Madrid, 4th July 2024
Connected TV (CTV) has revolutionised the way brands can reach their target audience, offering a unique opportunity to connect with viewers on their big screens at home. According to Magnite Research, 78% of households across the UK, Germany, France, Italy and Spain watch CTV.
Edward Wale, Managing Director CTV, EMEA at Magnite stated: “European audiences now move seamlessly between traditional TV and CTV viewing. With a change in audience composition and viewing habits, now is a critical time for brands to better understand how to reach these addressable audiences and the ways they consume content.”
The shift in viewing habits presents a huge opportunity for brands to reach audiences in a more targeted and engaging way. The CTV ecosystem, while powerful, is highly fragmented with numerous ID-based solutions, audience segments and platforms or apps on which to watch content. This fragmentation can lead to a siloed buying approach that has trouble scaling to attain the reach needed by CTV. Many advertisers are looking for ways to overcome this challenge by using unique identifiers or other forms of targeting unique users, but with this approach costs can outweigh the benefits.
Instead, we believe that area-based marketing is the solution to these challenges. Area-based marketing enables advertisers to create effective and scalable campaigns that reach the right audience at the right time.
We have developed a 4-step process through which we plan and activate area-based marketing campaigns:
- Audience: Define and discover your ideal customer
- Area: Identify focus areas where your ideal customers are using affinity levels
- Media: Select the most relevant strategy, and investment levels for each area. If the CTV campaign is to be omnichannel, we can consider supporting additional media channels,
- Moments: Dynamically activate campaigns and creative based on contextual scenarios for maximum impact
Area-based marketing allows us to reach consumers in granular areas using rich insights into their behaviour and preferences. By unifying data points through their location, we can understand the unique characteristics of each area and tailor our marketing efforts accordingly. We are able to combine 100´s of online and offline data sets including demographic, attitudinal, behavioural, mobility, media performance, and point of interest data. This enables us to not only define our target audiences but also to focus on specific areas where our target consumers are located. By targeting these locations, we can effectively reach the right people in the right places, without the need for cookies or individual identifiers.
As most viewing takes place at home it becomes even more important to consider household and residential data. According to Statista 30% of CTV households in Europe are made up of two people and 56% of three people or more, so understanding the entire household is key. It is like having a window into each home and its viewing habits.
With area-based marketing, we can use data points like demographics, household size, people per household and education levels to learn about residents. We can identify areas that over index for singles, parents, seniors and other groups, that along with additional insights, hone CTV targeting.
In addition to household data, purchase data provided by Mastercard can be a valuable resource for advertisers. This data is anonymously aggregated to the area where the cardholder lives, not where the transaction occurs, providing insights into the types of purchases, frequency of purchases, and amount spent by households. Understanding purchase behaviour can help advertisers tailor their CTV campaigns to target specific consumer areas more effectively. Not only can Mastercard Ad Insights add another layer of precision to the data ecosystem by providing spend data it is also a good alternative to first party data as it is a strong indicator of future purchase intent.
Advertisers can further customise CTV audiences by onboarding their own first party or custom data sources, such as sales, app usage, delivery volumes, leads, and website visits. For example, an auto brand can combine lead volumes by area with audiences interested in car content and those with mid to high income levels. This blend of custom data with existing datasets allows for richly defined CTV audiences.
Once we have successfully built our Audience, we progress to the Area phase where we leverage affinity levels to guide more intelligent planning and campaign activation. For example, continuing with our previous auto brand example, we can craft a two part CTV strategy: for areas with fewer leads in need of a greater push CTV is always on, whereas in areas with more leads, we launch CTV only during peak viewing hours like nights and weekends.
For any audience, we can determine high, mid, and low affinity areas as granular as a postal code. In high affinity areas CTV could run across all day parts and days of week in that area due to the high concentration of audience so wastage would be minimal, whereas, in the medium affinity areas with lower audience concentration but which might have relatively high audience volumes, CTV would be used in a more targeted fashion, such as operating exclusively at peak viewing times on evenings and weekends.
The ability to group postcodes or any other geographic area size based on affinity levels allows brands to create and activate a customised CTV strategy for each group, adjusting the levels of budget, creative message and pacing. In doing this, we can identify the most efficient and effective way to activate the campaign making the campaign work smarter not harder. This allows for a more tailored and targeted advertising experience for the consumer, whilst protecting their privacy.
In conclusion, an area-based marketing approach is perfectly suited to CTV, offering an innovative data-driven alternative where location is used to unify a wide range of on and offline data points to build rich audiences that can then be activated on CTV by area. Offering simplicity and scale in a fragmented CTV landscape.
Don’t miss our next blog, where we will go into the next two phases that follow Audience and Area which are Media and Moments.
