Over the past decade, digital advertising has undergone a remarkable transformation, fundamentally altering how brands engage with their audiences. This change has been primarily driven by the advent of self-service advertising platforms, with giants like Google and Facebook leading the way.
These platforms have democratized advertising, enabling businesses of all sizes to target audiences with unprecedented accuracy and measure the return on their advertising spend in an incredibly precise way. Now, as we enter 2024, a similar revolution is unfolding in the realm of connected TV (CTV), raising the question: Will this be the year when the TV industry reaches 100,000 advertisers for self-service TV advertising campaigns?
Rise of Self-Service Advertising
Self-service advertising platforms emerged as game-changers for digital marketing, beginning with paid search pioneer GoTo.com in 1998. These platforms offered a level of accessibility and precision that traditional advertising methods couldn't match. Any business — small or large — could set up a campaign in minutes and reach valuable audiences without the hefty budgets typically associated with traditional media buys. Metrics and analytics provided clear insights into ad performance against driving outcomes, ensuring that advertisers could understand and demonstrate the effectiveness and return on investment of their ad spend. This level of control and insight is now extending into the CTV space.
CTV has seen explosive growth over the past several years, with more households choosing streaming services over traditional cable TV. The shift has created a new avenue for advertisers to reach audiences where they are increasingly spending their time.
2024: A Turning Point?
As we progress into 2024, several factors suggest that this could be a pivotal year for self-service CTV advertising. Among them:
Advances in Measurement and Targeting: CTV platforms are rapidly developing their measurement and targeting capabilities. Advertisers can now leverage detailed viewer data to tailor their messages more effectively than traditional TV advertising allows. This precision, akin to what digital advertisers are accustomed to, makes CTV an increasingly attractive option.
Structural Changes in Digital Advertising: The digital ad landscape is undergoing significant shifts, especially this year’s planned phase-out of third-party tracking cookies. With increasing concerns over privacy and data usage, platforms are making changes that impact the effectiveness of traditional digital ads. These changes are pushing advertisers to explore new avenues, with CTV standing out as a promising alternative.
Increased Accessibility: The growth of self-service platforms in the CTV space is lowering the entry barrier for smaller advertisers. Similar to what was witnessed with digital advertising, these platforms allow businesses of all sizes to create and manage CTV campaigns with ease, opening up a market that was previously dominated by large advertisers with substantial budgets.
Diversification of Ad Spend: As more advertisers become aware of the benefits of CTV, including its high engagement and growing audience base, there’s a natural shift of ad spend towards this medium. This diversification is crucial in an era where multichannel advertising is becoming more of a necessity than a choice for brands seeking to maximize their reach and impact.
The Future Is the Past
Back in the early days of paid search in 1998, advertisers had to learn an entirely new way to do business. They had to figure out how to choose relevant keywords, write titles and descriptions for each keyword, upload 1000s of keywords, figure out how to bid, and measure ROI at a keyword-by-keyword level. As simple as this all seems now, it was really difficult back then. But as tools emerged and advertisers inched up the learning curve, a thriving roughly $200 billion-plus marketplace evolved, supported by millions of advertisers. The same thing happened in social.
The democratization of TV advertising is in full swing, driven by new tools and technologies that are analogous to the early days of paid search: self-serve TV buying, ROI measurement, auto-campaign optimization tech, etc. But for most of the 9 million paid search and social advertisers, TV is a new channel. As they embrace the new tools — like self-serve platforms — that democratize TV advertising, we are likely to see a huge surge of search and social advertisers adopting outcome-based TV.
