How to Use Data to Power Your CTV Advertising Strategy

Connected TV advertising — or CTV advertising — reaches new audiences through improved business strategies, cost-effective advertising and high completion rates. As more and more consumers watch content across multiple platforms, your business has increased opportunities for CTV advertising on laptops, televisions, gaming consoles and cellular devices. Data is a critical part of the success of your CTV advertising strategy. Explore CTV advertising and how data can power your success.

What Is Connected TV? 

Connected TV refers to any television that streams content through the internet rather than traditional cable or satellite feeds. Viewers access shows, movies, and live channels through apps on smart TVs, streaming devices, or gaming consoles. For advertisers, the appeal is simple: CTV brings the scale of traditional television together with the precision and measurability of digital media. Instead of buying against broad demographics, marketers can reach defined audience segments and track outcomes across the funnel. 

What Is CTV Advertising?

Today’s consumers have shifted away from cable TV and opted for reliable, accessible streaming platforms like Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, Disney+ and HBO Max. With the increase in streaming and content platforms, it has become necessary for companies to advertise to those consumers rather than through traditional cable TV mediums. That is where CTV advertising plays a critical role.

CTV advertising refers to video ads that are displayed via a streaming service. These ads are viewed on a TV, meaning they are either watched on a smart TV or via a connected device like Roku. You might see a CTV ad during the commercial break of a show streaming on Hulu.

CTV advertising offers different benefits than traditional TV advertising. It allows companies to reach more customers, including those who do not have a cable or satellite connection. Anyone who streams content on a specific platform can see the ad. CTV advertising also allows companies to target their ads to specific customers more precisely. With such tremendous growth, it is no wonder that more companies have begun to invest in CTV advertising.

Studies show that most American households have one connected TV device, meaning more people spend time watching streamed content than ever before. Marketers and advertising specialists have begun to take note. Streamed content isn’t going away. In fact, it’s only becoming more prominent each year.

CTV vs. OTT Advertising

So, what is OTT advertising, and how does it compare to CTV advertising?

Over-the-top (OTT) advertising is an umbrella term referring to ads that can be viewed on streamed content. CTV advertising is the medium that delivers the ad. For example, when an ad precedes the show you’re streaming on HBO Max, the ad is an OTT advertisement. The device that delivers the content to your TV, like an Amazon Fire TV Stick, is the CTV.

OTT advertisements use the rise in internet streaming to bypass cable and satellite connections, meaning streaming viewers do not need cable to see company advertisements. OTT capabilities enable consumers to watch videos in more ways and across more devices.

Marketers can implement OTT ads on any internet-connected device, including smartphones, tablets and laptops. CTV advertising, however, refers specifically to ads placed on internet-connected TVs. In other words, CTV and OTT advertising overlap significantly, but CTV advertising is a specific type of OTT advertising.

6 Advantages of CTV Advertising

From reaching new audiences to providing a cost-effective means of advertisement, CTV advertising offers many benefits to marketers and advertising agencies. The CTV advertising space is booming, introducing more consumers to company products and services. Here are six advantages to CTV advertising you should keep in mind.

1. Reaches Cord-Cutting Audiences

A cord-cutting consumer is a person who has decided to stop using cable or satellite TV in favor of streaming platforms like Netflix and HBO Max. Many cord-cutters decide to stop investing in cable and pay for an internet TV subscription instead, like Youtube TV or Hulu TV. As of 2023, more than 75% of Americans pay for a streaming service. CTV advertisements can reach a large number of these viewers who opt for streaming services rather than cable.

2. Provides a Cost-Effective Means to Advertise

While reaching premium networks on linear TV can be difficult and costly, CTV provides flexible pricing structures for a more cost-effective option. For example, you can pay for CTV ads based on cost per metric or cost per completed view.

With a cost-per-completed view pricing structure, companies only pay for advertisements when the viewer has watched at least 30 seconds of the video. Anything below that number does not count as a completed view. Due to effective targeted advertising, your business ROI is likely to be higher than linear TV advertisements, making the investment well worth it.

3. Opens Opportunities for Multi-Device Targeting

As viewers watch OTT streaming services across devices, you can complement your CTV ads by reaching your audiences on their phones or laptops. Multi-device advertising gets your message in front of your audience wherever they are, helping you forge a stronger connection.

4. Produces High Completion Rates

In North America, viewers watched 95% of CTV ads to completion. Get your ad seen in its entirety with CTV. Targeted ads help ensure consumers are more likely to be interested in the advertised content and, therefore, willing to watch the ad through to completion.

