Connected TV

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

Join us as we take a walk down memory lane over the past few years in the Performance TV space.

6 Min Read

We celebrate our ten year anniversary in ad tech this year, and three years in Connected TV. It’s been a whirlwind of a ride and prompted us to take a walk down memory lane and note down some of the key takeaways from our journey.

1. It’s a Performance Channel

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

Such a performance channel achieves a few things:

• Ensures your marketing budget is used efficiently: All in thanks to our partnership with best-in-class data provider, Oracle Data Cloud, this enables audience targeting at a very granular level – so that you’re not wasting precious dollars on audiences who would otherwise not be interested in your brand.

• Can be accurately tracked, measured and reported: Performance TV comes with all the bells and whistles – a super charged creative offering (more on that below) with the reporting capabilities to match. On a single interface, you can view who is visiting your brand’s website and converting after watching your Connected TV ads. Reporting isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, which is  why we’ve built the platform in such a way to make it 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.

• Connected TV as a digital marketing channel: Our platform is built for performance, so should it be measured as such.  We’re in sync with Google analytics, which is 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 HQ, 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 . This is why we exclusively serve Performance TV ads to television screens, not on any other device. We haven’t ignored the fact that we live in a mobile-first society, however, which is why Performance TV campaigns also serve related ads on mobile and desktop (in addition to ads served on CTV) to keep your message fresh as your audience moves from device to device – otherwise known as the ‘Second-Screen’ phenomenon. 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), this compels the viewer to browse the website to learn more on their phone or another device (such as desktop, laptop or tablet)

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

3. Quality > Quantity

We mentioned earlier that users are consuming content on their mobile more than ever before, but not everything is moving there. Did you know 70% of Connected TV is streamed on TVs? If we study the user patterns from sign up 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 in thanks to these factors:

• The Living Room Quality experience that you get on this platform, which makes for uninterrupted and fully engaged viewing.

• It’s not only the portal in which you consume the content that matters – quality programming is what 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 from 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 one to two ads at a time. This means two things:

• Ad recall and attention is likely to be higher with fewer ads (and we all know how much people dislike intrusive ads). An overwhelming number of users as reported below, are finding ads intrusive and popping up everywhere – but we’re a big believer that quality is better than quantity. Our platform is designed for compelling storytelling  on premium TV networks and practically strikes out the many issues that users are having with advertising culture, and reshapes it into an elevated experience instead of a disturbance.

• Viewers are likely to engage and show interest in the brand – albeit not show action right away but could be a future customer. This user behavior is matched with MNTN Performance TV’s ability to serve ads cross-device after a viewer is screened a Connected TV ad. 

The learning never stops, though! We are continually redefining and evolving our solution to help our customers with their advertising goals, and 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 retarget on Connected TV – it wouldn’t be a true performance ad platform otherwise! We let advertisers retarget in the way they feel would best resonate with their audience, which means you can serve 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 – since Performance TV has an average 97% completion rate,  it’s a sign that audiences are engaged with the content – hence drives better performance when it comes to other metrics like display retargeting, after launching their campaigns. 

The next question you might ask: How would you know who clicks on your ad from a Connected TV commercial, though? Once a fantasy for many marketers is now a reality – thanks to Performance TV Verified Visits. This tracks anyone who views your ad, and all the actions afterward – it’s this data that is truly powerful in optimizing your future campaigns and helps guide digital marketing strategy (in addition to the retargeting benefits).

We have several streaming TV retargeting success stories under our belt and continue to add them to the list, such as this major home supply retailer that pitted a retargeting test between Performance TV retargeting and Display-Only retargeting. Performance TV retargeting outperformed across all major KPIs like ROAS, CPV, site conversions and site visits with a better ROI to boot.