4 benefits of OTT advertising you don’t want to miss

Tubi, Mubi, Crackle, Acorn. This isn’t the start of a children’s song. These are the names of real streaming services, just a few of the many that are popping up today. They’re becoming so commonplace, Hendricks Gin even launched their own streaming service — literally — with videos of flowing rivers, babbling brooks, and calming streams.

For ad buyers, over-the-top (OTT) is a whole new breed of advertising. It takes programmatic practices and applies them to the most sought-after form of advertising there is: television. There’s a lot to learn — but also a lot to gain. 

Here are four benefits of OTT advertising to help you achieve your goals.

OTT buying allows advertisers to transition from contextual buys to audience-based buying. 

The main question TV advertisers asked five years ago was, “Am I placing my ads next to the right content?” Today, advertisers are also asking, “Did I reach the right viewer?” Traditional TV (linear) buyers have historically purchased audiences by understanding the predicted make-up of specific networks and programs. OTT takes that a step further.

You can create unique user profiles to reach your ideal audience at the right time and place, and then measure how your OTT ads convert in real life. Digital TV has a plethora of new metrics to buy against — like household income, in-market status, interests, and more. 

Take these separate audiences, for instance:

You can create these new audiences and mix and match them to make your perfect audience recipe. You can also test and learn based on each audience’s performance over time.

Related content: The Top 5 OTT Targeting Options You Need to Know

It’s not just about launching a campaign — it’s also about monitoring its performance to make sure you’re getting the most out of it. And when it comes to optimization and pacing, OTT advertising campaigns offer a lot more flexibility than linear. 

Pacing is a metric that calculates ad impressions over time, ensuring that ads are evenly spread out over the life of your ad campaign. 

To provide a simplified example, if you want your campaign to have 1000 impressions over a 10-day window, on pace is 100 impressions per day. If the campaign is serving 50 impressions a day, it is technically under pace. Under pacing is usually an indication that targeting or pricing is too restrictive. You can make changes to bring it back on track, like increasing the price of your bid or optimizing the campaign targeting.

Madhive has seven different pacing statuses — ranging from Way Under Pace to Way Over Pace — so you know if your campaign is delivering too quickly, too slowly, on target, or somewhere in between. We can drill down into more granular metrics like device distribution, creative delivery, and more. 

We’ve all been there — you’re binge watching content on one of the free ad-supported streaming services, and you wind up seeing the same ad so many times you have the entire dialogue memorized.

Frequency capping can prevent that by setting caps on how often an ad is played by day, week, month, and even hour to greatly improve the ad experience for your viewer.

We make it easy — all you have to do is set your frequency caps at the campaign level in our Audience Forecaster and in the Campaign Targeting section of the platform. Behind the scenes, our device graph is constantly updating its data sources to ensure that your ad never plays outside of its specified frequency cap. You can see an average of how many times an ad has played in-flight on our pacing screens.

While frequency capping prevents wasted media spend, dayparting and publisher capping help you reach a deeper audience pool. 

Dayparting controls what times during the day an ad can be served. Publisher capping helps ensure that ads play on a mix of publications or apps. For example, 30% of the campaign would play on one publishers’ apps, another 15% on the next. Most campaigns use both publisher capping and dayparting restrictions to ensure that your ad airs at the right time and place. 

Both settings are available on our platform.

Related content: What is a Device Graph? The Details for TV Advertisers

OTT also provides the ability to serve in specific geographic areas. 

Geotargeting, a popular tool in our platform, allows users to enter the address of a client’s brick and mortar store and create unique targeting parameters around that store. For example, an auto advertiser can target audiences within a five mile radius of their dealership. 

Advertisers have more flexibility and control on where their advertisements are shown, and how many impressions are delivered in a geographic area.

We know that navigating the programmatic landscape can be confusing. Add TV ads to the mix, and it becomes daunting — but the benefits of OTT advertising outweigh the learning curve.

And OTT doesn’t have to be complicated. 

WIth the right OTT platforms and partners, a CTV/OTT campaigns are a cinch and will help you reach or exceed your advertising goals.

To learn more about the benefits of OTT advertising or how to get started, contact hi@madhive.com.