At the 2024 Summer Olympics, Turkish competitor Yusuf Dikeç went viral during a target-shooting event. Dikeç brought home the silver medal, but that’s not what had the internet in an uproar: while all the other contestants used specialty gear and futuristic-looking glasses (designed to block out blur and distractions), Dikeç competed while wearing a completely normal pair of glasses and a t-shirt.
The reason everyone is impressed is simple: while you can target accurately without the proper tools, you’re making it a lot harder on yourself.
The same is true in CTV advertising: With the proliferation of smart TVs and streaming services, CTV advertising offers unprecedented opportunities for brands to reach their audiences. However, the key to maximizing these opportunities lies in using the advanced targeting strategies the platform offers.
In this blog post, we’re diving into the essentials of targeting in CTV advertising. We’ll explore why it’s crucial, how to do it effectively, and the strategies that can turn your campaigns from good to outstanding. Keep reading:
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Case Study: How Cool Media provided an in-depth brand analysis revealing a 21% ad recall rate for Suzuki. Read More
Why Targeting is Crucial in CTV Advertising
What separates Connected TV advertising from its more-traditional counterparts is, ultimately, the unparalleled ability to target your audience, with a degree of granularity that was never possible before. While linear TV involved casting a wide net and hoping that somewhere in there was your target audience, the digital architecture of CTV allows you to drill down and target your audience almost house-by-house.
With it, you can achieve:
- Enhanced Relevance: The more accurately you target, the more relevant your ads become. Relevant ads engage viewers, driving higher chances of conversion.
- Optimized Budget: Money spent showing your ad to unlikely buyers is money wasted. Precision targeting ensures that every ad dollar is spent effectively.
- Clearer Insights: Accurate targeting delivers detailed performance data, enabling you to make data-driven decisions and refine your strategies.
Key Targeting Strategies for CTV Advertising
There’s really no reason not to use all the most-accurate targeting methods at your disposal, but in order to do so effectively you need to understand them, so that you can utilize them in the appropriate ways and at the appropriate times. So let’s break down the various ways you can target your CTV ads, so you’ll know what to use when:
Audience Segmentation
Audience segmentation involves breaking down your target audience into smaller, more specific groups based on criteria of your choosing:
- Demographic Targeting: With CTV, you can focus on characteristics like age, gender, income, and education. For example, a luxury automaker might target high-income households, while a children’s toy brand could target families with young kids.
- Behavioral Targeting: Target users based on their past behavior. For instance, a brand selling cooking products might target viewers who frequently watch cooking shows.
Geographic Targeting
In the old days, you had to leave your ad laying out somewhere — on a billboard, in a commercial break — and hope your customer happened upon it. But with geographic targeting, you can find out exactly where your customers are, and bring the ads to them.
- Regional Targeting: In linear advertising, you could only run your ad in large broadcast areas. With CTV, you can zero into specific areas: specific towns, or parts-of-towns, high-or-low-income areas, and more. The targeting is significantly more granular.
- Digital-Out-Of-Home: WIth DOOH advertising, your ads appear in contextually-relevant places where your target audience is likely to see them. If you’re advertising an oil-change chain, your ads can appear on gas pumps. If you’re advertising for pet groomers, you can make your ads appear on screens in veterinary waiting rooms.
- Weather-Based Targeting: Weather-based targeting is a form of dynamic creative that you can activate in response to weather events. You can change which ads you run or which products and services you advertise in response to rain, snow, storms, etc.
Dayparting
With CTV, audiences get to choose when to watch their favorite shows — and different audiences will choose to watch the same shows at different times. If your audience is streaming a children’s cartoon just after school is out for the day, that’s a good time to run ads for children’s toys. If your audience is watching that same cartoon at 2 in the morning… it might be a good time to run ads for late-night taco delivery.
So-called “dayparting” allows you to air your ads at specific times of day when your audience is likely logged on and streaming. A well-thought out dayparting strategy can save your campaign money and net you additional conversions.
- Time-Based Targeting: Align your ads with viewer habits. For instance, a coffee brand might choose morning slots to reach people thinking about their first cup of the day.
- Event-Based Targeting: You can also time your ads to run during specific holidays or events. People’s work schedules may be very different around Christmastime compared to a normal weekday in July, for example, and people’s viewing habits may shift around major sporting events, elections, award shows, etc. Thinking strategically about your dayparting can pay huge dividends.
Contextual Targeting
Contextual targeting matches ads to the content that viewers are consuming — this approach uses the treasure trove of data on streaming platforms to align advertisers’ messaging with viewers’ interests in real-time. Targeting individual consumers in a home can be more-difficult, as you can’t always be sure who has control over the living room TV from moment to moment. Tying your creatives instead to the program being watched can help drill down more effectively.
- Content-Based Targeting: Publishers can bundle their shows by genre (sci-fi, home improvement/DIY, health/fitness, etc) and you can choose creatives that will align well with that messaging: home improvement brands on DIY channels, gym equipment and protein powders on health and fitness, etc.
Cross-Device Targeting
Cross-device targeting guarantees that your ads reach users across all their devices, creating a cohesive experience:
- Device Graphs: Device graphs anonymously link individuals to their personal devices, creating a customer profile that can link a user to a specific group of phones/tablets/computers and more. This helps capture the breadth of the customer journey.
- Sequential Messaging: Sequential ads use a series of ads to tell a coherent narrative in order — regardless of the device or platform the viewer is using. The narrative will follow them from TV to phone to laptop, taking advantage of device mapping to form a stronger connection with the viewer.
Measuring and Optimizing Your CTV Campaigns
These targeting strategies aren’t one-and-done, however. It’s a feedback loop of testing, optimization, and re-testing. As with everything else in the adtech ecosystem, you’ve got to A/B test everything you do and then try again to see if you can improve upon your results
Tracking key metrics is one important aspect: depending on your campaign, you may have different goals for sales, sign-ups, website visits, etc. Tracking those metrics as you A/B test will see if you’re moving the needle. At a higher level, metrics like view-through rates and engagement levels can assess whether your ads are grabbing attention.
View rates aren’t all, of course: mapping your conversions to the source will help you determine whether your targeting is working. But even if your targeting is perfect, you may not see the desired results, because you’ll also need to be testing your creatives at this point.
You need to make sure you’re building effective creatives for your audience, and also dialing in your ad frequency to ensure you’re not oversaturating with your messaging. Checking with audience surveys, brand-lift analysis and more will help you dig deeper into the data to figure out what’s working and what isn’t.
Following the cycle of A/B testing, analysis, optimization, and further testing will bring you ever-closer to your goal. It’s a never-ending loop, because there’s always additional optimizations you can make and better results you can drive.
Final Thoughts
In conclusion, CTV advertising has unlocked a huge toolbox of targeting methods that make CTV a hugely attractive option for advertisers. But these methods aren’t self-executing; you need to know how and when to deploy them, or a partner who can show you the ropes.
If you’re an advertiser or agency looking to up your CTV game, COOL Media is a solution that demands a look. You can get started today by reaching out to our team. With a focus on moving past simple viewability metrics to the real mechanisms that make conversions happen, you’ll see for yourself why we’re a leading innovator in adtech.
