Advertisers have more ways to reach consumers among a growing variety of media channels, and emerging technologies promise to make those moments of connection more engaging. The goal is to avoid inundating the viewers with the same adds on connected TV (CTV), over-the-top (OTT) platforms and linear TV.
“The industry now is challenged because we have a range of different ways to buy CTV, OTT, linear TV,” Sarah Stringer, executive vice president of U.S. media partnerships at Dentsu Media, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “We’re looking for ways we can consolidate the data signals across these different ecosystems to create a better, more pleasant viewing experience for audiences.”
A more holistic view of consumers helps to not only improve that viewing experience, but also to make media buying more efficient for advertisers.
“We’ve been doing a lot of work in terms of: how do we demystify the marketplace, how do we take that duplication out of the market and how do we start looking at the data signals that we have?” Stringer said. Those data signals are part of the effort to “try to identify in a respectful way an individual’s experience through this ecosystem and we try to optimize it for not only the brand, but also for the customers themselves.”
Measurement and Cross-Platform Reach
Brands have more software tools to help measure the effectiveness of TV ads, including eye-tracking technology that can provide more granular detail about how the creative elements affect people’s receptivity to a marketing message.
“It’s fascinating that we now have these tools at our disposal, and it’s something that we continue to dig into at Dentsu, because we continue to see that it has such a huge impact on the effectiveness of your campaigns,” Stringer said.
The cross-platform media environment has many digital “walled gardens” that add to the difficulties in making campaigns less repetitive for consumers as they move across different platforms.
“We will need as agencies to look at these translation points across the media that is a little bit more open and are building out industrywide tools to have a better performance across each of their platforms, and how we factor that into some of the other players that we work with that are fundamental to a media plan as well,” Stringer said. “The Holy Grail will still be around how we identify individuals in a still-respectful way and in a privacy-first way. We’ll find that it will be less around the individual and more around the outcome and the context.”
Immersive Ad Experiences
Mixing content and commerce is becoming more feasible with the emergence of technologies to insert branded product placements within programming.
“The technology I’m most excited around is this idea of 3D object that has been added to a video post-production,” Stringer said. “It’s essentially like an overlay technology, and it will identify key moments where it would seem natural for an object or an advert to be placed into a video, and allows for a more seamless way for a brand to be visible without necessarily being an interruptive force.”
Video channels increasingly are offering more interactivity that gives people an immediate way to buy products they see on screen.
“There’s some really exciting technology that will really allow for that moment of brand to be reconnected to that moment of content or purchase, which is great,” she said.
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