This holiday season, consumers are going to be shopping online more than ever to avoid in-person crowds at retailers. As marketers are replenishing their ad budgets just in time for this much needed economic boost, they also need to consider new strategies for reaching consumers at home throughout all stages of the holiday shopping funnel.
Digital behavior has certainly changed this year, with traditional device consumption up due to so much remote work and learn activity across the world. And, of course, Addressable TV (advertising technologies that enable advertisers to selectively segment TV audiences and serve different ads or ad pods within a common program or navigation screen) consumption went up as a result of the same, but just how much it went up is a bit of a surprise.
So, how do you take advantage of connected TV (CTV) opportunities and the inevitable e-commerce shopping palooza that’s about to go down in Q4? We’ve got a few ideas to help you out.
It all starts with exposure
Addressable TV viewership is up 40% globally and 64% in North America in Q2, paving the way for a big second half of the year.*
Just like walking down the aisles of a department store, consumers are constantly bombarded with new brands across digital channels throughout their social content and web browsing every day. But, the best time to introduce them to a new product or service isn’t when they’re in content-stimulation-overload at their fingertips; it’s when they’re laid back and focused on one large, central screen, about to consume one piece of content. Today’s addressable TV options offer consumers any content they could possibly dream of, and that means marketers can have a field day with contextual alignment. Non-skippable, snackable ads, right in the middle of a Love Island (™) binge session--who wouldn’t be paying attention?
Through identity resolution, marketers can map CTV devices to households and individuals for a unified view of exactly what users in front of their brand ads on addressable devices and connected platforms. Once you know what users could be in front of that digital screen, you can begin targeting them with holiday campaign ads and initiate your brand connection with consumers.
Retargeting
Out of 1,000 respondents surveyed, 43% of consumers said they notice different ads being served by the same brand-- a sign they’re paying attention after that first awareness exposure.
Brand exposure is just the start to driving a purchase, and it’s definitely not where the purchase is actually happening. So, now that you’ve made consumers aware of your product you need to remind them before they forget to check you out online. Retargeting has long been a strategy for digital marketing. It can be effective, but as we’ve all fallen victim to the dreaded 100%-SOV-Geico ads during your favorite show-- we know it’s not always the best use of impressions and opportunity. The good news is, ad buying technology has enabled brands to go from ‘the big screen’ to mobile or desktop so easily.
Leveraging identity resolution, marketers can target on CTV devices and then easily find and retarget those users on additional devices through one demand-side platform (DSP) like The Trade Desk. By combining identity and ad technology, omni-channel media strategies become that much more effective; because once you know who’s watching that glossy, contextually placed addressable TV ad, you can easily retarget them and start to evaluate their journey to purchase.
Cross-device frequency capping
Over 30% of users claim they see the same ad from a brand more than 5 times in a week and over 22% said they get annoyed with a brand after the 5th ad-- which means adjusting frequency could go a long way toward brand favorability.
Finding the same users across different devices is just the beginning of a comprehensive digital targeting strategy. Once you’ve found them, you need to make sure you’re reaching them on the right devices and channels at the right time. If you’re using a cross-device identity solution like Tapad, then you’ve got the right insights-- a household of individuals and their associated IDs and devices. But before you start sending impressions across every possible touchpoint (with identity resolution, you could have at least six IDs to reach an individual) you should consider what role each part plays in the whole. To keep with our current example, how are you remessaging users from addressable TV to mobile; and how often? Using cross-device targeting can be an extremely powerful way to drive ROI and conversions, but if you’re not focusing impressions on devices and channels that you know resonate with a given consumer, you’re probably wasting a good portion of them. The bid for their loyalty isn’t just about frequency of messaging, it’s also about restraint.
As campaigns deliver in real-time and you collect engagement and conversion insights, cross-device identity can help you find those consumers and all the potential places to target them, and then it can help you prevent over-saturation to those consumers through frequency capping and suppression-- driving the perfect cadence of ads to deliver results.
Tying it together
There are a lot of great ways to take advantage of new digital consumption trends this holiday season by leveraging the actionable insights of identity resolution. Can your identity solution enable these three simple strategies? If not, it might be time to reconsider how you execute cross-device to be inclusive of Addressable TV opportunities while engagement is skyrocketing during peak shopping season.
Tapad is a global leader in privacy-safe, cross-device identity resolution.
