Connected TV Advertising: Four Things We’ve Learned With Performance TV

7 Min Read

Happy birthday(ish) to us. We’re celebrating over a decade in ad tech, and six years in Connected TV. As Performance TV pioneers, our whirlwind of a ride has us taking a walk down memory lane to note down some of the key takeaways from our journey.

1. CTV Is a Performance Channel. Period.

We’ve proved the haters wrong: Connected TV isn’t just TV; it’s another digital channel that can be added to your performance marketing mix. It can be targeted, launched, and reported on in the same way as you would with social media or display.

Such a performance channel achieves a few things:

• Performance TV ensures your marketing budget is used efficiently. MNTN enables audience targeting at a very granular level—so you’re not wasting precious dollars on audiences who aren’t interested in your brand. We do this through MNTN Matched, the world’s first keyword-based audience builder for CTV, which lets advertisers match with the consumers who are most likely to buy their products.

• It can be accurately tracked, measured and reported. Performance TV comes with all the bells and whistles—it’s a supercharged creative offering with the reporting capabilities to match. (More on the “creative” bit in a minute.) On a single interface, you can view who is visiting your brand’s website and converting after watching a Connected TV ad. We also know reporting isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, which is why we built the platform to be easy for everyone to use. This means you can handpick whichever metrics you’d like to view, and configure your reports to suit your needs.

• Track Connected TV like any digital marketing channel. Our platform is built for performance, so should it be measured as such.  We’re in sync with Google Analytics—every performance marketer’s trusty weapon—to ensure that MNTN Performance TV can be measured alongside all of your other performance campaigns and give advertisers a holistic view of how their digital campaigns are comparing overall.

2. Audiences Are More Connected to Your Brand on Performance TV

We love a good statistic here at MNTN, so here’s one for the books: Shoppers are not only twice as likely  to buy a product after seeing it on Connected TV, but have twice as much affinity with these ads than on Linear TV. That’s why MNTN exclusively serves Performance TV ads to television screens. But we also know we live in a mobile-first society, and audiences are going to have their devices in hand when they watch (also known as the “Second-Screen” phenomenon).Performance TV campaigns also extend your campaign message beyond the TV screen to every device in the household—including phones, tablets, and desktops—to keep your message fresh as your audience moves through their day. This is how it works on MNTN Performance TV:

• Viewer is served a targeted Performance TV ad on their CTV supported device, but has their mobile phone close by. Our platform serves 15- or 30-second ads, which are non-skippable and in HD to ensure a premium and fully-immersive ad experience.

• Upon viewing the ad (with a call-to-action to the advertiser’s website), the viewer wants to learn more, so they pull up the website on their phone (or tablet  or laptop).

• Our MNTN Multi-Touch feature enhances the overall ad experience, keeping your brand top-of-mind through targeted and relevant ads across mobile and desktop—all tied to your Connected TV campaign—that reach your audience at multiple touchpoints along the customer funnel. 

3. Quality > Quantity

Yes, users are consuming content on mobile devices more than ever before. But not all content—not by a long shot. Did you know 88% of American households now own at least one internet-connected TV device? Or that 70% of Connected TV  is streamed on TVs? If we study the user patterns from signup through to viewing, it’s clear that Connected TV is a winner over time.

As you can see in the visual above, the migration from other devices to Connected TV is a quick one, all thanks to these factors:

• The Living Room Quality experience, which makes for uninterrupted, fully engaged viewing.

• It’s not just about the platform/device people use to consume content. It’s quality programming that gets people to sign up to Connected TV services in the first place. This is why we only serve ads on top-tier ad-supported networks like CNN, ESPN, Food Network, and CNBC.

Considering the similar amount of time spent on TV versus mobile, advertisers get a lot more value out of delivering Performance TV ads. Unlike Linear TV, where you’ll find three to five commercials squeezed between programmed content, Connected TV ads appear less frequently, with just one to two ads at a time. Here’s why this matters:

• Ad recall and attention is likely to be higher with fewer ads. The majority of internet users find ads intrusive—but we’re big believers in quality over quantity. Our platform is designed to deliver compelling storytelling  on premium TV networks that practically strikes back at the many issues that users have with advertising culture, reshaping it into an elevated experience instead of a disturbance.

• Even if viewers don’t convert right away, they’re still likely to engage and show interest in the brand—they might very well be your next loyal customer. MNTN Performance TV was designed to work with shopper behavior by serving ads not only on Connected TV, but other household devices (thanks to MNTN Multi-touch) to reinforce your brand message and be top of mind when they’re ready to convert.

The learning never stops, though! We’re continually redefining and evolving our solution to help our customers achieve their advertising goals, and we have some exciting updates coming your way this year, so watch this space.

4. Television Makes for an Effective Retargeting Tool 

Say what, now? Yes, you can indeed retarget on Connected TV—it wouldn’t be a true performance ad platform otherwise! We let advertisers retarget however they feel would best resonate with their audience, be it serving a user who visited your site a retargeted Connected TV ad or vice versa. It’s proven that this works, too. This ties back into our Living Room Quality offering—Performance TV has an average 97% completion rate, which means audiences are engaged with the content, which drives better performance than other metrics like display retargeting. 

But how would you know who clicks on your ad from a Connected TV commercial, though? What was once a fantasy for many marketers is now a reality, thanks to MNTN Verified Visits™. This feature allows you to track when someone views your ad, and whatever interactions they have with your brand afterward. This is the data with the most power to optimize your future campaigns and guide your digital marketing strategy (in addition to the retargeting benefits).

The list of our clients with retargeting success stories keeps growing. Take this major home supply retailer, for example, who tested Performance TV retargeting against their Display-Only retargeting campaign. Spoiler: Performance TV retargeting outperformed across all major metrics like ROAS, CPV, site conversions, and site visits—with a better ROI to boot.

So there you have it—our walk down memory lane has been nothing short of rewarding, but we’re just getting started. Connected TV has a bright future ahead, and we’re looking forward to seeing where that road takes us.