← MarTech Podcast ™ // Marketing + Technology = Business Growth
MarTech Podcast ™ // Marketing + Technology = Business Growth
How CTV Became Performance Marketing’s Next Channel
00:29:10
Loading summary
Transcript57 lines
- [00:00]
Podcast Network Announcer
The Martech Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast, I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit iheareverything.com.
- [00:26]
Benjamin Shapiro
From advertising to software as a service to data across all of our programs and clients, we've seen a 55 to 65% open rate. Getting brands authentically integrated into content performs better than TV advertising. Typical lifespan of an article is about 24 to 36 hours. We're reaching out to the right person with the right message and a clear call to action. Then it's just a matter of timing.
- [00:54]
Podcast Network Announcer
Welcome to the Martech Podcast, a member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. In this podcast, you'll hear the stories of world class marketers that you technology to drive business results and achieve career success. Here's a host of the Martech podcast. Benjamin Shapiro
- [01:16]
Benjamin Shapiro
70% 70% of media buyers expect to increase their connected TV budgets next year. That's a big shift for a channel that marketers usually treat as too expensive, too hard to measure, and mostly useful for brand awareness. So what's changed as we see the reality of an AI driven playbook where there's less site traffic and weakening digital direct response attribution? The channels that we previously wrote off as brand plays are getting more and more attention. And with ctv, marketers can target specific audiences at scale and measure performance in ways that weren't possible just a few years ago. So as TV advertising become a performance marketing channel, should B2B marketers reallocate their search and social budgets into television? Alan I'm Benjamin Shapiro and today we're talking with Alison Clark, CTV and Go to Market strategy lead at AdRoll, a sponsor of the Martech podcast. And today we're talking about why connected TV is entering its performance marketing era.
- [02:16]
Shift Paradigm Marketing Sponsor
Today's interview is brought to you by Shift Paradigm Marketing today is buried in complexity. You've got the tech, you've got the tools, but moving the needle feels harder than ever. And the last thing us marketers need is another consultant pitching digital transformation. Enter Shift Paradigm Shift is an integrated team of experts who help enterprise brands turn complexity into traction. Their work is insight led and strategically grounded, designed not to sell you a service or a piece of tech, but to actually solve real business challenges. What makes them different? Well, they're AI enabled but not AI dependent. They're human first, but plugged into the latest tools and models and the moments those models need to go through to prove themselves. They get techy without losing sight of the real person behind every click. And they don't just hand you a deck. They build the blueprints and stay to develop, deploy and run the engine. Growth isn't one size fits all, so stop settling for strategies that collect dust and start working with the team that actually builds for you. Visit ShiftParadigm.com to see how they can help you connect meaningfully with your audience. That's ShiftParadigm.com Alison welcome to the Martech podcast.
- [03:26]
Alison Clark
Thanks so much for having me today.
- [03:28]
Benjamin Shapiro
Excited to have you here. First off, congratulations. I know this is your first time on a podcast. The setup looks great and I'm sure that you're potentially a little nervous. But we've got lots to talk about when it comes to the changes in marketing, specifically your area in Adroll focusing on leading ctv. Not only just a new podcast guest, but also you're relatively new into AdRoll and leading CTV. What the heck are you doing at AdRoll? Why CTV? Why'd you make this big change?
- [04:03]
Alison Clark
You know, I'm really excited to be here and talking to you and I'm really excited to be at Adroll. We are doing so many amazing things and making CTV just more measurable and accessible to brands that otherwise haven't traditionally been running in ctv. So what we're seeing is a huge shift in consumer behavior. Think of your own streaming habits, right? You're going on, you're logging into an app and you're streaming. We see time spent in CTV is growing and therefore advertising budgets are moving over to connected television. Because now you can combine TV impact with digital accountability with measurement and all the good things that come along with along with ctv.
- [04:47]
Benjamin Shapiro
You know, obviously television has changed a lot and more and more of the boob tube is now actually connected. And I think most of the consumption happens in places like YouTube, YouTube, TV, Netflix. Pretty sure people are still watching that. And then there's this whole sort of other host of like other connected apps of Paramounts of the world. Peacock and Fox has its own app and every individual channel has their own apps. Give me a sense of the landscape and what's connected. Where can you advertise? Where can't you just give me the 10,000 foot view of what the landscape looked like today?
