Opinion: Optimizing a CTV Ad campaign for a PAN-India audience

CTV brings the best of two worlds, traditional TV, and digital experience together, and advertising on this platform has the potential of a PAN-India reach with measurable conversion. Alok Pandey of Xapads Media shares insights on optimizing a CTV campaign for the PAN-India audience.

A few years ago, cable television was a major ticket to access video content, followed by OTT and now the continuing trend is attributed to CTV. Today, Apart from content consumption, Connected TV also offers ample advertising opportunities as users dive deeper into its content in various lingos which help brands to make a difference in their brand presence. In fact, as per the survey conducted by Statista in August 2022, in India, CTV audiences are more willing to watch advertisements and 45% of people efficiently engage with them which creates an effective brand image and recall value.

The accelerating growth in CTV is due to the internet penetration and affordable HD entertainment at home that encourage marketers to leverage precise targeting fuelled by the wealth of consumers’ data. This also enhances marketers’ advertising efforts and helps in better optimizing the ad campaign with effective ROAS and results. 

But the foremost and most important part is to understand who your audience is because, with the availability of different gadgets, users' preferences bounce to and fro in terms of content utilization. Therefore, it's better to do Audience Segmentation and tap into the CTV-centric cohorts, sharing common interests in CTV inventories. For example, if a user has seen a 30 seconds video ad on his mobile and the same on smart TV then, the app install would be attributed to CTV as the user installed the app, after viewing its ad on smart TV. Hence, the possibility of user acquisition increases via advertising on CTV because it delivers a complete funnel view, enabling marketers to monitor users' patterns and frequency of viewing ads. This results in better campaign optimization with growth in ARPU and LTV as well. 

In fact, considering the netizen's interest in CTV, its viewership has also increased by 30% between 2021-22 and it is expected that Indian households will own CTV amounting to 25 million by 2025 (source: Statista). The spike in demand for CTV is because of its unique content offerings wherein, understanding the audience type, especially the geos & demographics, and targeting mainly the GenZ & Millennials play an important role in attracting attention towards it. Since such audiences are internet-era netizens that spend quality time online it does wonders for brands with skyrocketing presence and ROI. 

Secondly, marketers can leverage Vernacular Languages which is one of the unique plethora of CTV offerings. In India, it is well said that “kos-kos par badle paani, chaar kos par vaani” since the language changes every few kilometers like the taste of water; likewise, CTV offers unique content in regional dialects, pertaining to different geos. Its offerings tailored to users’ choices drive more impressions and click-through rates as netizens strongly resonate with the native content and find relatability with the brands. Moreover, with the trajectory rise in digitalization and free flow of information due to internet penetration, CTV is reaching the households of Tier II and Tier III too where the scope of vernacular advertising is much higher.

For example, showcasing content in Urdu and Marwari in cities like Lucknow and Rajasthan would perhaps drive more engagement than displaying content only in specific standard languages.

This drives both content performance and campaign optimization with a possibility of users returning to content as it grips their interest and builds a personalized content feed. 

Moreover, to optimize the campaign better, follow the Hybrid Approach where the flow of content begins via CTV commercials and the right source gets attributed for conversions. This helps to determine user identity and engagement with the content by reducing the deduplication of metrics and distributing personalized content at individual levels. This enables CTV to thrive and make its mark with its own specialties like Digital & Passive Metering, Automatic Content Recognition (ACR), etc which also distinguish CTV from linear TV and BVOD (Broadcaster Video-On-Demand).

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Additionally, such solutions also define the optimal approach for audience measurement because CTV massively scrutinizes Unified Identifiers. It's an open-source privacy-centric identity solution that helps marketers use deterministic insights to better connect with netizens at the personal level. Based on this, advertisers can also do a thorough analysis of user behavior and engagement with the brand that further enhances granular targeting and optimizes actionable results.

In fact, with the slow march and depreciation of third-party cookies, CTV advertising has become the most wanted solution for effective brand presence and campaign optimization. Since its real-time and advanced reporting capabilities include programmatic metrics that efficiently edge the campaign performance. It analyzes insights like impressions, inventory type, and a lot more due to which, CTV prioritizes the right and precise audience targeting and personalized content offerings. This encourages consumers to explore what brands have in store, supporting media buyers to bring performance marketing to television. 

Moreover, I would like to say that, CTV ad campaigns can be optimized considering the mechanism of ACR Technology (Automated Content Recognition) because it identifies both the audio and video on smart TV.

This is effectively reshaping the marketers’ advertising efforts as it immediately captures the signal of the broadcasting video focusing on users’ geolocation, IP address, and demographics and cross-checks it to better find a match.

It won’t be wrong to say that all such solutions have their own potential and importance but how effectively and powerfully a creative depicts the brand story, empowers the advertising efforts. This is because it's the creative and the right placement that makes a brand stand out. Therefore, these days, brands strive their best to make their presence stronger with the help of attractive creatives that provokes users to dive deeper into the content of their wants. 

Hence, CTV is revolutionizing the digital ecosystem with a surge of becoming the topmost part of marketers’ advertising toolkit and sooner it will be the future of the digital advertising ecosystem. This is because of the way it's transforming advertising efforts, making it easier for marketers to precisely tap into the most wanted audience. Its specialties, trends, ad formats, and capabilities have drastically amazed marketers that brands of all scales have started stepping and capitalizing towards the CTV landscape for effective and optimized results. 

This article has been authored by Alok Pandey, VP - Sales & Marketing, Xapads Media.

Disclaimer: The article features the opinion of the author and does not necessarily reflect the stance of the publication.