CTV took off during the pandemic and it shows no signs of slowing down. According to ComScore’s annual State of Streaming Report, the hours of CTV viewing per household surged 21% in 2023, reaching nearly two billion hours. 2024 promises to be deliver even more viewing hours.
As a marketer, this presents opportunities and challenges for you to reach and engage your audience.
Ad-Support CTV is a Growing Opportunity
In early 2024, Amazon informed its subscriber base that it would begin to show ads on Amazon Prime, but users who wished not to see them could pay a higher price.
Amazon was simply following the lead of almost every streaming provider in the market. HBO, Netflix, and Disney+ now actively encourage their subscribers to opt for an ad-supported tier. Why? Ad-supported streaming plans are more profitable than ad-free plans. “Executives at streaming services like Disney, Netflix, Paramount, Warner Bros. Discovery, and NBCUniversal say that ad-supported plans generate more revenue per user than ad-free plans,” writes the Hollywood reporter. This transformation means that advertisers have access to more CTV inventory than ever before.
For advertisers, CTV is a win-win channel. Consumers are more engaged, as we see from the escalating number of viewing hours. And as a digital channel, it is quickly evolving into a performance channel, enabling marketers to home in on their ideal audience and drive business outcomes.
Challenges Remain
As exciting as CTV is for advertisers, the format faces challenges:
- Inventory fragmentation. For many advertisers, content serves as a proxy to the audience. But CTV is distributed across multiple streaming providers, MVPDs, and platforms, making it difficult for advertisers to buy ad space in a streamlined manner.
- Inconsistent Campaign Metrics. This too is a challenge that stems from the fragmentation of CTV. The multitude of platforms and providers invariably leads to inconsistent measurement standards and methods. With a mishmash of data, advertisers are hard pressed to measure the success of their CTV advertising campaigns, and to compare results across content, audience and channels.
- Limited Targeting Capabilities. The fragmentation of CTV inventory also limits the targeting options available to advertisers. Targeting is typically limited to technical attributes such as device, operating system, and connection speed. On top of that, outside of automated content recognition (ACR) data collected by the smart TV, marketers have limited access to what the consumer is actually watching. Yet content often serves as a proxy to the consumer.
- Deterministic audience data is expensive. Audience data, built on household identifiers is available and can help address fragmentation while reaching the correct target group.. But it is very expensive, and rarely scales.
The Solution – Digiseg
Digiseg offers a solution that allows advertisers to target households at scale, efficiently and cost effectively.
- No Tracking, No Cookies. Our cookie-free approach means we were born for CTV. Advertisers can reach their entire audiences in every market based on demographics and consumers needs..
- Household Segmentation. To Digiseg, the big screen in a household is just another household channel we can help advertisers reach at scale. Build your audience based on who you want to reach — families, home owners, lifecycle stage, consumer needs..
- Unified Targeting. We offer 39 core audiences that you can combine to reach your ideal prospects at scale, across 50 markets. We provide you with one list to target across all CTV inventory. Check out our interactive audience builder to see how easy it is.
- Access to Premium Inventory. Our curated deals provide you with access to premium inventory that isn’t always available through the exchanges.
See how it worked for BMW.
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