- [05:28]
Alison Clark
I mean, you get an app, you get an app, everyone gets an app, right? Everyone has their own platform across the board. And you know, there's all the premium subscription network apps and then there is all the free apps to be Pluto's of the world where you can find even more content. So consumers are really using a mixture of both to find content that they want to watch wherever they want to watch and are a lot of times they get an app, they subscribe, they binge and then they turn, they turn from that app and they go and find content in the next place. So really part of your strategy has to be, yes, the premium big name apps are important part of your media mix, but so is finding consumers wherever they have opted to stream across the free and ad supported channels as well.
- [06:16]
Benjamin Shapiro
I think most people have traditionally thought of CTV as a brand channel, right? I'm going to go, I'm going to make this beautiful, expensive piece of creative and I'm going to splash it around broadly. And so CTV was mostly, I think probably a CPG channel, right? Maybe enterprise brands on the B2B side like the Salesforces, the Hubspots, maybe did a little television, but the down market brand hasn't really been able to use CTV because it didn't have that direct response component. Is television still a brand channel or are we starting to think about it from a demand perspective?
- [06:58]
Alison Clark
You know, I would look at CTV as it can be performance, right? We are able to target, we're able to measure, we're able to see conversions and what happens after someone sees the ad. That's the beauty of ctv. Linear television still hard to measure, still hard to see really what's happening from that side. So I would say linear is still very much an awareness play. But we're, CTV is crossing over into that performance marketing where you can measure and see those business outcomes, see conversions and really see how CTV played into your marketing mix and what incrementality it drove for your brand.
- [07:34]
Benjamin Shapiro
Talk to me a little bit about the measurement piece because I think that's where most marketers sort of balk at television. I think it's two things. One, it's expensive to create a commercial, right? People spend up to a million dollars, multiple millions of dollars making a beautiful film as a minute long commercial. But also it's like great. So even if I'm getting in front of the right audience, how do I know if it's working? Talk to me through the measurement strategies for ctv.
- [08:01]
Alison Clark
You know, really you're, you have to have a strong measurement strategy because you want to make sure it's working and you want to see how it's affecting those business outcomes. We use third party verification along with our on site metrics, right? We have the standard metrics that Everyone comes to expect. But we also go above. We can show cross channel attribution. How did your video fit into your overall media mix? Then we move over to our partner is Innovid, it's third party. And we can show like, what did they do after they see the ad? How many days did it take them to go to your site? What did they do when they were on your site? Did they convert? Did they make a purchase? What was, what was that experience like for them? Really proving out how CTV is fitting and, and moving the needle for brands through, through powerful, impactful measurement.
- [08:50]
Benjamin Shapiro
I want to talk a little bit about that because you said the C word click. I have this philosophy that the click is essentially dying, right? We're seeing more research in LLMs and people are going to websites and generating first party data less because they're doing all the research other places. And so are you seeing any softness or degradation in sort of the actual click?
- [09:20]
Shift Paradigm Marketing Sponsor
Great.
- [09:20]
Benjamin Shapiro
Somebody saw the website, they're aware of the brand and maybe they engage. But are they actually still going to the website or are they just going to their LLM and saying, hey, what's the deal with this product I saw on this ad and then researching other places?
- [09:35]
Alison Clark
I think they're doing both. Right? And that's why creative is really important, right? You have to have a strong call to action if you want them to go to your website. Yes, everyone's going to research, they're going to do their own back and forth. But you need to make sure that you are driving them to your website so that they can convert, so that they're seeing your product that they see, get your look, your feel, your tone, right? There's so much on a website that really plays into getting someone to become a consumer of your brand. So really you want to be able to drive them to your website. There is no clicks in ctv, right? They have to get there another way. So are they going directly there after they see their ads? Are they putting it into search? Are they researching somewhere else and then going that way? All of them, right? Everyone's doing their own thing. But the important part is to ultimately get them to your site so that your brand and your messaging and what the message that you want them to know and it can come across in your own voice.
