How To Influence Action with CTV Ads

Strategus Encore Omnichannel Technology Enhances Customer Engagement, Brand Resonance 

With more people at home than ever, millions are forming closer connections with their connected televisions. Viewers are watching more ads, and shopping more online. Problem is, with CTV ads, brand resonance and customer engagement metrics are infamously hard to measure. 

Inspired by this epic opportunity, Strategus Labs™ set out to find a solution. It’s been well documented for years now that the vast majority of viewers have smartphones in hand while watching TV in their living rooms, and they’re using them more often (probably even more than the remote itself). With the research and development behind our new Encore Omnichannel technology, Strategus Labs discovered a way to bridge the gap between the television screen and in-home personal devices to enhance our clients’ CTV campaigns with a call-to-action in subsequent messages on smartphones and computer screens. 

How it Works

It’s always been difficult to know who saw your ad in a broadcast ecosystem, but with our programmatic OTT/CTV campaigns, Strategus already knows how to serve and track relevant messages to individuals, households and devices. Once the viewer watches an individually targeted CTV ad to completion, the Encore Omnichannel campaign enhancer can instantly re-target the already-engaged viewer with relevant, clickable calls-to-action on their mobile phones, tablets, laptops and desktops.

If we’re following a target, and already know they’re in-market for a new pickup truck for example, we can serve them an actionable ad on their smartphone that they can click to learn more about model options, accessories and pricing.

Although this strategy is relatively new and hard to find outside Strategus, we can already document campaign performance improvements using Encore vs. running CTV by itself. One of our clients, a national lawn care company, recently ran a four-week, nationwide CTV campaign originally designed to build upper sales funnel awareness. By adding the ability to know who watched the OTT/CTV ad to completion and then serve them retargeted ads on their other digital devices, we were able to generate over 20,000 visits to the client’s site. This ultimately was attributed down the funnel to $2.1 million in sales, and with offline conversion attribution, were able to deliver an astounding 3,000 : 1 return on investment.

While OTT/CTV CPMs are among the highest of any digital media, Encore offers the additional benefit of being a lower cost tacic, thereby simultaneously blending down a campaign’s eCPM while increasing its click, conversion and attribution rates.

Relevant Engagement

This technology essentially brings trackable engagement to CTV advertising, and yet it is the antithesis of the indiscriminate and annoying spray-and-pray banner ad mentality of the past. Encore is the opposite, because we’re only re-targeting ads to already engaged prospects who have seen our CTV ad to completion, which ensures that those ads won’t be viewed as irrelevant.

At Strategus, we believe our clients should always expect smarter-efficient-faster results, and we encourage them to demand more from their programmatic advertising campaigns. With our Strategus Labs division, we’re relentlessly pursuing new advances in targeting, ad serving and attribution technology to keep pace with consumers’ ever-changing digital media consumption habits. Developing this methodology that engages likely customers on their second screen with calls to action and relevant messaging is another big step in the right direction, and a new way to build brand relevance and sales success.