In this Q&A, MIQ’s UK CCO and newly-crowned Ad Tech Personality of the Year, Zuzanna Gierlinska joins us to discuss how marketers can get the best from CTV.

What are the key strategies marketers can implement to fully unlock the potential of CTV advertising?

To put it simply, the only way that marketers can unleash the full potential of CTV is through programmatic. Programmatic offers the best way to achieve granular audience targeting, meaningful reach, effective frequency, and more impactful measurement.

The competitive advantage of applying a dedicated CTV programmatic tech stack provides markets with the ability to navigate many of the channels limitations: fragmentation, quality, and price. Leveraging the right technology paired with diverse data enables you to take a fully agnostic approach. This enables you to work across the expanse of CTV supply, inventories, and platforms, giving you valuable insights into your audience.

And be sure to make the most of creative. Dynamic Creative Optimisation (DCO) seamlessly tailors your ads to specific audience interests, enabling you to measure campaign performance in real-time. (QR Codes and dynamic creative being prime examples.) MiQ recently delivered this in partnership with Merkle for The Gym Group where we leveraged dynamic TV creative to drive an average 6% footfall uplift for key gym locations.  

How can brands effectively integrate CTV into their broader digital marketing strategy without siloing it?

Let’s be honest, consumers don’t watch TV in terms of linear / BVOD / SVOD/ FAST, so it’s time we stopped navel-gazing and started thinking about TV in a more holistic manner.

The answer is to plan and activate linear TV, streaming and YouTube together, with a single view of the audience from the outset. By analysing these channels side-by-side concurrently, brands can build media plans that optimise for reach and frequency, keeping up with constantly evolving viewership habits. This means that no matter the screen, your audience should always have a brand experience that resonates. 

But it doesn't stop there, as CTV shouldn’t be planned and bought in silo. My recommendation is to always consider your CTV strategy alongside the rest of your programmatic activation, social, digital-out-of-home (PDOOH), and even audio. Ears can be just as valuable as eyeballs!  

What challenges do advertisers face when scaling their CTV campaigns, and how can they overcome them?

In MiQ’s 2023 report, we found that 31% of advertisers are concerned about the cost of CTV. With so much fragmentation across the CTV ecosystem, it’s challenging to achieve assurance of quality and validation of cost efficiency.

To overcome this, it’s important to firstly understand where your consumers are spending their time. Think beyond just the broad brush of BVOD, and get granular across the wealth of apps and platforms available. For a true picture, this discovery should incorporate not only streaming channels - but also linear TV and YouTube. 

MiQ’s TV Intelligence platform incorporates all of these environments to provide a holistic view of audience consumption, enabling a brand to effectively pin point where, when and what their target audience is watching. In a click of a button, you have visibility on where your media plan is over-saturated vs where you are under-exposed and have opportunity for incremental reach. This enables you to build a CTV strategy with refined reach and frequency, supporting overall higher effectiveness and better ROI.

How is the shift from traditional TV to CTV changing consumer engagement, and what opportunities does this create for advertisers?

CTV consumption is continuing to snowball. Brands that fully understand where, what and when their audiences are viewing are able to take maximum value from this channel.   

In the UK, 68% of households have connected TVs and our TV Intelligence platform shows that the average household subscribes to three CTV apps. We also see that streaming is a key part of 87% of UK CTV users’ viewing experience. Specifically across ‘light TV’, viewers 51% of consumption sits within YouTube, SVOD, AVOD.

However, CTV investment is still heavily skewed to BVOD as media plans lack the sophistication of harnessing the breadth of CTV. This results in over-saturation and price inflation.

There are significant opportunities for advertisers when applying a programmatic buying strategy that cherry picks inventory based on actual viewership. It drives better efficiencies on investment, and secures a competitive advantage by winning share of voice with under-exposed audiences.