The expansion of CTV in the political market marks a major shift in the ad landscape that will reverberate for campaigns in 2024 and beyond, making it critical for advertisers to get their CTV strategy right.
It’s comparable to the rapid growth of pre-roll advertising and the changes that ushered in for the digital ad market starting in the early 2000s, according to Gary Sherwood, VP of client solutions, political and advocacy at Resonate.
“[R]emember how quickly the media landscape started to fragment when, all of a sudden, there seemed to be an endless number of websites to spend time on,” recalled Sherwood. The result: Time spent with digital media on home computers took off among all age groups, which led to a boom in the amount of video content advertisers could put their messages in front of.
“We’re really seeing history repeat itself with CTV,” Sherwood said. “There are more content channels. There has been a massive surge of smart TVs in U.S. homes, and there’s increased usage across all ages as the format matures. This launches a really exciting time for advertisers and campaigns to adopt different TV buying strategies.”
With all of that growth come challenges. So how can campaign advertisers capitalize in a cycle that is poised to set another political spending record on CTV/OTT?
An all-reserved, premium CTV media-buying approach is one thing, but advertisers will inevitably face skyrocketing demand and competition for limited inventory, warned Sherwood. He also advised campaigns build in programmatic.
“This lets campaigns supplement the strategy with the powerful combination of data and digital targeting, but in a linear TV experience,” he said. “They also get all the historical advantages that programmatic has become synonymous with, such as increased scale, more flexibility, and the ability to make adjustments to pacing and targeting, which is a very potent combination.”
The data piece will be a critical one to get right next year, given that voter behaviors are continually shifting, and the number of incoming messages Americans will be exposed to in a presidential year will increase.
“The data that campaigns need to target must keep up with that,” said Sherwood. “It can’t be stale because, ultimately, it’s the data you’re using that’s going to elevate the relevance of those impressions across the long tail of your TV impressions. We’ve been focused for more than ten years on making a massive AI-driven data set that is representative of the U.S. voting population across thousands of individual attributes. We can build custom audience segments in real time and target campaigns.”
Contact Resonate to learn how you can take your CTV strategy to the next level in the upcoming election cycle.
