OTT, CTV, linear TV and digital video: How video can be managed in one place
For consumers, video is wonderfully simple. They watch whatever they want, wherever they want and they shift seamlessly from OTT to connected TV to linear TV to digital video.
But for buyers, trying to reach those consumers has become a fractured, non-intuitive mess. For more than a half-century, the magic of TV was that it was the easiest place for advertisers to reach the audiences they wanted — and at the scale they needed. That can still be true, but only if advertisers and agencies utilize a unified linear and digital data set to activate across the video ecosystem.
For buyers: video success is about efficiency and scale
Managing reach and frequency is fundamental to advertising success, but that hasn’t been easy when consumers are endlessly surfing from platform to platform. Countless households end up either entirely overexposed — or, conversely, unexposed — to a brand’s message. That’s no way to manage anything, least of all millions of dollars of media investment in video campaigns.
Media buyers need a holistic view of how real consumers are spending their time watching the biggest screen in the house. With that in mind, automatic content recognition (ACR) data provides near real-time exposure data — and it’s not limited to a specific platform. ACR helps marketers and other stakeholders to understand the content being consumed behind the TV screen by matching small samples of content against comprehensive libraries of content. If it’s consumed on the TV through streaming or traditional methods it can be measured. If it’s consumed on the TV’s “glass” — whether it’s streaming or linear or apps or games — it can be measured.
For example, at Samsung Ads, the approach is to leverage ACR data from more than 50 million smart TVs. This ties a thread from linear to digital viewing, allowing advertisers to manage video campaigns across apps, bundles and channels in much the same way that a consumer does.
It’s about making investments work harder, not buyers
When marketers have holistic data, then finding audiences, understanding them and reaching them becomes a lot easier. It’s easier to prove the incremental reach and efficacy of the media and it’s easier to funnel insights back into the campaign to make an investment work even harder next time.
ACR captures every pixel being passed back through the glass. From a TV consumption perspective, this captures what that TV was exposed to — i.e., channels, programs or shows, linear ads, total time spent and household reach enabling advanced targeting, measurement and viewership insights. These insights help to guide investment objectives.
It’s about choice, control, flexibility and transparency
Buyers need to buy the way they want to buy, whether it’s Direct IO or programmatic buying or anything in between. They need to manage reach and frequency without getting a migraine. They need flexibility and transparency. It’s time to stop fretting about fragmentation and fix it. Video is simple for consumers, it can be for advertisers as well. To achieve that goal, marketers must put efficiency, intelligence and scale at the center of their plans. It is the surest pathway to ensuring that their investments work harder for them and that the tools available to them – including ACR and all its advantages — place control and flexibility at the heart of every campaign.
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