Omnicom Media rolls out research showing the need for CTV advertising to change its ways

Digiday will cover several partnerships the holding company will announce at Cannes Lions next week, but today’s story delves into the research out of Omnicom Media Intelligence that underpins the approach. 

Joanna O’Connell, Omnicom Media’s chief intelligence officer, explained the thinking and conclusions behind the report, called “Connected Content: The Force Multiplier for Maximizing Brand Influence,” which canvassed consumers of CTV content to find, unsurprisingly, that they hate seeing the same ad again, but that they generally don’t mind ads that are relevant to them (as in personalized) and relevant to the content they’re watching. 

“This was born out of our genuine enthusiasm to try and pull media and creative together, because as Omnicom we can,” said O’Connell. “And tell a story about about how content needs to be developed and deployed in this modern world of media fragmentation, of divided and declining attention, of ad fatigue and frustration. So that’s what we set out to do.”

What the research found were telling stats like: 

• 80% of consumers say a bad ad is worse than no ad at all
• 51% say a poor advertising experience reflects more negatively on the brand than the platform carrying the ad
• 76% connect more strongly with ads that are relevant to the content they are consuming
• 40% say sequential storytelling makes them more likely to purchase from a brand.

While some of that feels somewhat obvious, it’s the codification of it that can usher in a new way of approaching the marketing messages that appear in programs, be they live or pre-made. O’Connell explained the era of the 30-second hero spot has come and gone, with fragmentation, binge watching, complexity in how ads are bought and sold, and other factors. 

What followed, to O’Connell’s thinking, made the problem worse. “I remember this over rotation toward audience, the obsession with audience, and the whole industry forgot about content and the halo effect of being near content — the contextual value of the environment where the ad is appearing,” she explained. “Through all of that from a production standpoint, the hero asset just kind of being kind of atomized to fill all these new spaces. And it was being optimized against these real-time KPI/click/vanity metrics.”

Megan Pagliuca, chief product officer for Omnicom Media North America, said the industry as a whole needs to adapt its thinking. “Audience is important, but also context is important,” she said. “If you think of the challenge in our industry overall, we almost over-index to audience, and then weren’t thinking about the context. We’ve always had this balance that we think about, the audience and the audience graph, and then the inventory and the inventory graph, and the granularity on both sides. We think the contextual and the inventory data is just as important, but it’s not as talked about as much as audience data.”

So what should Omnicom and other agencies be thinking when trying to make the ad experience better on streaming and CTV outlets? Advertising “needs to fit the environment that it lives in, and the environment that the consumer lives in — their mindset, their head state,” she said. “To do that, though, you need to be thinking both about the content itself, and about the platform and the context — and you need to be thinking about delivery, timing, placement, frequency, all that stuff.

“It’s a conceptual framework that sounds pretty obvious and understandable,” she continued, “but this is not how kind of content at scale models work.”

Which is why Omnicom’s research suggested six recommendations: 

• Shift from asset consistency to content continuity: Build brand narratives that evolve across platforms and moments rather than repeating the same message everywhere. This can mean sequential storytelling. 
• Prioritize relevance and context: Adapt creative to audiences, platforms, content environments, and consumer mindset. 
• Create additive rather than interruptive experiences: Focus on delivering value, utility, and contextual relevance instead of relying on disruptive ad formats. 
• Integrate teams earlier: Bring media, creative, production, commerce, data, and measurement teams together at the start of the planning process. 
• Leverage AI and dynamic optimization: Use audience intelligence, contextual signals, and performance data to always refine creative experiences. 
• Design for cumulative influence: Measure success not only through immediate engagement but also through the long-term impact of connected brand experiences. 

It all essentially boils down to this, said O’Connell: “Every opportunity that you have to serve an ad should be augmenting — not interruptive, not disruptive, not highly repetitive — but augmenting” the viewer experience.