OTT marketing

OTT marketing is for over-the-top marketing and refers to the delivery of ads through online video streaming, or digital video services that have traditionally been delivered “over the top” of cable services. OTT marketing includes CTV marketing or connected TV advertising, which refers to video streams that are paid for via sponsored content, banner ads, and other types of ads, not a subscription cost to the watcher. OTT marketing differs from traditional TV advertising as it no longer relies on the traditional TV networks, and it can be much more targeted based on what the streaming provider that hosts the ads knows about its audience. Plus, OTT ads are on-demand: they’re not sold for a specific slot on a specific show at a specific time.

As Forbes highlights:

OTT services don’t need to worry about things like a broadcast schedule or geographic limitations. Viewers can access their content at any time of the day or night … Another difference between OTT advertising and traditional broadcast advertising is that you can typically reach a smaller but more targeted audience with OTT advertising, which is one of the primary reasons I see advertisers drawn to it.

OTT marketing provides advertisers with more control over their audience targeting and provides more insights to improve the performance of their ad spend.

OTT ads, also referred to as streaming TV ads, have become a major trend in the past few years, one reason for which is due to “cord cutting,” which is when households cancel their traditional cable or satellite TV, and rely on streaming services like Netflix. Amazon highlights why this is a big deal for OTT marketing

Over six million households were expected to cord-cut in 2020, bringing the total number of cord-cutter households to 31.2 million. That number is estimated to grow to 46.6 million total cord-cutter households by 2024, or more than a third of all U.S. households.1 This presents a huge opportunity for brands to incorporate streaming TV advertising into their media strategies.

As more and more households are moving beyond cable to streaming services, this has opened up a new marketing channel for advertisers that is growing extremely fast. OTT ads are becoming an important part of many brands’ marketing mix.

Unlike traditional TV ads, the fact that streaming ads are delivered over the internet gives advertisers more granularity in their audience targeting and audience insights. Another key difference is that streaming TV ads can finish with a clear call-to-action (CTA) that drives the user to a website or app.

Although OTT ads typically have more targeting capabilities compared to traditional TV ads, brands still need the right marketing analytics tools in place to achieve the highest ROI on their advertising budget.

Measuring the ROI of your marketing efforts is a key part of any digital ad campaign, and OTT marketing is no different. It’s important for brands to know the audience demographics that their ads are reaching, the performance of their CTAs, and much more. A few key metrics for marketers to measure the performance of their OTT ads include brand reach, brand lift, and offline lift.

As a leader in marketing analytics and marketing intelligence, Singular provides a complete suite of tools to understand, attribute, and report on the performance of your OTT marketing campaigns. As highlighted in our guide on the importance of having the right marketing intelligence platform (MIP):

With a MIP, decision makers achieve full knowledge of the return on investment for all their marketing efforts at a granular level. That means understanding both the full costs of each marketing activity, whether paid or organic, and the specific results those activities achieved.

In summary, Singular provides marketers with unprecedented visibility into their ad campaigns, regardless of the marketing channel used. With these granular insights, marketers can make  data-driven decisions to improve the ROI of their marketing campaigns by optimizing every level of their ads, including creative, targeting, and more.