- [10:31]
Benjamin Shapiro
Is there a marketing tactic where you're essentially avoiding the click using ctv? And I'll give you the example of our production business for I hear everything, the company that runs the March podcast, right? I want to go find B2B marketers and I can figure out how to target them using ctv. I can get the ads in front of them, hopefully have something that looks pretty, that gets them to understand what the brand is and give them a nice call to action. Do I actually need to drive them to the website? Like if somebody sees the ad and has enough of a, I guess they review duration that you're tracking, can I then retarget them from the ad exposure or do they have to click for me to use other methodologies to do my nurturing and retargeting and all the other downstream of stuff?
- [11:21]
Alison Clark
No, we can retarget. If someone sees your CTV ad, we can then retarget them for you in display without them going to your site. And we can retarget from display back into CTV and then we can retarget off of those who have been to your site. So we can. They don't necessarily have to go to your site to be retargeted, but obviously the end goal is that you want them on your site so that they can learn more about your company and ultimately become a partner of yours.
- [11:49]
Benjamin Shapiro
Okay, tell me a little bit about CTV. For B2B marketers, it seems like that's a trend now that you know the media buys can be more targeted, they could probably be smaller. You're not doing a national television buy. So now we're in this place where B2B makes a little bit more sense. What makes an effective B2B marketing system? CTV campaign.
- [12:12]
Alison Clark
You know what makes a good B2B CTV campaign is that we can now target by account and contact targeting, which really makes your buy very efficient. You are only reaching those that you want to reach. Think about it. You get 15, 30 seconds on the largest screen in the house in front of your business decision maker. That's impactful, that's powerful. They're in a lean back environment. They've decided to engage with whatever content they're watching. And now you have a platform to share what your brand is with them in uninterrupted, uncluttered environment. It is really impactful and great for B2B because you're eliminating that waste. You're not on the linear screen hoping that that decision maker is watching. You're now finding that decision maker when they have opted in to sit and watch a program.
- [12:58]
Benjamin Shapiro
All right, so let me role play here for a second and I'll selfishly use my own brand as the example. I want to get in front of mid market B2B buyers. I have to figure out how to make creative first and you're saying that the targeting can be down to my account list. So I know I want marketers mid market, B2B10 million of revenue or more. And I'm going to filter them by do they do brand marketing and do they have a podcast? And so I come up with this list, I give it to Adroll or whatever vendor I'm going to use. Now I've got to make the creative 60 seconds, 30 seconds, 15 seconds. Do I just put the camera on? I can record myself. Do I use Gemini to create the ads? Like, how do you figure out how to make creative that stands up on the widescreen? Can I just go like, super bare bones and be like, hi, I'm Ben. Hire me as your podcast producer. Look, I'm great at targeting.
- [13:54]
Alison Clark
No, but you can if you want.
- [13:58]
Benjamin Shapiro
I've got a nice camera. It looks fine.
- [14:01]
Alison Clark
I think, really think of all the brand assets you have and think of all the assets that brands have from your socials, from your websites, from. From all that you do, all the reels that you have. You have so many assets at your hand that you can come to a company like Adroll. We can help you make creative assets. There's also AI out there making creative assets. You really have a lot of different avenues to take. If you don't, you no longer need those huge production budgets. You don't need the Hollywood film crew. Right. You have so many things at your fingertips already that you can use to make a powerful message. But what you really need to make sure is that in that message, you are conveying what you want them to know about you and where you want them to go. Because without a strong call to action, it's like, great, I saw this ad. But now, now what or where do they, you know, where do I go? So it's really important that you bring it all together and really have strong creative. Because without strong creative, all the targeting in the world won't, Won't drive results.
- [14:59]
Benjamin Shapiro
Let me argue with you. I think that me showing up on somebody's television and looking in the camera and saying, hi, I know you're a marketer and I know that the click is dying and I know that the way to get in front of your consumer is to refocus on brand. And if you don't know how to do that, you should consider creating a comprehensive media strategy. I'm Benjamin, the CEO of I Hear Everything. If you need help with your media Strategy, come to iheareverything.com. that's a total pattern disrupt from every Other sort of ad that you're seeing on television. Does it make me look sloppy? Maybe, but, but like, when you're actually doing television creative, like, I don't want my brand to look like a Ford truck ad. So what actually makes good creative? Not just how do you produce the creative, but what do you need to say when you're producing the creative when you're in television?
