OTT refers to over-the-top media service and represents the unified term for video content delivery via the internet to any device. Connected TV, also known as CTV, can be any physical device that delivers video content – a smart TV, a gaming console, or a streaming stick like Amazon Fire Stick, Apple TV, Roku, or Chromecast.

If you are someone over the age of twenty-five you probably have memories of visiting the local video shop every weekend. The rise to prominence of CTV is associated with the arrival of Netflix which drove video shops out of business.

In 1999, the digital video recorder (a.k.a. the DVR) launched. It allowed users to record their favorite TV shows and shortly after the set top boxes arrived. In 2005 YouTube was founded, which at the time was powered by Flash Player. For the following year, the platform surpassed 25 million views. In 2019 the streaming wars between Disney and Netflix naturally drove audiences to switch from watching traditional cable to cord cutting. This pushed video-streaming services to offer exclusive content and subscriptions grew in significant numbers.

Where there is a big audience interest, there is a potential for advertising, so marketers invested in programmatic advertising, which has made the automation of buying and selling ad placements on streaming platforms much easier and more effective than ever before.  

How can CTV help my advertising campaign?

OTT and CTV have emerged as alternatives to traditional television, boasting a range of advantages over their predecessors. One significant advantage lies in the abundance of first-party data available, coupled with the ability to swiftly deliver targeted advertisements.

 OTT advertising technology empowers advertisers by enabling them to effectively reach their desired audience based on several factors such as demographics, interests, context, time of day, device, and location. In contrast, linear TV heavily relied on generic Comscore and Nielsen data, which often carried margins of error.

Incorporating Connected TV (CTV) advertising into your marketing strategy can be beneficial for growing your business. Let’s say you have a sports goods shop, and you want us to help you reach devices on which users watch streaming services.

The biggest advantage of this type of advertising is that it is targeted, because CTV allows you to deliver a personalized advertisement to a specific audience based on demographics, behavior, or interests. Let’s use our sports goods shop for example: by targeting sports enthusiasts or local viewers, you can ensure your ads reach the right people who are more likely to become your customers. In your case, the BrandIQ team can create a personalized CTV ad campaign targeting viewers who frequently stream sports events or visit sports-related sites.

Brand awareness and recognition is enhanced by CTV as it gives opportunity to promote your products or services to a wide range of potential users. CTV also offers geotargeted audiences. This is particularly useful for small businesses with physical locations, such as our sports goods shop, as you can target viewers within your local community and increase foot traffic to your store.

Connected TV allows a flexible way of advertising as it provides detailed analytics and insights, allowing us to track the performance of your campaign, so that we can perform different strategies for better results when it is needed.

With CTV there is the ability of cross-channel integration so we can create a cohesive brand experience. By synchronizing CTV campaigns with social media, email marketing and your website, we can reinforce your message across different touchpoints and increase overall engagement to maximize your profits.

What is ACR?

Automatic content recognition, also known as ACR, represents a technology built into smart TVs that is used to identify what is playing on it. ACR enables a smart device to listen and/or see what’s playing on screen. The recognition can be audio or visually based.

Almost any content that is played on a smart TV and carries an audio or visual signal can be identified by ACR. It is used to measure viewership and ad performance. ACR targets ads and personalizes content recommendations.

While streaming services can track what people are watching on their television, ACR technology enables this tracking across connected TV platforms, but also on  other devices plugged into an ACR – including set-top boxes and Blu-ray players. That data can then be used to target ads to a specific audience, to recommend shows and movies to users and to retarget TV viewers with ads on other devices . ACR data allows measuring ad exposures at the individual device level.

Moreover, the information regarding the advertisements or programming displayed on an individual’s TV can be leveraged to construct audience profiles. These profiles may consist of groups of individuals who watch specific shows or have been exposed to ads. Additionally, this data can be linked to other data sources, such as IP addresses, email addresses, or even physical addresses to establish connections with existing profiles and gather insights about individuals belonging to specific demographic and income groups.

We at BrandIQ integrate ACR data with other datasets, so it becomes possible to determine the effectiveness of your advertising campaigns on smart TVs.  We measure the number of viewers who made purchases or visited your sports shop website after being exposed to your ads.

CTV is one of the best ways to make your advertising campaign successful. It ensures your ads get to the right audience and is extremely flexible, so it makes the right changes during the campaign to achieve optimal results.

Contact BrandIQ today and start your marketing journey with us!