Hollywood and Digital Marketing Walk the Red Carpet Together

5 Min Read

Nimble and TV advertising are two words that brands wouldn’t expect to see together, right? Well, we have a thing or two to say about that. “Being nimble is a new capability for everyone because of Connected TV. From a branding standpoint, like on social media, you can produce creative campaigns tailored for the moment. Delivering the right message, staying topical and pairing it all with precise audience targeting can deliver a memorable ad campaign,” explained Ali Haeri, Vice President of Marketing at MNTN. Haeri, along with George Dewey, Chief Brand Officer of MNTN and President of Maximum Effort, joined Adweek for a discussion about applying a social media mindset to creating your best creative yet. Watch the replay here or scroll on down for the key points from the session.

“Advertising is Disposable Art”: Deadpool and Other Stories

What do Aviation Gin and Mint Mobile ads have in common (okay, besides the fact that Ryan Reynolds stars in Maximum Effort, who co-produced 20th Century Fox’s massive $781M box off smash Deadpool, has always approached their projects – whether that be spinning up ads for the likes of Aviation Gin and Mint Mobile – by tapping into the cultural zeitgeist. But, importantly, they also pay close attention to timelines since “w​e try to keep timelines tight as we don’t want to overprocess or over think things,” explained Dewey. It’s this mindset that led to being awarded the Gold Winner at the 2016 Clio Awards. For example, Aviation Gin featured the famous “Peloton wife” actress in its own commercial, which started as a simple text message between Dewey and actress Monica Ruiz. Then, there was the Rick Moranis ad, which was completed all in eight days during pandemic times – no small feat. What was common to both of these projects was “recognizing the cultural landscape. Think of it as having a dance partner – you should work with the dance partner instead of controlling it. If you don’t acknowledge the humility of where you are as a brand and how you fit into the landscape, then you’re in for trouble,” said Dewey.

Another recipe for success was keeping their business model as nimble as the ads they create. “I like to think of it as a clean sheet design. We were coming to the agency business with literally no infrastructure or preconceived notions. There were things that I didn’t want to replicate from the traditional agency model, like the pitching process. It makes zero sense to give your ideas away for free in a bake-off and you get paid either zero or cost for probably hundreds of hours of your brightest team’s time.” 

At the end of the day, efficiency trumps hours. “The more infrastructure you have, the more layers you have. Secondly, we view ads as disposable. If you go into something as disposable, the company is not riding on it, then it loosens your sphincter a bit. Lastly, it’s okay to be wrong. It may not work, and that’s okay too. You brush yourself off and move on.”

Extending the Performance Marketing Sensibility to Television

We’ve talked about how brands can fast-track their creative in an efficient and nimble way, but getting your content out to market is the next hurdle to jump. “Digital marketing channels like social media made people reactive in real time. You could be reactive, but there’s a built in time delay as you can’t just get TV advertisements up at will, which is why utilizing the right tools and capabilities is crucial,” explained Haeri. This is why platforms like MNTN Performance TV are so important as it acts as a central vessel to house your brand’s ad and deploy your campaigns, all from one self-serve platform. The nature of self-serve platforms trim any inefficiencies too, and enable your brand message to go out there as soon as possible.

The self-serve component is one part of a well oiled machine that empowers brands to create content as quickly and inexpensively as possible. MNTN Performance TV is fully automated, which frees teams up to innovate and conceptualize their next big idea. “Think of it as programmatic advertising, with a different ad unit. You can retarget visitors on the television screen and more – what sort of ideas will that unlock?” The platform seeks out the TV networks that your audience is likely to be watching, and serves these in a non-skippable, HD format directly (and only) to their television screens for maximum impact. Most importantly, the impact of your ad creative can be measured in real time, allowing for immediate feedback to aid the creative process – it even helps to inform your brand’s linear TV advertising (though we don’t recommend going all in with that approach, and here’s why). “CTV tracks site visits (through cross-device tracking) and conversion tracking, which is the most actionable data you can get. You can also access network level data to see which publishers are correlated with conversion performance.”

Fast forward to today, CTV advertising platforms like MNTN Performance TV equip brands with the technology and tools to take action quickly, and prove that advertisers can get a television ad up on air, target, track, test and evaluate its performance as easily as any other digital advertising channel. Brands can BYOC (Bring Your Own Commercial) and upload it to the platform, and then access tens of thousands of audience targeting segments all within a single solution. Our automated media buying technology ensures that your ad is served to the right audience no matter what network they’re watching. Brands can even conduct A/B testing through the platform to experiment across different creative elements, and finally – those same stats that you would see on Facebook Ads manager, can also be reported on in addition to digital marketing metrics that matter to the bottom line, like ROAS, revenue, conversions and more.

The benefits of Connected TV advertising don’t stop there. Whether you’re testing the waters with television advertising, or are ready to go all in, we’re here to help. Get started on some of our resources and make sure to tune into our past webinars here.