- [15:55]
Alison Clark
I mean, I love that you said what your value prop was, who you are and what you can do for them. Bam. Simple, easy. That's all you need. You need to make sure that they know who you are, what you're doing and what you can do for them. And why, why, why do they care? Why are they seeing this ad? Right. Like, make sure it resonates.
- [16:13]
Benjamin Shapiro
And I do feel like if I, like, grab the camera a little bit and be like, is this thing on? Hello, can you see me? I've never done a TV ad before, but maybe we're onto something. I could probably just clip up this podcast. All right, we've got our ad down. Now I've got my targeting. Talk to me a little bit about budget and the actual administration of a campaign. Now that I've got tight targeting and some really sloppy and probably not great creative ad roll. Please help me with this. What do I do to actually execute?
- [16:44]
Alison Clark
You know, you need to make sure that you're spending enough. You need enough reach and enough frequency to make sure that your message is heard. You know, for a national campaign, if we're starting with a B2C customer, right, you want to make sure you have a large enough budget over a long enough time to drive, enough speed, scale and impression so that you can measurement. Right, we go back to measurement. If you don't have enough scale, you're not going to see enough conversions. You're not going to have stable measurements.
- [17:08]
Benjamin Shapiro
Okay, hang on, but give me real numbers here. National campaign, not B2B specific, definitely not focusing anymore on. I hear everything. Sorry about that, everybody. How big of a campaign? If I'm doing a national campaign, what budget do I need? How much reach, what frequency? What is actually sort of the minimum threshold to make an effective campaign and at least enough to give you a signal to figure out whether it's working or not.
- [17:35]
Alison Clark
Really, you want to end up somewhere over 2 million impressions. So that's going to be 25, 30k is really where you need to be per month. You want to make sure you're driving, like I said, that reach bigger budgets better, more reach, more engagement, more conversions. So you really want to make sure that you are spending Getting somewhere around 2 million to 3 million minimum impressions per month.
- [18:02]
Benjamin Shapiro
Hang on, let me do some math here and I'll use rounder numbers. You said 2 million impressions and I think you said $25,000 was the, the about what you'd spend. If I'm, I'm doing the math correctly, let's say it's 2 million impressions and $20,000. That's a $10 cpm. So it's, it's not terribly expensive to get those 2 million impressions. You need 20 grand, but you're spending it relatively efficiently at a probably a $10 to $15 CPM. Does that sound roughly correct?
- [18:35]
Alison Clark
Yeah. CP CPMs have come down and become a lot more efficient. Right. There's a lot of places, as we talked about before, a lot of different apps, a lot of different ways to stream. So there is a lot of supply out there. So CPMs have come down making CTV even more efficient. And you can buy between that 10 to $15. Does it go up the more targeting you layer in? Yes, some, some live events, sports. Think of that. Those are higher cost events and higher CPMs. But you're also capturing attention. So you kind of have to weigh both against each other when you're looking to make your media plan. But really you want to be in that 20, 25k plus minimum per month. Really bigger budgets or you're just going to see better results.
- [19:21]
Benjamin Shapiro
Okay, so that that media buy on a national campaign goes relatively quickly. That's a monthly ad buy. Help me understand reach. If I'm spending my 25 grand to send out 2 million impressions, are we talking 2 million people with a reach of, you know, a frequency cap of one? What, what's the actual reach? How many people do you get in front of?
- [19:42]
Alison Clark
It depends what you want your frequency cap to be. The frequency varies by brand and industry. Right. Somewhere you want to be around. It takes six touch points, six to seven touch points before someone will convert. Will all of those be in ctv? Probably not. So you want to make sure that you're setting your frequency cap probably somewhere around 3 to 4 per campaign or per month to make sure that you're getting enough exposure. But you're also not having ad fatigue. You want to, you know, going back to creative. It's really important to have a lot of variations of your creative so that there isn't that creative fatigue.
- [20:17]
Benjamin Shapiro
So now you got to create a couple different ads and you're rotating them. You're trying to get to see six or Seven impressions across Omnichannel and you're probably doing half of them on CCTV for your 25 grand. And what's going through my head is like when I'm buying media at smaller scale on LinkedIn, it's way more expensive than a 10 to 15 cpm. Now look, there's a click there and maybe I could grab somebody's email address in my LinkedIn ad. So it's not an exact benchmark, but the television ad buy is actually way less expensive than some of the digital media that I'm using, which seems counterintuitive to what most people think about television advertising. It's expensive and you got to do it at this huge scale. It's actually from a unit economics relatively cheap.
