“Gone are the days of blanket national and regional buys, wasted impressions on non-relevant audiences and lacklustre measurement,” says MiQ VP of broadcast sales Craig Hamm.
Connected TV (CTV) ad spend in Canada will surpass $1 billion for the first time this year. While still behind traditional TV spend, CTV has already revolutionized the advertising industry by making TV more cost-effective.
With the precise and flexible capabilities of data-driven programmatic CTV, national advertisers and local brands alike can reach custom audiences, bypassing significant wastage in spend – however they will also face more competition.
“Brands today can’t afford to not be on CTV,” adds Hamm. “But the good news is, TV buying isn’t just about competing for limited inventory anymore. Marketers can be far more creative and strategic when armed with the right insights to activate on their unique goals and budgets. TV inventory is essentially unlimited today, representing a paradigm shift from a program-based strategy to an audience-first approach.”
Well known for innovating the Canadian programmatic space, MiQ has consolidated CTV inventory from major Canadian publishers, free ad-supported streaming TV (FAST) channels and over 300 different channels and apps to build a uniquely diversified TV dataset for Canada, reaching 92% of Canadians watching ad-supported streaming TV (AVOD), and beyond.
Established partnerships with Bell Media gives MiQ access to traditional TV viewership data, and Samba TV, a global leader in automatic content recognition (ACR) technology, can be used to inform TV campaigns that run on both traditional and CTV. Frequency duplication across traditional and CTV is a common and costly headache for marketers, shares Hamm. “MiQ works with multiple platforms to consolidate audiences and reporting. Working with multiple vendors, marketers may not even know the true reach of their campaigns, or that their audience is being shown their ad 20 times over because they don’t have insights on where the audiences overlap, leading to massive inefficiencies and wastage.”
That’s not the only hurdle marketers are facing, he adds: “As viewers shift from traditional to CTV, we are finding that some have become harder to reach, especially those using ad-free services. This is where MiQ’s agnostic data partnerships shine. Combining viewership and behaviour data from multiple sources, we can retarget these ‘premium’ audiences on their second screens as they watch ad-free shows, often at a lower CPM. The applications of such robust retargeting capabilities are endless.”
Working with diverse data and inventory sources has many advantages, Hamm adds: bigger scale, more 1:1 deterministic targeting, more accurate lookalike and predictive audience modelling, omnichannel connectivity, and the ability to reflect unique audience and brand needs.
In one example, an advertiser wanted to sell tickets to a live comedy show but was unable to purchase “sold out” commercial time during the comedian’s TV series – a common limitation to traditional TV buying.
MiQ offered a customized CTV campaign targeting households that were frequent viewers of the series with ads, as they watched other CTV content, then layered on geotargeting within a 2-hour driving radius around the event venue.
“Because programmatic is essentially done in real-time, we can also sync to a variety of real-world and contextual events,” adds Hamm.
A popular application is competitor conquesting. “There are a handful of people who pull out their phones when they see a TV ad. Using technology through our partners, we can detect when a competitor has an ad running during a commercial break. We can then target people who are in the same household watching that ad with the client’s ads as they start scrolling on their mobile devices. Programmatic can do this within seconds.”
Dynamic creatives are also on the rise with new technologies that tap into client data feeds. “There are powerful applications for real-time data. We recently had a sports betting brand run a dynamic CTV campaign where we streamed their live betting odds during sports events displayed on a branded canvas, which led to double the engagement.”
“These complex activations are impossible to achieve without the tremendous investment in data and inventory that MiQ has packaged into our Advanced TV solution,” Hamm explains. “We specialize in media activation, but we’re really an ‘insights’ company. We focus on data, analytics and building the right tools to simplify, process, and activate on key brand learnings for marketers.”
In the rapidly evolving world of TV and programmatic advertising, it is crucial for marketers to stay ahead of the curve and “think outside the blocking chart”, Hamm notes. MiQ simplifies the analysis of billions of data points from multiple sources, identifying actionable optimizations for a cohesive strategy that’s easy to understand and act on.
It all starts with a conversation – before any strategy has been decided upon. “Measurement and validation of any strategy and execution should reflect the client’s goals set up prior to the campaign and offer them measurement beyond just ‘cheap CPMs,'” he says. “We want marketers to feel confident in what they invest in.”