5. Allows for Easy Performance Tracking

Because of CTV’s incredible data capabilities, you can track ad performance metrics like completion frequency or website traffic. If you notice areas for improvement, you can adjust your ad as needed.

6. Protects Brand Image

CTV advertising empowers you to place highly relevant ads in the spots your audience is watching. Use this relevancy to reinforce your brand’s image and keep up with performance tracking to measure how well your ad serves your brand.

Understanding CTV Measurement

One way CTV advertising differs from linear television is its enhanced measurement capabilities. With linear TV, you cannot view performance metrics, but with CTV advertisements, you can track reports and measurements on customer engagement or conversion rates. Tracking consumer data and learning new information about your target audiences is also challenging with linear TV. Unlike CTV advertisements, these ads play at specific times of the day based on previous program ratings.

CTV has many measurement capabilities to help you gauge the success of your campaigns. They also give you critical insights into optimization possibilities. Here are some of the metrics you can access:

• Campaign impressions: One of the most straightforward metrics, your impression count, tells you how many times a streaming service displayed your ad.
• Cost per thousand impressions (CPM): CPM measures how much one thousand impressions costs you.
• Completion rate: An essential complement to impression metrics, your completion rate measures how many viewers watched your ad to completion.
• View-through rate (VTR): VTR tells you how often consumers viewed your ad to completion.
• Conversion attribution: Conversion attribution is how you’ll link your CTV ads to conversions, enabling you to effectively measure your return on investment (ROI). Your identity graph will prove helpful at this stage.
  

How to Get Started With CTV

If you’re ready to dive into CTV advertising and reap the benefits for your brand, a data strategy will be paramount to your success. From target optimization to channel blending and report preparation, getting started with CTV can change the trajectory of your advertising campaigns. Follow these steps before launching your campaign.

CTV Ad Platforms 

When getting started, you’ll also need to select your preferred CTV ad platform. The CTV ecosystem is mainly powered by a handful of major platforms that give advertisers access to premium inventory, robust targeting, and transparent measurement. While each has its quirks, they all serve as gateways to the high-engagement environments where viewers are increasingly spending their time. 

• Platforms like Roku offer massive reach through their proprietary OS, detailed device-level data, and native ad placements that integrate smoothly with the streaming experience.  
• Amazon Fire TV adds the advantage of retail data and shopper intent signals, allowing brands to tie CTV exposure directly to commerce behavior.  
• Hulu (via Disney’s ad stack) combines high-quality content with advanced audience segmentation and cross-device measurement.  
• YouTube on CTV continues to surge, giving advertisers performance-style targeting alongside the reach of traditional TV.  
• Demand-side platforms such as The Trade Desk, Google DV360, and Yahoo DSP aggregate inventory across publishers, making it easier to centralize targeting, frequency, and reporting. 

These platforms are the core of CTV buying today, each helping marketers deliver personalized ad experiences at scale while maintaining the transparency and control expected from modern digital campaigns. 

Step One: Optimize Your Target Audience

You can maximize your success with CTV ads by appealing to most households and customers. By monitoring current interests and other data trends, you can develop an ad that will gain traction with a wide range of consumers. Start by identifying the target or most frequent interest trends and adapting your campaign to fit.

For example, you might want to target younger viewers who are more likely to use streaming platforms like Disney+ or HBO Max. Or you can optimize your target audience by appealing to households that use Roku, Apple TV or Chromecast.

Step Two: Determine KPIs

While CTV advertising gives you the data to track, you’ll need a set of key performance indicators (KPIs) that align with your business strategy to measure your performance. The most common CTV advertising KPIs include the following:

• Reach: You can measure the number of viewers who view your advertisements.
• Impressions: An impression tracks the number of times consumers view your ads.
• Viewability: A percentage of how many impressions were viewable, or how many people viewed most of the advertisement.
• Engagement: You can track interactions with your ad through metrics like video completion and click-through rates.
• Conversion: You can track how many viewers convert to your business, such as purchasing products or visiting your website.

Depending on your company goals, one or all of these metrics might be critical to your success. The primary goal of all advertisers is to track how well you are reaching your intended audience and what indicators might increase success.

Step Three: Blend With Other Channels

Strategize upfront about how your CTV ads will work with other channels. For example, you can use retargeting to get your message in front of viewers through search or social media. Track data across channels to implement multichannel strategies effectively.

