By Tom Discepola, Director of Programmatic, Tatari
Digital advertisers are well-versed in the practice of retargeting and the ability to reach consumers who have visited a certain site or looked at a product.
We’re well past the days where it was notable that a pair of pants followed a potential buyer around the internet. Today, this is standard practice. Unfortunately, these banners that follow consumers around are easy to ignore. Retargeting is table stakes, but it’s also reached a saturation point when it comes to efficacy.
Fortunately, there is a new avenue opening up for brands that rely on retargeting, and it represents an opportunity to easily test an emerging medium in the process. That new channel is CTV, which, due to its digital delivery, is finally combining TV-like engagement with retargeting capabilities.
A new era of retargeting
Display retargeting today is done by dropping a pixel on a website or app, then placing a consumer who visits that site into an audience pool where they can be retargeted with ads across the web.
With CTV, the process is the same, but the targeted ad is delivered on streaming TV, as opposed to on the web. This is a critical distinction when it comes to visibility and engagement. Display advertising has been plagued with so many issues over the decades. Fraud, viewability, and the rise of made-for-advertising content have all been hot-button issues over the years, and that doesn’t take into account banner blindness and the fact that most consumers easily ignore these ads. While online video has made inroads, many ads on social media or YouTube can still be skipped after a few seconds. Even social media ads, which have been the bread and butter of ecommerce brands, are easy to scroll right past.
TV ads delivered within a streaming ad break are not skippable. The best practice with social video ads is to capture a user’s attention in the first three seconds in order to get them to stop scrolling. With CTV, advertisers have the luxury of telling their full brand story across 15 or 30 seconds. That is a fantastic opportunity to give more detail than a consumer may even get when they visit a site or look at a product.
The perfect test case
This is a low risk way for brands to test CTV advertising, because the ads are only going to people who have demonstrated some familiarity with the brand by visiting their website. It is not a massive upfront spend to prospect and get people to visit a site to learn more, but about helping remind consumers of a brand and encouraging them to convert. In some internal studies, we’ve seen retargeting perform 250% more efficiently than prospecting campaigns.
Even more exciting is the fact that we’re still in the early stages of CTV retargeting. With display, dynamic creative technology allows brands to pump out hundreds of permutations of ads that show the exact product that a consumer viewed. The consumer then has the option to click the ad and go directly back to the product to add it to their shopping cart.
That capability isn’t quite available in CTV yet, but it’s close. The rise of AI to generate ad creative and shoppable TV ads are the future of CTV and will make retargeting an even more powerful practice across the channel.
In the end, there are two ways to look at CTV retargeting. One is that this is an easy way for brands to test spending on CTV. Those that want to explore but are unsure of where to start can invest as littles at $50 per day to reach consumers who have already raised their hands, then look at the performance before investing more.
On the other side, advertisers who have relied heavily on retargeting to drive sales now have another performance channel to turn to. Social, search and display are all heavily competitive and brands are seeing reductions in ROAS, and TV represents a new frontier for engaging with potential customers and driving conversions.
