Between the 2020 election and the pandemic, consumer usage of media has evolved making it easier for advertisers to leverage CTV and OTT in addition to linear. “While CTV and OTT aren't necessarily new to the midterms or, even the 2016 presidential election, the pandemic highlighted these environments as not just a complement to linear campaigns, but as a substitute or a must have,” he explained.
Advertisers would need to allocate budget dollars particularly when considering the scarcity of available inventory within the marketplace. Initially in the 2018 midterms, he noted, “OTT and CTV were looked at as a tactic to establish cross platform frequency,” and reach extension but during the pandemic, as people stayed home, there was a massive shift in viewer engagement and binge watching to these platforms and that, he stated, “Is where OTT really thrives.”
The benefit for political advertisers was evident. “It gave campaigns an opportunity to reach voters outside of their respective echo chambers on cable news or local news in a more laid back living room environment,” he shared.
And this viewing shift is not a fluke, according to McGuire. “While streaming viewership was a growing trend over the past decade and accelerated throughout the 2020 presidential cycle, I don't think the pandemic or growth in streaming engagement is a fluke. Rather, I think it's a catalyst to consumer behavior as we know it now. Streaming is here to stay.” This bodes well for political advertisers who need to reach specific voters by zipcode in their living rooms where they are more open to messaging.
But there are challenges that include regulatory differences between linear and digital. Are OTT and CTV considered linear or digital? “If it comes through an ad server, all signs point to digital, right?” McGuires posited. “But the reality is that 75% to 80% of impressions are landing on linear.” For advertisers, budget decisions and tactics rest on the right answer to that question. “One of the things that I question as we go into 2022 and 2024 and beyond, when 50% of budgets are still being allocated towards broadcast and they are contextual alignments, you might use impressions to evaluate the media post campaign but you're not transacting that way.”
Data usage is another challenge. “Sometimes I think we get too granular in the way we employ data,” he stated. There is the risk of serving too many impressions to the same people with OTT and CTV. “We need to start scaling and using actual insights to inform our tactics,” he advised.
Solutions for advertisers require not only good third party verification providers but also the strategic use of first party data. “I think that's going to become very important as we move towards a cookie less world,” McGuire noted. For a4, it is their ability to leverage authenticated IP addresses which helps with all sorts of fraud issues and insures that the advertiser is reaching an actual home and not a bot or other non-human traffic. “We have a proprietary compiler that washes PII data across several internet providers nationally,” he stated. “We have access to 92 million IP addresses that are refreshed every two weeks, so you know you're working with a first party refresh data set,” he added.
But the big opportunity here, according to McGuire, is first party ACR data. a4 has just partnered with LG which offers, “an ACR feature built into all of their 20 million devices. It insures that you're reaching real TV watchers and not just box.”
All of this lends to an ability to craft and customize segments. “We partner with dozens of third party data vendors, but I would say, from a political and public affairs standpoint, we have about seven or eight that we lean into directly,” McGuire explained. “We can create any kind of custom segment such as custom voter files.” His company is also testing in beta the ability to ascertain the effectiveness of creative through interactivity which will help advertisers tweak their messaging within the flight. “Actionable insights that we glean from real people and sequential messaging are going to be really important and something that's not really utilized right now.”
For McGuire, the future looks bright but more complex. “It's no surprise that our marketplace become more competitive,” he noted. “I would argue that if you're just tracking impressions or completions you're doing yourself a disservice. Having expert boots-on-the-ground to actually track KPIs is very important. Reporting is going to be a huge differentiator moving forward as will the growth of ACR,” he concluded.
This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com
Artwork by Charlene Weisler
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