How to Integrate Streaming Advertising Across Your Larger Marketing Strategy
Streaming TV is one of the freshest faces in digital advertising. An increasing number of brands are integrating this channel into their overall marketing strategy, and for good reason.
To discuss these reasons and more, Tinuiti spoke to Devin McGaughey, CEO of Prospect Point Media, and Stefanos Metaxas, Chief Strategy Officer of Bliss Point Media, in the webinar The Future of TV is Performance Streaming. We’ve included some of the best insights from the webinar below.
Why streaming advertising?
Traditional TV broadcasting has long been the go-to strategy for major consumer brands around the world, and still represents a significant chunk of many business’ marketing budget, even now.
That strategy is becoming dangerously obsolete. With more and more consumers moving to on-demand content via video streaming and OTT services, viewership of regular TV content is shrinking – and fast. According to a report by Nielsen, streaming video now demands a higher audience share than broadcast TV.
Streaming revenue has grown from $6.1 billion in 2010 to nearly $130 billion in 2021. By 2026 OTT media is projected to reach over $210 billion. That’s a sizeable chunk of the market, and it’s only getting bigger.
But broadcast TV isn’t just lagging in audience share. It’s also lagging in brand-friendly adtech. TV is and has always been notoriously hard to measure. And while it’s improved in some areas, it’s still behind in measurement and reporting – two of the most critical areas to brands.
Contrast this with how streaming advertising handles metrics, and it’s easy to see why brands are making the switch.
“Streaming allows for measurement precision,” Metaxas says. “It allows for large scale and also allows for data ownership. This makes it an overall perfect contender for a performance marketer.”
“If there’s one thing you take away from all this,” Metaxas adds, “it’s that the ‘black box’ days are behind us and you can grow this into a very meaningful campaign.”
Brands are clearly paying attention to this shift. According to McGaughey, “Marketers are shifting spend to streaming as ad-supported providers continue to scale. Within our own client base, most of the people we work with have been successful in making OTT a meaningful part of their marketing stack. They’ve been ramping disproportionately to the industry’s growth.”
As proof of this, McGaughey notes that Prospect Point Media’s September 2020 cohort has ramped spend by around 75% as opposed to the industry standard of 30%.
Now that we’re clear on why streaming advertising is worth your attention, let’s discuss how exactly streaming advertising is able to integrate and be an integral part of your larger marketing strategy.
Streaming video is a full-funnel performance channel
Many marketers believe that streaming advertising is only for driving upper-funnel awareness. And while it definitely is good at that, that’s not all it’s good at.
Streaming video offers advertisers a good variety of sales and marketing initiatives, and you can leverage it as a full-funnel performance channel that can do more than just build your brand. It can engage and move customers through the entire funnel – provided you have the right mix of ad content.
“With the vast majority of our clients,” Metaxas says, “we discuss BOFU metrics, cost of acquisition, and how we can tailor the campaign to maximize the volume at the bottom of the funnel.”
Household ID overcomes attribution obstacles
One common objection to ad-supported streaming TV is that it faces the same attribution issues that broadcast TV does: that the lack of click-based performance marketing keeps brands blind to actual campaign performance.
But McGaughey says that this is not the case at all. “The way we do it is pretty simple, in principle. We use Household ID Matching, from impression to KPI.” When a consumer sees an ad on their Smart TV, they usually search the brand some time later on their computer or on another device and then make a purchase. Household ID Matching is able to associate those other devices as belonging to the same household through unique digital identifiers, and thus attribute the ad conversion correctly.
Streaming allows for robust incrementality testing
If broadcast TV, with all of its attribution challenges, can be a central part of many business’ marketing strategies, then streaming TV deserves a spot too, thanks to its capability for incrementality testing.
Incrementality testing is a mathematical approach to advertising that helps you measure the true incremental contribution of a media channel, campaign, ad, or tactic to overall campaign performance.
“Audience holdouts are our most popular method of incrementality testing,” says McGaughey. “You show an ad to a treatment group, and then you’ll show a public service announcement or another brand’s ad to a control group, and then evaluate the response differential between the two.”
With incrementality testing, you’ll be able to invest your marketing budget with greater care and precision – only spending where its most likely to have an impact.
Your data is your data
Data is the bedrock of any effective marketing strategy, which means it’s important for you to have free and convenient access to that data.
According to McGaughey, “One of the benefits of working with an agency or partner is that you get consistent data among all the different networks with which you’re running campaigns. This is both impression-level data and response-level data.”
“We are very transparent with the data we send back. We believe that the data is the brand’s data, We want to make sure it’s accessible to the brand in the most useful way. We commonly set up a custom data pipeline that dumps data into an S3 bucket or directly into a platform of the brand’s choosing.”
Streaming advertising has the potential to be an important component of you larger marketing strategy. With its ability to address consumers at every stage of the funnel, target specific households and markets, and obtain transparent data that unlocks valuable consumer insights, it’s no wonder that OTT advertising is growing in popularity among consumer brands.
Want to discuss streaming advertising in more detail? Reach out to us!
You Might Be Interested In
