Cannes is just around the corner, and once again CTV will be one of the major talking points across the Croisette. Here Alex Hole, SVP and General Manager of Samsung Europe and MENA, explains how the conversation around CTV advertising is evolving, and outlines the specific aspects of CTV which he expects will be generating the most chatter on the yachts and beaches next week. [Partnered post]
Cannes may have wrapped up its iconic film festival, but this year’s Cannes Lions should keep its eye on the screen.
As the industry’s finest creatives and media minds flock to the South of France to reflect on, celebrate, and lay out fresh strategies for the next year in advertising, a few topics are set to dominate. Our industry’s largest agencies, WPP, Publicis, are remodelling their approaches and winning, or losing, global clients as a result. Critical conversations around the role of AI in adland and the race to attract and retain new talent are already filling the festival’s programming.
But with the likes of Netflix, Disney+, and ITV all posting a rise in ad spend over the last quarter, and with hit shows like Severance, White Lotus and the Traitors continuing to dominate the cultural zeitgeist, let’s not lose sight of one of our oldest and most enduring channels – television.
Television has always been part of the enduring success of advertising, and its newest iteration – CTV – will remain a key part of adland’s future. In fact, with video ad spend rising by 24.5 percent last year in Europe – of course driven both by social and CTV spend – I’d argue the channel is only getting started.
As brands seek measurability and more accurate targeting, they are also striking the balance between brand and performance advertising. CTV offers the best of both – the mass appeal of silver screen moments combined with the rich insights of digital – and it is evolving just as quickly as its counterparts in the media mix.
An ever changing channel
TV advertising hasn’t just endured because it indulges some of our best storytelling as an industry – it’s a dynamic and responsive medium. TV viewers know what they want, and they’re using their televisions to facilitate a broad media diet that is reshaping the medium.
UGC apps like YouTube are now a significant part of viewers’ TV diets, while our data shows that gaming rose to 11 percent of overall TV viewing time in the UK in the second half of last year. Viewers now curate their media consumption through a broad range of video apps and gaming platforms, creating a rich and varied landscape.
While consumers turn to an average of four apps to shape their TV experiences, even looking at just the top 20 streaming apps will reveal more than 2000 possible combinations for media buyers to navigate.
But hyper-curated viewing leads to higher attention, satisfaction, and results for advertisers. Much like apps like Crunchy Roll feed an audience of anime lovers, through the rich data offered by CTV, advertisers in turn have the chance to reach these audiences based on real-time interests, when they are most engaged.
New formats
And this year’s Upfronts only reiterated just how much innovation is happening in this space – from AI-powered contextual ad placements, to gamified ad formats, to new and exciting ways to target audiences. But perhaps what’s most exciting about this space is that, with subscription video-on-demand streamers now putting ad revenue at the forefront of their business model, each new offering is now built with advertisers – and ROAS – in mind.
IP-based gaming, live streaming, and sports rights investments all create opportunities for brands to show up on TV in new and more exciting ways. In the UK, we’ve just rolled out Gamebreaks, branded mini games that boost ad recall by 53 percent. Inviting audiences not just to watch, but to engage with their ad break, the new format associates brands with a moment of levity and was preferred by 89 percent of viewers.
Meanwhile, shoppable ads in the US allow users to seamlessly engage with the brands on their television without disrupting the flow of their favourite show. And as these new formats reinvent what a CTV ad can look like, the same transformations are happening behind the scenes.
Innovative data strategies
As a dynamic, data-centric channel, CTV is also transforming how we can target and measure ad campaigns. Machine learning technology is helping advertisers gauge and tweak their media buying in real time, and pull thousands of data points together to make sense of today’s fragmented viewing habits.
But efficiency is about more than the bottom line. Adverts only work when the viewer wants to see them, when they offer value to their target’s day. Ad wastage, then, leads to a bad TV experience.
Using new technologies to build lookalike machine learning models, brands and advertisers can now ensure that they reach the most relevant audiences at scale, while content providers – from the likes of Samsung TV Plus to ITVX – preserve a seamless, satisfying experience for viewers at home.
Beyond new technologies, data scientists are also inventing more creative and human-centric strategies to help advertisers better understand who they are targeting. Our TV habits now follow us far beyond the confines of our living room, or even beyond our TV screen. We stream our favourite shows on our phones on the go, and at the same time, 72 percent of Brits now use their smartphone during each TV session. This second screen, for so long treated as a distraction by advertisers, presents yet another opportunity.
I’m expecting cross-device insights to be a critical CTV topic at Cannes, as advertisers look to layer data sets from across our devices to launch more sophisticated, effective campaigns. My television may know which four apps make up the foundation of my viewing habits, but when overlaid with the apps I scroll through on my commute – the fact that I open Strava every day, or browse on British Airways after dinner – we can gain a much richer insight into which ads will be directly relevant to me.
When the landscape is as fragmented as it is today, these data innovations are perhaps the most important. It brings television’s formidable power for persuasion into the future, combining the very best of old-school adland with robust digital strategies. And as I fly out to France this weekend, I will be thinking about how CTV’s drive towards improvement and reinvention has kept this long-beloved channel firmly in the spotlight.
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