Earlier this year, Nielsen reported that for the first time in history, TV viewers spent more time streaming content than they did watching cable television.1 This shift offers a massive opportunity for TV marketers who wish to get their message in front of increasingly digital consumers on the big screen in the living room. But as new ad-supported streaming services enter the market, you may find it challenging to navigate this increasingly crowded and fragmented TV ecosystem.
That’s why we recommend choosing a demand-side platform (DSP) partner that provides a single point of access to all ad-supported streaming providers in one place. By consolidating your Connected TV (CTV) buys on The Trade Desk, you can tap in to the largest marketplace of premium, high-quality inventory across all your publisher partners. Plus, you can get access to a true end-to-end buying solution — from planning tools and insights that can help inform your budget allocation decisions, to data-driven activation and optimizations that can enable you to control exactly how often viewers see your ad, to measurement tools that can help you understand how CTV ad exposures are driving your desired business outcomes, whatever your KPIs may be.
As advertisers continue to activate upfront and scatter budgets, we wanted to take this opportunity to highlight some of our features that you can leverage today to help you drive the most value on CTV.
1. Audience Accelerator
We believe that the key to activating a successful CTV campaign starts with leveraging the right data to inform your strategy. Audience Accelerator is our linear TV data solution that aggregates TV ad exposure and content viewership data from a variety of premium partners. You can use these data segments in several ways.
- Incremental reach: Use suppression targeting to exclude viewers who have already seen your ad on traditional television so you can drive the most incremental reach beyond linear TV.
- Content viewership prospecting: Target viewers based on the types of content they’re watching, from sports to drama.
- Competitive conquesting: Target viewers who have been exposed to your competitors’ ads to try to win market share.
- Retargeting and sequential messaging: Retarget viewers who have already been exposed to your linear TV ads with sequential messaging on CTV.
2. Advanced Frequency Management
Ad experiences matter. In fact, 88 percent of consumers say brand experiences are as important as a brand’s products and services.2 That’s why we believe that controlling ad frequency is one of the most important things you can do.
When you buy directly from your publisher partners, it’s impossible to control frequency holistically because your ad buys sit in siloes and can’t communicate with one another. In a single show, your viewer can be served an ad by the content owner, the app, and the device based on three different ad buys, multiple times each.
By consolidating your CTV buys on The Trade Desk, you can reach your most valuable audiences across all screens and devices — and control precisely how often they see your ads. With our frequency management tools, it really is as easy as saying, “I want my viewers to see my ad at least three times per week but no more than once per day, and no more than seven times per month.” Just input your frequency goals and any desired caps, and our platform will work to achieve it.
What’s more, you can create what we call frequency groups, where you can count various campaigns toward a shared frequency cap, including your programmatic guaranteed (PG) campaigns. While frequency caps can’t be applied to PG campaigns, frequency groups enable your PG impressions to inform your private marketplace (PMP) and open-market buys so that you’re not overexposing viewers across campaigns.
3. Koa Optimizations for incremental reach
Are you looking to maximize reach to your audience that’s no longer watching linear TV? Our AI, Koa™, can help you do just that. Koa uses linear TV data to understand which pockets of viewers are most likely to be cord-cutters or light TV viewers, then enables you to set parameters that automatically prioritize your spend in an effort to help you drive the most incremental reach for your campaign. Just make sure you’ve selected incremental reach as a KPI during campaign setup. On average, our advertisers see a 15 percent to 20 percent increase in incremental reach when using this feature.3
4. Commitment Manager
As many consumers continue to choose streaming over traditional cable to watch their favorite TV shows, marketers are increasingly executing upfronts programmatically to reach viewers where they are. Commitment Manager can make it easy for you to consolidate and manage your upfront spend commitments on our platform.
The tracking dashboard enables you to analyze spend, pacing, and performance across all your publisher commitments on The Trade Desk, all in one place. When you turn on Commitment Pacing, our platform allows you to set parameters that automatically prioritize spend toward inventory which fulfills your commitment. Commitment Pacing can help you deliver in full while enabling you to maintain control over important campaign elements like audience targeting, frequency management, and data-driven optimizations.
