With the promise of enhanced engagement and deeper consumer connections, interactive advertising has been a buzzworthy conversation topic among media professionals. But while the technology to execute on interactivity is advancing, both the tools and consumer behaviors aren't yet fully aligned for widespread adoption.
We wanted to dig deeper into the interactive ad landscape, so we turned to Lance Wolder, Head of Strategy at PadSquad. Lance and company create dynamic and engaging ad executions for brands that not only capture attention, but also drive campaign success. Who better to opine on how the industry can unlock the full potential of interactive ads?
In our exclusive interview, Lance shares:
✅ Insights about creating value for consumers
✅ How localization can be a lever for personalization
✅ Tips for how brands can execute on advanced CTV ads today
Read on to learn more about this emerging CTV trend.
Lance Wolder: I've been on a few panels over the last two years, and people are very excited about what CTV generally means for digital advertising. But when interactive CTV comes up, without a doubt, every time it becomes a conversation around performance and full-funnel activation. Can we make it shoppable? Can we bridge the gap from seeing Monica's dress on Friends to actually buying it? And what does that really mean?
Unfortunately, as an industry, we're a little ahead of ourselves regarding what's possible with available technology and what consumers want. Customers aren't looking at a commercial and thinking, "I want to interact with that — I want to use my remote control to click around and explore that ad."
“When interactive CTV comes up, without a doubt, it becomes a conversation around performance and full-funnel activation.”
Lance Wolder
Head of Strategy, PadSquad
We have a long way to go in encouraging consumers to put down their phones and pick up their remote controls, setting the expectation that they can interact with a commercial because they're going to get value out of it. We, as TV viewers, just aren't conditioned to do that yet.
Lance Wolder: Standardization and scale are the two biggest challenges. There are some really exciting things happening in video with ad formats, like the pause ad, but the challenge is a lack of standardization. If a brand wants to create a pause ad, they have to go to each platform one by one to be able to execute it.
The problem is made even worse when it comes to interactive CTV. If I'm sitting in the shoes of a Fortune 100 brand, I want to produce a cool ad experience that will win awards but also reach as many people as possible. And today, the scale just isn’t there. This is where PadSquad is focused; we’re building innovative video ad products that can tell brand stories at scale.
Lance Wolder: We built interactive CTV units very early and quickly learned of the challenges. So, instead of fighting that fight, we decided to look introspectively and work with what's available today. We were able to lean into something we call Advanced CTV, which solves for some of the annoyances of watching ads on TV today.
One of the biggest frustrations in watching streaming TV is seeing the same ad repeatedly during a single show. That's annoying. As marketers, we know frequency is great, and it works. Still, we believe there are other levers in digital that make that ad experience more interesting and engaging while making frequency more tolerable.
“Imagine seeing an ad from a national retailer that shows your closest store location and the products that are on sale there. We use technology to take a generic commercial, and make it special for the viewer.”
To us, that means enhancing your CTV spot with dynamic messaging that results in a more personalized ad — just changing how the video is shown to make it more appealing and exciting.
Imagine seeing an ad for a national retailer that shows your closest store location based on where you're watching from. Take it one step further, showing animated cards that showcase the products available on sale this weekend. In this simple use case, we use technology to transform a generic commercial that works for every market and make it special for the viewer sitting in Dallas, Texas that knows where to go this weekend.
I see location as an important component of personalization that's existed for years through a painstakingly manual planning process. But today, we're able to use technology to apply geo-targeting, audience, and other digital signals to personalize the creative and deliver this type of ad experience at scale.
I see local news and regional content as a huge market opportunity for these types of Advanced CTV campaigns. When watching, viewers are thinking about their community, what to do this weekend with their families, and the world around them. What a perfect time to connect with a message that meets them where they are.
Lance Wolder: We call that ad sequencing, and in a perfect world, you would have that first ad spot appear unaltered, just as it was intended. Perhaps the second time you see the spot, it’s the same video, but it's been enhanced to showcase the products on sale this week. And finally, a third version of the creative highlights the store locations nearest you. From a creative strategy point of view, ad sequencing is another type of personalization we’re thinking about a lot.
“From a creative strategy point of view, ad sequencing is another type of personalization we’re thinking about a lot.”
Outside of PadSquad, there have been some awesome broadcast campaigns where a sponsor owns the entire episode, and an entire story unfolds across the show. The beauty of our evolving world is that in broadcast, this approach is costly and hard to pull off, but with digital, it's possible today.
Lance Wolder: I've been in this industry for 20 years and I think content alignment is super valuable, and that's why broadcast advertising is still so important. This is why these massive platforms like Amazon and Hulu own content and can offer brands ownership of content, like what you see in sports.
But viewing behaviors have changed, and outside of sports, we're not sitting down to watch Thursday night’s episode of "insert your favorite show here." So that's where audience targeting comes in. Some of the best strategies we've built allow brands to reach "that person who's tuning into Sunday Night Football" with the insight that they don't necessarily need to be watching Sunday Night Football when I show them the ad.
So when an automotive brand approaches us to create an Advanced CTV ad for an electric vehicle, our first question is: who are you targeting? Because we see an opportunity to do more than use a generic auto spot with a generic targeting approach. From there, we research who this shopper is: they’re heavily male, and over-index for watching channels and content like sports, news and comedy. This gives us a richer opportunity to connect with them across multiple touchpoints versus just pinpointing one tentpole event like SNF. There's excitement in using data and creative to bridge the context and audience.
Imagine a world where that automotive ad is complemented by a live social feed of tweets from games and news happening now. While not interactive, a brand can use digital signals or data from digital to enhance their creative and make it relevant through targeting. This is the level of innovative strategy and personalization that I'm really excited about.
As long as it's not creepy. I hate when things get too creepy.
Lance Wolder: I think that the platforms with the largest audiences have an opportunity to create that human connection to interactive advertising in a meaningful way.
A brand like Netflix has a tremendous opportunity to be able to say: I'm going to create really unique content-driven interactive ads that will encourage viewers to purposefully grab the remote to interact.
And if we start to build that habit, to put down the phone and grab the remote to engage, that will make the biggest impact on our industry. The technology is here; we just need consumers to want it.
Lance Wolder: This goes back to advertising 101, when we ask ourselves: Why would somebody give me their time or attention? Why would someone want to interact with my ad? What do they get from it? The answer can’t be "I want them to shop for my products." They don't necessarily care about your products.
“We need to ask ourselves, why would somebody give me their time or attention? What do they get from it? They don’t necessarily care about your products.”
Consider a brand campaign for the holidays that offers a list of 10 binge-worthy holiday films to watch with your family — presented in a branded, scrollable interactive unit. The campaign would offer value to the viewer that's sponsored and branded, with links to the films to stream now. Now, this is something that might encourage consumers to reach for the remote.
Suggesting someone wiggle their remote to see the shirt in a different color isn't going to cut it. I honestly don't think anybody cares about the novelty.
Lance Wolder: Yes! I'm incredibly excited about what's going to be possible. We just have to be tempered in our approach and make sure we're adding value to the consumer instead of just doing it because we can. I don’t want advertisers to look back and say, "interactive ads don't work," when in reality, we just didn't give viewers something to really care about.
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To learn more about PadSquad, click here.