- [21:02]
Alison Clark
Yeah. And it depends. I mean, there is a time and place for LinkedIn, right. They're great at capturing demand, but really what CTV does is create demand. So you need to be, you need a full media marketing mix to make sure that you are generating demand, getting in front of new consumers, making sure that your pipe is full, that you always have the next customer in mind, and not just taking demand that's already there and capturing and targeting them.
- [21:30]
Benjamin Shapiro
Okay, now let's get back into the selfish stuff where I ask you about my media buy. I'm not trying to reach 2 million impressions. You know, let's say that's five people. I'm going to have to do math again. What's 2 million divided by 5? That would be 2000-004004-00000 people. Maybe my math is terrible, but hundreds of thousands of people, I care about 5,000 people. So if I'm doing a much smaller media buy, is the cost of that media buy so much higher because I have a targeted list that I'm still spending 10 to 20 grand? Or is this a much smaller experiment?
- [22:08]
Alison Clark
So if you're using account contact targeting. Right. Budgets are going to be different depending on your list size, depending on how many people, how many people we can reach and target and find. The CPMs will be maybe slightly higher. Sometimes finding those contacts, there's more harder to find them. So that CPM and that bid request then becomes a little bit more expensive, but it's not going to become astronomically more expensive. And when in those cases where you have a smaller list that you're going after. Yes, smaller budgets make sense. Again, you want to make sure that you still have a variety of creative, that you're still managing your frequency, hitting them, but you're still staying top of mind as well.
- [22:49]
Benjamin Shapiro
Yeah. If I had 5,000 leads and I want a frequency of 6. Now I'm looking at 30,000 impressions and at a $10 CPM. Great, that makes a ton of sense. I'm assuming the CPMs probably go up at least, you know, double, maybe triple. Because instead of being like broad targeting nationally, now I'm like, get this specific person. And that level of granularity has to be more expensive. But you're not talking about a $30,000 media buy to reach 5,000 people. It's actually not totally cost prohibitive. There's also this notion of, I don't know if you've heard of this new technology. It's called artificial intelligence. I heard it on a podcast and everybody seems to be talking about it these days. Tv I think I already called it the boob tube. You know that box that we look at at the end of the day that gives us fun stuff to watch. Is AI affecting the CTV world? And if so, how?
- [23:50]
Alison Clark
It definitely is. AI is everywhere and what AI does is helps make media buying more efficient, more effective. Right. It can do frequency capping, real time optimizations, it can help with creative again going back make a lot of different variations of your creative for relatively inexpensive is going to make marketers and all of us work smarter and be more efficient with our time is going to take the things that used to take a long time to do, make those quicker. But you still need marketers in place to figure out where we then run what we want to do. The actual strategy and AI will just be layered in to make us more efficient.
- [24:27]
Benjamin Shapiro
So we already said AI can be used in the creative component. Right. I'm guessing it's probably already used in sort of targeting and adroll I'm sure has lots of smart people in machine learning and AI that's doing the bid optimization. Am I missing other places where AI is being layered into the ctv?
- [24:47]
Shift Paradigm Marketing Sponsor
Fine.
- [24:47]
Alison Clark
Process audience targeting. Right. Finding the right audience, finding the lookalikes it's being leaked into. Optimizing your campaign performance, making sure that you know it's optimizing to the best performing audiences across the board. So yeah, it's being looped in and even measurement and analyzing results and all that. You can use AI for, for it all.
- [25:11]
Benjamin Shapiro
Yeah. So I'm going to have a conversation with my cfo, turns out that's me and we're going to say, hey, I'm going to do a TV ad buy. And he's going to look at me and say that sounds expensive. And I'm going to say actually it's like five to ten grand. It's really not that bad because our list is small and we're pretty targeted. And he said, well, great, how are we going to track that? How do you actually figure out what is working with a CTV buy? What are the metrics I'm looking at and how do I figure out conversions?