5. Frequency Savings Reporting
With our platform, you can now quantify the value and efficiencies gained from holistic frequency control. Our new frequency savings report can measure your exact budget savings, as well as the number of additional households you were able to reach. In fact, we’ve found that advertisers on our platform save an average of 38 percent of their budgets thanks to frequency caps, resulting in an average 24 percent increased household reach.4
6. TV Quality Index
To facilitate a more positive consumer experience and run a successful CTV campaign, you need to understand the quality of the inventory that you’re running on. Now, for the first time, advertisers can report out on quality. TV Quality Index is a metric that aims to quantify the quality of the inventory you are buying. By shining the light of transparency on CTV experiences, we hope that marketers will be empowered to differentiate the value of impressions amid an increasingly fragmented landscape, and to optimize their campaigns toward higher-quality experiences.
Viewers are turning to CTV in droves, and it’s changing the future of TV advertising. This is a huge opportunity for pioneer brands (like you!) to rethink what is often the largest part of their advertising budget.
With The Trade Desk, you can access industry-leading features and capabilities that can help you drive the most value out of your CTV investment when every dollar matters. To learn more about these features and our end-to-end buying solution, contact us or reach out to your account manager today.
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1 “Streaming Usage Increases 21% in a Year to Now Account for Nearly One-Third of Total TV Time,” Nielsen, July 2022, https://www.nielsen.com/insights/2022/streaming-usage-increases-21-in-a-year-to-now-account-for-nearly-one-third-of-total-tv-time/.
2 “Salesforce Report: Nearly 90% of Buyers Say Experience a Company Provides Matters as Much as Products or Services,” Salesforce News & Insights, https://www.salesforce.com/new....
3 The Trade Desk platform data, 2022.
4 The Trade Desk platform data, 2022.
Earlier this year, Nielsen reported that for the first time in history, TV viewers spent more time streaming content than they did watching cable television.1 This shift offers a massive opportunity for TV marketers who wish to get their message in front of increasingly digital consumers on the big screen in the living room. But as new ad-supported streaming services enter the market, you may find it challenging to navigate this increasingly crowded and fragmented TV ecosystem.
That’s why we recommend choosing a demand-side platform (DSP) partner that provides a single point of access to all ad-supported streaming providers in one place. By consolidating your Connected TV (CTV) buys on The Trade Desk, you can tap in to the largest marketplace of premium, high-quality inventory across all your publisher partners. Plus, you can get access to a true end-to-end buying solution — from planning tools and insights that can help inform your budget allocation decisions, to data-driven activation and optimizations that can enable you to control exactly how often viewers see your ad, to measurement tools that can help you understand how CTV ad exposures are driving your desired business outcomes, whatever your KPIs may be.
As advertisers continue to activate upfront and scatter budgets, we wanted to take this opportunity to highlight some of our features that you can leverage today to help you drive the most value on CTV.
1. Audience Accelerator
We believe that the key to activating a successful CTV campaign starts with leveraging the right data to inform your strategy. Audience Accelerator is our linear TV data solution that aggregates TV ad exposure and content viewership data from a variety of premium partners. You can use these data segments in several ways.
- Incremental reach: Use suppression targeting to exclude viewers who have already seen your ad on traditional television so you can drive the most incremental reach beyond linear TV.
- Content viewership prospecting: Target viewers based on the types of content they’re watching, from sports to drama.
- Competitive conquesting: Target viewers who have been exposed to your competitors’ ads to try to win market share.
- Retargeting and sequential messaging: Retarget viewers who have already been exposed to your linear TV ads with sequential messaging on CTV.
2. Advanced Frequency Management
Ad experiences matter. In fact, 88 percent of consumers say brand experiences are as important as a brand’s products and services.2 That’s why we believe that controlling ad frequency is one of the most important things you can do.
