Connected TV has seen explosive growth in recent years, but advertising investment has yet to catch up. That opens up real opportunities for forward-thinking brands to gain a competitive advertising advantage, as Zuzanna Gierlinska, UK chief commercial officer of MiQ, told the audience at this week’s Campaign Media360 conference.
“Leveraging the sophistication of AI-powered programmatic advertising, brands can now navigate the breadth of the fragmented CTV ecosystem and engage with relevant, highly targeted audiences at scale,” Gierlinska said. She then introduced an expert panel of experts who had teamed up to do precisely this for multi-channel broadcaster UKTV: Penny Brough, UKTV chief marketing officer, Hamid Habib, managing director at media agency Arena Media UK, and Holly Fitzgerald, group agency director at MiQ, UKTV’s media partner.
Getting personal
Brough said she joined UKTV at a critical moment, when audiences were migrating from traditional linear TV to video-on-demand (VOD) content. Yet more than 50% of their audience didn’t know where to access UKTV shows on demand, and even fewer knew that UKTV was a network of channels.
“We wanted to look at how to create the glue between all of our brands,” Brough said.
“As a broadcaster, we already have a really powerful tool of owned media at our fingertips, so it’s essential that our paid [advertising] is reaching new and lapsed audiences.”
UKTV wanted to test the hypothesis that hyper-personalisation could drive increased viewership among these audiences, keeping its biggest shows thriving in both linear TV and VOD. So it turned to its media partners to help.
Habib said that Arena Media UK put together a connected TV (CTV) campaign that was bespoke, highly personalised, and directly attributable. “At the heart of it was ACR data – anonymised household data that lets you look at what people are watching on their TV screens at home, which you can segment at postcode level,” he said.
The partners then layered in more data, including ad exposures, competitor behaviour, and demographic data. This helped produce a detailed picture of key “battleground areas” targeting the light and lapsed audiences UKTV wanted to reach.
Shifting audience behaviour
The next step was for Fitzgerald to assemble a team of data scientists, analysts and solution engineers to turn their campaign ideas into reality. Knowing that not all light and lapsed viewers would be interested in the same shows or genres, the team developed mood-based ad campaigns built around six very different UKTV titles. These ranged from Bangers & Cash, a behind-the-scenes documentary about a car auction house with a loyal following among motor enthusiasts, to the Sister Boniface Mysteries, a favourite with crime fans.
The media partners adopted a “robust and scientific approach” to measuring success, said Fitzgerald, dividing postcodes within the UK into ‘control’ and ‘exposed’ test areas, and tracking key metrics in those areas, including the number of households tuning in per postcode, and the average number of minutes watched per postcode.
“This gave us a really precise view of how behaviours changed in areas where we ran the campaign, versus those where we didn’t,” noted Fitzgerald. “The great news was that we saw more tune-ins, but we also saw more people watching shows for longer, which proved the value of our mood-based targeting. Ultimately, this wasn’t just a media campaign, it was a measurable shift in audience behaviour.”
Three steps to a winning formula
Running over six months, the campaign allowed the team to continually test, learn from and double down on its successes. These included a 12% viewing uplift among light users and a 5% uplift among lapsed users for Bangers & Cash, and an 18% uplift among light users and a 124% uplift among lapsed users for Sister Boniface Mysteries.
So, what was the winning formula behind their successful CTV advertising strategy? “First and foremost is bringing linear, CTV and YouTube data together in one place, so you have a really clear picture of what your audience is viewing and at what frequency,” said Gierlinska. “The second part is leveraging advanced AI-powered programmatic, ensuring the insights and data used in planning can directly pull through into activation without the need to retranslate and rebuild those audiences in buying platforms.”
“The third part is an agnostic approach to media buying with multi-DSP capabilities – critical to ensuring you can deliver hyper-personalisation at scale.”
Using this formula, UKTV was able to access the breadth of the CTV ecosystem and ensure their campaigns delivered the right message for the right programme at the right time.
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