In the Blackout Battle, CTV Advertising is Still An Oasis
by Isabel Greenfield
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This post was produced in partnership with Lever Interactive, a digital advertising agency specializing in emerging channels.
When you think of television advertising, audience targeting isn’t usually the first thing to come to mind—but it soon will be after reading this post. Linear TV has turned off many brands, with advertisers utilizing this format for one main reason—brand awareness. But, even that is a subjective measure, which is why advertisers (specifically in B2B) have avoided it altogether as it doesn’t deliver the insights needed to justify the spend.
The television advertising industry has progressed in leaps and bounds over the past few years, specifically on formats like streaming (Connected TV). A recent article by TechCrunch reported that ad spend grew 57% in 2021 to $15.2 billion, and is expected to grow another 39% this year to $21.2 billion. Why are advertisers and agencies flocking to this performance channel? Let’s explore the ways in which MNTN’s agency partner, Lever Interactive, has made the most of CTV’s audience capabilities, with great success.
Connected TV applies an audience-first approach to targeting. And no, we’re not referring to what audiences are watching, but instead CTV’s innate ability to drive relevant ads to viewers across different types of programming. Lever Interactive, one of MNTN’s leading agency partners, have taken hold of Connected TV’s audience-targeting capabilities—and reaped the rewards. “Reaching a B2B audience through TV advertising required assumptive placements based on network almost exclusively. On CTV we don’t have to assume where an audience will be tuning in and at what time. We can simply build an audience-focused campaign that reaches a B2B segment with every buy,” says David Sutton, Vice President at Lever Interactive.
MNTN Performance TV embraces the audience-first approach through giving advertisers the ability to target first- and third-party audiences via its Oracle Data Cloud integration and CRM upload feature.
B2B advertisers might think there’s no place for them on television, but CTV’s audience targeting features change the game. “The reality is that we have the same advanced audience targeting approaches available to us, but B2B advertisers can get stuck in older thinking that their audience is too niche, too granular, and too difficult to target. The silver lining is that B2B brands’ hesitation to invest in CTV provides more untapped potential into very efficient advertising, which is apropos for any early adopter but that gap is growing smaller by the day,” explains Sutton.
Here are a few best practices we recommend B2B advertisers apply to their audience targeting strategy to start off on the right foot.
Why should B2C brands have all the fun? Let’s look at an example of a leading B2B email and SMS marketing platform who drove a 11.6% conversion rate with MNTN Performance TV. The brand was looking for a way to increase site traffic, with the ultimate goal of parlaying the increase in qualified visitors into more demos. They turned to MNTN Performance TV to help them reach the right audience, and motivate those viewers to visit and convert:
The end result? The combination of prospecting and retargeting campaigns delivered significant increases to both site visits and conversions, proving that B2B brands can reap the benefits of Performance TV. Besides an 11.6% conversion rate, the B2B brand was able to lower their month-over-month cost per lead by 98% and lower their month-over-month cost per visit by 56%.