How Audience Data Should Shape the Way You Buy Connected TV Inventory

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[00:00:00] Bennett: Me personally, I get over a dozen emails a week from people trying to sell me different ways to buy Connected TV ad inventory. We know that Connected TV is a really powerful way to interface with customers. TV advertising is good as it gets in terms of telling a brand story. The ways to buy that inventory have continued to get more and more and more as Connected TV ad inventory continues to grow. There's many different ways to do it, and it's really hard to tell when money's getting wasted, when you're doing the right thing and hitting the right customers at the right time through that ad inventory. There's three primary ways that people are buying Connected TV ad inventory. The first is really through a direct buy model. So if you've got the budget and you've got some really strong insights or opinions about where your customers are consuming content, you can do direct buy with HBO, with Hulu, with YouTube TV.

[00:00:50] Bennett: It's going to feel a lot like doing a direct buy with your local linear news station or something like that. You also can do more of a middle model called a demand side platform or with programmatic guaranteed deal types, which allow you to still have a lot of control around the platforms or channels where you're buying the media. So Hulu, Netflix, Amazon and the mix between them. Then you also get to layer a lot of audience data on top of it. So you can go after people who are interested in camping or hiking or people who work in industrial manufacturing or are fleet buyers, those type of things that can be really valuable in terms of where you're serving those ads. The last component is an aggregator. Aggregators are kind of like the Costco or Sam's Club of Connected TV ad inventory. They are great because you get a lot inside of one particular CPM that's typically lower than the other two models, but you lose a lot of control inside of that model too.

[00:01:41] Bennett: I think the biggest thing to take away is that none of those models are necessarily good or bad, whether you're doing direct, DSP or aggregator, they're just what's right for you, your business, the customers you're trying to hit should be the thing that helps dictate which way you kind of scale inside of that. So the questions we get asked a lot is how do I know if I'm wasting money? How do I know if I'm getting the best bang for my buck? How do I know if I'm really moving the needle with this style of advertising? The questions that we are asking ourselves and our partners that we're using and we encourage our clients to ask us as well is really around where are my ads being shown? So what channels, platforms, apps are they being on? If you end up with a bunch of Roku inventory or a bunch of Sling TV inventory, that's kind of a bummer because you're going to have a really cheap CPM, but your reach to a relevant audience on a premium placement is really low.

[00:02:29] Bennett: We also are asking lots of questions around audience. Who is seeing these ads? Tell me about the demographics, the psychographics, the behavioral attributes of the people actually consuming the media. And then lastly, where are these ads being shown? Geographically, inside of the home itself, I want to know that type of data and any provider who is doing a really good job in terms of the reporting and the style of inventory they're providing should be able to answer those questions really succinctly and quickly to give you the level of data you need to feel good about Connected TV advertising. So we're pretty open palms in terms of the ways that we buy connected TV ad inventory. There's pros and cons to direct DSP and aggregator. And so really what we start with is the customer. We want to figure out who your customer is, how we're interfacing with that customer, what do we know about their demographics, their psychographics, their behavior, so that we can grab all the different audiences that can go and target these people.

[00:03:20] Bennett: And then we use the right buying mechanism to hit them. If you have a little bit more of a mass media appeal and you're going after a few more markets, it actually may make some sense to go with an aggregator to try and get a little bit more blast in terms of who's seeing the ad itself. If you serve a super premium product and have a really high net worth audience, they make a lot of sense to go through more of a DSP model where you can filter to that. If you know you're only going to be in a few specific markets and you want to really have a broad awareness message, maybe go with the direct plan where you can put all of your budget in one or two specific channels in very specific geographic areas. So no necessarily bad way or wrong way to buy your connected TV inventory.

[00:04:01] Bennett: You just want to make sure you have the data to back up the choices that you're making and that it's moving the needle for the business.