Step Four: Prepare to Report and Attribute Promotion

With CTV, you’ll need an identity graph to measure your overall outcomes best. An identity graph allows you to see all online interactions from each customer across channels in one place. For instance, this overview will let you see whether a customer views your CTV ad and then purchases on your website.

How to Increase the Effectiveness of CTV Campaigns

As you get started with CTV campaigns, you can implement a few strategies to increase your campaigns’ effectiveness:

• Try personalization: Dynamic technology and retargeting capabilities allow you to leverage personalization at scale with CTV. Personalization has many benefits for your campaign, such as increased viewer receptivity. The more engaged your consumers are, the more likely they will respond with action. For instance, they might download an app or complete a purchase.
• Test out multiple ad copy variations and creative: Because of CTV’s robust, real-time measurement capabilities, you can quickly run various variations of your ad and receive performance data rapidly. Use this to your advantage and run tests to determine which version performs the best. You could even test different combinations across audience segments to measure results within each group.
• Review audience data and targeting segments: Improve your CTV campaign targeting by consistently reviewing audience data and analyzing whether you can strengthen your segmentation strategy.

Why CTV Curation Matters in Programmatic Trading

CTV curation is the latest strategy becoming popular to those looking to navigate CTV advertising’s unique ecosystem. With its ability to streamline and refine the process of programmatic trading, curation has become indispensable in the CTV domain, where the challenge of balancing high costs against limited supply demands expert navigation. 

Understanding the significance of CTV curation begins with a closer examination of the CTV supply chain. In the realm of CTV advertising, direct and guaranteed transactions stand at the forefront of trading activities. Despite its relatively recent entry into the advertising world, CTV distinguishes itself through the prevalence of direct transactions. Even though it shares technological similarities with digital advertising, the bulk of CTV’s programmatic campaigns are executed via private marketplaces or through programmatic guarantees, employing deal IDs as the foundational elements for finalizing the transaction conditions.

This trend can be attributed to a legacy perspective. In contrast to digital advertising, which prioritizes scalability, performance, and minimizing CPMs, television has traditionally been regarded as the epitome of a premium advertising medium by both brands and consumers. It’s viewed as a worthwhile investment, a perception that seamlessly transitions into the CTV space as traditional broadcasters migrate to digital platforms.

For those who own media properties and provide streaming services, utilizing deal IDs serves dual purposes: it enables the preservation of the elevated CPMs characteristic of traditional TV in their expanding CTV domains, or, for those just entering the streaming arena, it establishes a minimum pricing threshold that mirrors the allure of large-screen entertainment. Additionally, the CTV landscape is marked by a more limited supply compared to digital displays, leading to an uptick in costs. In situations where supply is limited, there’s a mutual desire for enhanced security and greater transparency in transactions.

Moreover, the creation of content for the big screen is inherently more costly, rationalizing the investment in securing these placements directly rather than risking the unpredictability of open programmatic trading. Brands with a history of engaging in direct transactions in the linear TV marketplace might find the open and varied nature of digital supply chains less navigable.

Given the elevated financial and operational stakes throughout the supply chain, curators have emerged as vital intermediaries, ensuring the maintenance of quality standards.

Advantages of Curation for Advertisers on CTV

Curation in programmatic advertising provides a strategic advantage by offering advertisers a carefully selected inventory. This process not only streamlines the purchasing journey but also enhances transparency from start to finish.

Key Benefits of Curation:

• Refined Inventory Selection: Curators handpick the best inventory, simplifying the decision-making process for advertisers.
  
• Simplified Buying Process: The curation approach eases the complexity of buying, making the entire process more straightforward.
  
• Enhanced Transparency: End-to-end clarity in transactions and campaign execution is significantly improved with curation.

In the vast landscape of digital advertising, an unrefined campaign could end up dispersed over countless properties. Curation stands out by offering a premium filter, ensuring quality over quantity. While this method might require a higher initial investment compared to open auction bidding, it promises better performance indicators and efficiency by eliminating placements that could compromise brand safety.

CTV Curation’s Unique Position:

• Unlike digital advertising, the challenge in CTV lies not in sifting through an excess of options but in securing access to high-quality placements.
  
• The mainstay of CTV ad trading involves direct and guaranteed deals, which are notably more demanding in terms of time and resources to arrange and execute.