- [25:40]
Alison Clark
So we use again, we use Innovid, we put a pixel on your site and we track who's seen you're at, who's gone to your website afterwards, what did they do, how long did it take them to restart, respond, what creative is getting the most responses, time of day, when are you running, what geographical regions are they coming from? We're going to give you all of that. Where they give you video completion rates, household visits, unique households reach frequency, you're going to have all that across the platform to kind of measure how did your campaign do, how did it perform and what was, you know, overall, how did it impact the rest of your media buying as well?
- [26:21]
Benjamin Shapiro
When you talk about how it impacted the rest of your media buy and you're thinking about the sort of omnichannel nature, great, we're putting this blanket, this halo of television that's covering our entire market with all of the ads and if somebody comes to the website, we could track them. How do you figure out whether it impacts your other marketing channels like did the television impact your display or your social ads?
- [26:46]
Alison Clark
We have cross channel attribution, which shows where CTV fell in the mix, where display was. Right. How all your channels work together to tell you, of course it's going to drive efficiencies, right. If you're only running display and social, those dollars have to work really, really hard because they're not your true branding mechanism. Right? You need that awareness, you need your name out there. So working everything together, we see campaigns all the time. When you pair CTV with disposal display, driving down costs across the board, making your display more efficient because you're supplementing with CTV to help do some of the heavy lifting. So what we've seen is CTV and display really work well together and both together are going to drive more efficiency for your brand. Rising Tides lifts all ships, that's what they do together. They're going to play off of each other to give you that efficiency and effectiveness that you're looking for and really work well together to drive more conversions at a more efficient price.
- [27:48]
Benjamin Shapiro
You said Rising Tides raids all boats or all ships. And I actually think my takeaway from this conversation is the cost component of CTV has changed. And where most marketers think of CTV as this brand channel meant to raise the water level is actually much more of a digitally native channel now. Now the problem is there's no click from the television. So you have to use some of these cross channel attribution metrics and map whether somebody got to the website. So you get all this benefit of all the brand reach and maybe somebody goes from your television ad and conducts their AI search and they end up showing up direct. So TV doesn't get credit for all of the impact it's having, but you do get to understand whether you've shown an ad to somebody, do they come on your website and down to the conversion level in the same way that most of our digital responses. So television, oddly enough, is becoming more of a programmatic ad buying channel than it is this creative brand display channel that we've thought about it for the last three decades or however long we've been watching television. It's actually way longer than three decades.
- [29:05]
Alison Clark
Yeah, it really, it's now measurable and it's, it's taking everything that you love about tv, the big screen, the reach. Right. And it's making it into now you can track conversions, you can track the impact and, and you still get the beautiful screen to tell your brand story on the larger screen in the house when people are leaned in and paying attention to what is on.
- [29:27]
Benjamin Shapiro
All right, well, Allison, congratulations. You've completed your first podcast. Thank you for coming on the show and being my guest and telling us a little bit about what's actually working with CTV and marketing today.
- [29:40]
Alison Clark
Thank you for having me.
- [29:41]
Benjamin Shapiro
All right, that wraps up this episode of the Martech podcast. Thanks again to Allison Clark, CTV and go to market lead at AdRoll.
- [29:48]
Shift Paradigm Marketing Sponsor
A special thanks to Shift Paradigm for sponsoring this podcast. Shift is an integrated team of experts who help enterprise brands bridge the gap between strategy data and customers. Human first, AI enabled and execution led. They build the blueprints, then stay to develop, deploy and run the engine you need. So stop settling for decks that collect dust and start working with a team that actually builds for you. Visit ShiftParadigm.com to see how they can help you connect meaningfully with your audience.
- [30:19]
Benjamin Shapiro
If you'd like to contact Alison, you can find a link to her LinkedIn profile in our show notes or on martechpod.com or you can visit her company's website, which is adroll.com and if you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of marketing and technology knowledge in your podcast feed, hit the subscribe button in your podcast app or on YouTube and we'll be back on your feet next week. All right, that's it for today, but until next time, my advice is to just focus on keeping your customers happy.
- [31:11]
Podcast Network Announcer
Thanks for listening to the Martech podcast and I hear everything. Production Looking to launch or scale a podcast like this one for your brand? Then visit iheareverything.com.