It’s taken some trial and error, but what clearly works best when it comes to digital video is tailoring that content for the platform those videos will be placed on.
When a spot with the same message is spread across different platforms, the question becomes: what engagement metrics warrant one platform getting a bump from the client’s ad budget?
“OTT and CTV have completion rates through the roof,” said Emily Karrs, creative director at Republican shop IMGE, adding that that gets clients excited. “‘Oh wow, people are watching our whole ad.’ Yeah, they didn’t have a choice.”
She added: “We keep going back to Meta. It’s like old reliable. The more native the ad, the better we’ve seen it perform.”
But on Meta’s platforms, a campaign’s completion rates can be low, warned Kate Conway, partner and chief creative officer at the Democratic shop Assemble the Agency.
“So you’ve got to make sure your message is in the first few seconds,” Conway said at C&E’s recent CampaignTech East conference. “There’s no silver-bullet platform. It’s really about figuring out where your target audience is spending time.”
To help get engagement metrics off the baseline, Atima Omara, of Omara Strategy Group, stresses that digital creative needs to be geo-targeted with local images and video. Making the mistake of including, say, out-of-state b-roll can be costly.
She recalled an ad campaign in Iowa that featured farming trucks that were yellow as opposed to a local green color.
“We definitely think about how we’re going to make sure it resonates, and make sense,” Omara said. “That’s how I advise campaigns.”