Having a curator to navigate this intricate landscape allows brands and agencies to extend the reach of their high-quality video campaigns with confidence, relying on the curator for:

• Campaign Execution: Handling the intricate details of launching and managing campaigns.
• Troubleshooting: Quickly addressing and resolving any issues that arise.
• Optimization: Continuously refining campaigns to achieve peak performance.

Why Curators Are Invaluable:

• Unified Deals Across Publishers: Curators can negotiate deals encompassing multiple publishers, streamlining the process for buyers.
• Tailored to Specific Needs: Curators offer services that cater to particular channels, regions, or demographics, simplifying the selection process for brands.
• Advantages for Publishers: Publishers can increase their reach without compromising on pricing standards, thanks to curators setting custom price floors.

This structured approach, particularly in territories like Europe, Central America, or Southeast Asia, is crucial. It addresses the challenges of running campaigns in areas with diverse broadcasting and streaming platforms, each with its distinct planning and performance tracking systems. Curators significantly reduce the due diligence required from brands and agencies, guiding them to the optimal curator for their needs and thereby smoothing the transition for broadcasters moving from linear to OTT platforms.

What’s Next for CTV Curation? 

CTV curators play a pivotal role in providing stability and expertise in an arena that is continuously evolving. They offer a layer of comfort akin to having a seasoned expert guiding the way through the ever-changing environment of CTV. With rapid advancements in technology, shifting guidelines, and evolving best practices, not to mention the dynamic nature of mergers and acquisitions that could alter the trading landscape overnight, their role is more crucial than ever.

Even for teams well-versed in digital strategies, the CTV platform presents a unique challenge. The intricacies of executing campaigns within this medium reveal a learning curve, illustrating that digital competencies don’t always translate directly into the CTV context. This scenario underscores the channel’s ongoing development phase, where hands-on experience and adaptation are key.

Despite these challenges, the allure of CTV for viewers remains unmatched, drawing significant advertising investments away from traditional linear, display, and social platforms. For advertisers looking to dive into CTV advertising, the window of opportunity is wide open, though it’s important to acknowledge that we are now beyond the phase of early adoption. In this scenario, leveraging curation emerges as an effective strategy to navigate and accelerate the entry process for brands and agencies. Curation offers a balanced approach, ensuring both quality and reach, making it an indispensable tool for those aiming to make their mark in the CTV advertising space.

AI’s Role in CTV Advertising 

AI is quickly becoming the engine that makes CTV advertising smarter, faster, and more efficient. With millions of households generating fragmented viewing data, AI helps unify signals and predict which audiences are most likely to engage or convert. Machine learning powers everything from dynamic audience creation to real-time bid adjustments, ensuring campaigns adapt to behavior instead of relying on static targeting. 

AI also improves creative relevance. Marketers can test variations, optimize messaging to specific audience cohorts, and automatically serve the best-performing assets without manual guesswork. On the measurement side, AI enhances attribution by stitching together cross-device activity and surfacing which exposures actually drive outcomes. As the CTV landscape grows more complex, AI is what turns that complexity into actionable, performance-ready insights. 

How AI Enhances CTV Advertising 

• Identifies high-value audiences by analyzing viewing behavior, device signals, and cross-platform activity
• Predicts which households are most likely to engage or convert, improving targeting efficiency
• Automates real-time bid and budget adjustments based on performance signals and inventory quality
• Optimizes creative by testing variations and serving the highest-performing assets to each audience segment 
• Reduces frequency waste by unifying exposure data across publishers and devices
• Improes attribution through cross-device stitching, helping clarify which impressions drive outcomes
• Finds actionable insights that help marketers refine audience strategy, pacing, and creative over time.

Conquer CTV with Lotame

Lotame’s solutions combine the power of first-party data and third-party data targeting, giving marketers the scale and reach they need to conquer CTV advertising. 

Brands can use Lotame’s end-to-end data collaboration platform, Spherical, to activate their first-party audiences on CTV inventory across all major demand side platforms. Our solution also allows marketers to expand first-party audiences even further with our built-in enrichment, machine-learning modeling, and lookalike tools.  

You don’t have to have a ton of first-party data to take advantage of our CTV solutions though. Whether marketers have customer data or need it, they can use Lotame’s high-quality data to engage the audiences they want to target. All of Lotame’s custom and 5,000+ prepackaged audiences — demo, interest, intent, and CTV viewership (US only) — are targetable on over 50 CTV and OTT media channels globally.

Is your business ready to get started with CTV advertising? Learn more about how Lotame can help you get Data Empowered with Connected TV and seize your CTV spotlight.

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