When you buy directly from your publisher partners, it’s impossible to control frequency holistically because your ad buys sit in siloes and can’t communicate with one another. In a single show, your viewer can be served an ad by the content owner, the app, and the device based on three different ad buys, multiple times each.
By consolidating your CTV buys on The Trade Desk, you can reach your most valuable audiences across all screens and devices — and control precisely how often they see your ads. With our frequency management tools, it really is as easy as saying, “I want my viewers to see my ad at least three times per week but no more than once per day, and no more than seven times per month.” Just input your frequency goals and any desired caps, and our platform will work to achieve it.
What’s more, you can create what we call frequency groups, where you can count various campaigns toward a shared frequency cap, including your programmatic guaranteed (PG) campaigns. While frequency caps can’t be applied to PG campaigns, frequency groups enable your PG impressions to inform your private marketplace (PMP) and open-market buys so that you’re not overexposing viewers across campaigns.
3. Koa Optimizations for incremental reach
Are you looking to maximize reach to your audience that’s no longer watching linear TV? Our AI, Koa™, can help you do just that. Koa uses linear TV data to understand which pockets of viewers are most likely to be cord-cutters or light TV viewers, then enables you to set parameters that automatically prioritize your spend in an effort to help you drive the most incremental reach for your campaign. Just make sure you’ve selected incremental reach as a KPI during campaign setup. On average, our advertisers see a 15 percent to 20 percent increase in incremental reach when using this feature.3
4. Commitment Manager
As many consumers continue to choose streaming over traditional cable to watch their favorite TV shows, marketers are increasingly executing upfronts programmatically to reach viewers where they are. Commitment Manager can make it easy for you to consolidate and manage your upfront spend commitments on our platform.
The tracking dashboard enables you to analyze spend, pacing, and performance across all your publisher commitments on The Trade Desk, all in one place. When you turn on Commitment Pacing, our platform allows you to set parameters that automatically prioritize spend toward inventory which fulfills your commitment. Commitment Pacing can help you deliver in full while enabling you to maintain control over important campaign elements like audience targeting, frequency management, and data-driven optimizations.
5. Frequency Savings Reporting
With our platform, you can now quantify the value and efficiencies gained from holistic frequency control. Our new frequency savings report can measure your exact budget savings, as well as the number of additional households you were able to reach. In fact, we’ve found that advertisers on our platform save an average of 38 percent of their budgets thanks to frequency caps, resulting in an average 24 percent increased household reach.4
6. TV Quality Index
To facilitate a more positive consumer experience and run a successful CTV campaign, you need to understand the quality of the inventory that you’re running on. Now, for the first time, advertisers can report out on quality. TV Quality Index is a metric that aims to quantify the quality of the inventory you are buying. By shining the light of transparency on CTV experiences, we hope that marketers will be empowered to differentiate the value of impressions amid an increasingly fragmented landscape, and to optimize their campaigns toward higher-quality experiences.
Viewers are turning to CTV in droves, and it’s changing the future of TV advertising. This is a huge opportunity for pioneer brands (like you!) to rethink what is often the largest part of their advertising budget.
With The Trade Desk, you can access industry-leading features and capabilities that can help you drive the most value out of your CTV investment when every dollar matters. To learn more about these features and our end-to-end buying solution, contact us or reach out to your account manager today.
-
1 “Streaming Usage Increases 21% in a Year to Now Account for Nearly One-Third of Total TV Time,” Nielsen, July 2022, https://www.nielsen.com/insights/2022/streaming-usage-increases-21-in-a-year-to-now-account-for-nearly-one-third-of-total-tv-time/.
2 “Salesforce Report: Nearly 90% of Buyers Say Experience a Company Provides Matters as Much as Products or Services,” Salesforce News & Insights, https://www.salesforce.com/new....
3 The Trade Desk platform data, 2022.
4 The Trade Desk platform data, 2022.