
It’s not only the digital backbone of CTV that has made television a growth channel for brands of all sizes. It’s the accessible advertiser experience, as well.
While not universally available—it depends on the ad solution you’re using—self-serve CTV advertising makes TV ads accessible and intuitive for marketers new to the space. Traditional TV advertising may be a complex beast, fraught with unknowns, but launching a CTV campaign can be as easy as setting up a paid social campaign.
Adjustments are a breeze, too. You can modify audience targeting mid-flight, update your ad creative, and rely on automation to optimize media buys to boost results. All in a way manual optimization can’t keep up with.
Smart automation is especially useful for smaller businesses that value time at a premium. They’re busy wearing many hats and running into unique, often scary challenges every day, so CTV’s ability to offer an excellent impact-to-effort ratio is a big deal.
Better performance = bigger growth
As they say, the (performance) proof is in the pudding. Between intelligent automated optimization and audience targeting that actually reaches the viewers you care about, CTV makes it that much easier to hit your campaign goals. And because it’s all measurable, you don’t need to rely on a trusting nature and upbeat attitude to get a sense of whether everything is working as intended.
These fundamentals play a major role in growing a business, whether it’s a startup ecommerce beauty brand or a local auto dealership. Hyper-targeting your audience to drive them to your dealership and gauging success is pretty fantastic when it comes to measuring performance.
That was the experience of John Watts, digital strategist for the Houston Hyundai Auto Group. “When I was first looking for an ad solution, I was focused solely on something that would offer us a high level of awareness,” said Watts when describing his hunt for a CTV platform. “But I realized that there was much more that could be done with CTV advertising.”
By leaning into CTV’s rich performance data and its ability to retarget previous website visitors, Watts was able to make consumer behavior actionable when they visited the auto group websites.
“I wanted to ensure that if someone visited one of our websites, they had a high likelihood of engaging,” Watts said. “If a consumer takes some kind of action on our site, I can measure that and then use that knowledge to make informed campaign decisions.”
Those campaign decisions paid off. The CTV campaign delivered an 81% month-over-month improvement for cost per acquisition. Additionally, site visits went up by 11% and average raw conversions increased by 24%. That’s the power of performance on the TV screen.
Small business, scaled
CTV has made it possible for smaller brands to compete with industry giants on the TV screen. They don’t need to trade the advantages of their other relied-upon performance channels to do it, either. With CTV, they get performance and prestige, all rolled into one tidy package that can—and will—fast-track growth for millions of advertisers in a flash.
—
Imani Clark leads the platform experience team at MNTN. Her team is focused on empowering customers with the knowledge and resources they need to be successful within the platform.
