While TV has been long-established as a brand-building medium, CTV is gaining traction as a performance channel, due to innovations in measurement and privacy-preserving technology. For mobile app marketers, this is opening up a new environment to reach highly engaged audiences, writes Alexei Moltchan, Vice President of Product Management at Verve, with the rise of “second-screening” boosting viewers’ mobile activity while watching streaming TV.
App marketers are always looking for the most efficient advertising channels to maximise their return on investment. Historically, achieving that has typically meant dividing performance advertising budgets across three buckets: in-app, search, and social. This approach, however, is rapidly shifting amid the performance revolution of connected TV (CTV).
CTV has come far in the last decade. Commanding increasingly vast audience attention, it offers a strong lever for driving massive scale, with Brits spending more than 1,400 hours glued to streaming content per year, 79 percent of US households owning a smart TV, and the global set-top-box market now valued at over $27 billion.
Crucially, advances in targeting and measurement precision have also made CTV a much better fit for the performance-first app economy. Now an effective full-funnel medium, CTV is no longer just the programmatic-ready reboot of linear TV. It’s a powerful means of driving performance that’s currently underutilised by the majority of app marketers, which means there is a huge opportunity for forward-looking players to get ahead.
The perfect window of opportunity
We’ve reached the perfect point in CTV’s growth journey for app marketers not only to get involved, but double-down on it. On the one hand, the channel’s grip on audiences has hit critical mass with cord-cutters and cord-nevers making video on-demand and streaming services their primary methods for accessing an endless array of shows, films, live sports, entertainment and more.
On the other hand, CTV’s performance capabilities are relatively new, but already robust, sophisticated, and still largely underexplored by app marketers. This means smart app marketers have the chance to gain an early mover advantage, before mainstream adoption explodes.
While competition remains relatively low, there are cost-effective opportunities available for them to serve big-screen ads that not only spark recognition, recall, and positive associations among high-value audiences but also tangibly boost the bottom line. And this is especially true given the existence of technological solutions that prove CTV’s ability to drive consumer actions at the bottom of the marketing funnel in a data-driven way.
A clearer line of sight on ROAS
Conventional TV ads have long suffered from an unfavourable reputation when it comes to performance efforts; seen as ideal for blasting out mass messages and keeping brands front of mind, yet ill-suited to driving quantified impact. The industry, however, has started to recognise the unfairness of this perception as it became clear that consumers who use their phones or tablets while watching TV (second-screening viewers) are often inspired to visit brand sites, download apps, and make purchases.
From the outset, CTV’s digital delivery has allowed marketers to achieve even more accurate targeting and tailoring of ad serving to audience preferences in a contextual, privacy-safe manner. Over time, with recognition of CTV’s ability to fuel tangible performance outcomes, mobile measurement providers (MMPs) have developed capabilities that prioritise CTV ad exposure in attribution waterfalls, alongside other channels, helping to close the CTV attribution gap in a precise and privacy-preserving way.
Such technological advancements include creating household-level IP-based matching and device graph technologies that can, based on opted-in data, determine when different devices are likely linked to the same household, allowing marketers to focus on assessing behaviour at the household (not user) level. Providing a clear picture of connections between CTV and important consumer actions, these approaches have made it possible to accurately measure installs, sign-ups, and purchases influenced by ads, without compromising individual privacy.
Moreover, they can also attribute the indirect, “assisted” ripple effect of CTV on overall return on ad spend (ROAS) across channels. Not all consumers will hit the download button or open apps immediately, but thanks to the lasting impact of quality big screen CTV creative, there is a strong chance that ads will influence broader conversions by making individuals more disposed to engage next time they see a promotional message for the featured brand – and household-level analysis makes it easier to connect the dots, as a conversion can happen on any device and operating system (e.g. a Tablet with Android OS, iPhone with iOS or even on the web on Windows PC). So, instead of purely relying on social, search, and in-app to capture interest and fuel responses, app marketers can significantly broaden exposure and effectiveness at multiple levels. Indeed, according to recent studies from WPP Media, the performance of lower-funnel response channels is up to 13.7 percent higher when TV is included in media activity.
Following the new CTV curve
The only real way for app marketers to find out what CTV can do for them is through practical experience. As with any new venture, it will be important to embrace an experimental mindset and accept some uncertainty, although CTV’s position as an established advertising channel and increasingly strong performance driver should keep risks to a minimum.
Regardless of whether marketers have run TV before or not, initial activity will entail an investment allocation within the media plan. Apart from re-distributing marketing budgets from standard performance channels (such as search and social), they’ll need to work with trusted MMPs on establishing measurement setups configured to assess performance against key conversion goals for CTV as an advertising medium.
The scope to deploy familiar metrics, however, will help ensure efforts can be translated to CTV with minimal friction. As long as MMPs can connect CTV exposure to specific consumer responses, app marketers can port across most of their usual performance measures to track campaign success, including cost per install (CPI), and desired in-app actions (such as cost per acquisition, CPA), and even ROAS. Furthermore, if they want to have full parity, they can even evaluate an adjusted version of the obvious exception, click-through rates, by using QR codes to trace click-equivalent interaction. Any requirements for data sharing should also generally be limited, unless they want to re-target or suppress specific audiences.
Finally, choosing the right demand-side platform (DSP) or media buying partner is key. On top of prioritising top-grade supply and transparency, leaning towards vendors that understand how to fuel strong results in contextually driven privacy-first environments will be vital, especially when we consider the fact CTV is a one-to-many medium with strong interest-based signals, such as different genres and shows consumers are engaging with.
The time is ripe to leverage CTV’s budding performance era. As attitudes change and fresh promotional frontiers open up, the biggest risk for app marketers isn’t necessarily stepping outside of their comfort zone and exploring emerging opportunities; it’s losing ground to their competitors by deliberating for too long and missing a prime innovation moment, meaning the time to act is now.
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