Four questions with Samsung Ads: how will CTV grow?
Partner Content
Minai Bui, director of product marketing, Europe & APAC, at Samsung Ads, addresses four issues around the future of connected TV.
Q1. GroupM’s optimistic forecast for the global ad industry this year still suggests robust growth, despite current difficult global economic and geopolitical scenarios. We know that marketers are still keen to explore more digitally-focused media strategies — including connected TV (CTV). How do you see CTV’s role growing within the global ad industry?
CTV is still nascent. GroupM predicts TV ad revenue will grow by 4.3% globally in 2022, with CTV ad spend expected to grow 24% to hit $21bn by the end of this year.
While this growth is promising, CTV’s share of ad spend is not yet reflective of the growth in CTV viewership that we’re seeing globally or the mass audiences that have fully embraced streaming and connected TV environments.
Magnite estimates that four in five European households are now reached by a connected TV, a 30% increase from SpotX’s findings in 2020.
Looking at our own data, we see that 87% of Samsung TVs in Europe watched some form of OTT content in May this year.
Furthermore, 20% watched OTT content exclusively, with an average of 78 hours per TV per month, which shows us that those audiences who do stream, do so a lot.
As CTV grows, so does the opportunity for agencies and advertisers to reach their desired audiences.
It also offers agencies and advertisers with a wealth of data which is critical in helping them better inform their media strategy and budget allocation decisions, especially as viewership continues to fragment. This, along with advancements in targeting and measurement within the CTV space should help grow CTV’s piece of the ad spend pie over the coming years.
Q2. The most persistent message to advertisers and the industry, for at least the last couple of years, has been the importance of first-party data. But we also know that first-party data alone doesn’t paint the whole picture. What other data does CTV have?
At Samsung Ads, we have a large, deterministic data set that is not projected or modelled, and reflects actual user behaviour, at scale — specifically, the viewing behaviours on our millions of Smart TVs to help agencies and advertisers understand what users are watching, for how long and when.
We do this through our automatic content recognition (ACR) technology which identifies the content that is played on our Smart TVs. It’s important to note that we only deploy our ACR technology on opted-in devices, and in a GDPR compliant way.
To complement our first-party data offering, we’re also looking at new ways we can layer our data with external data sources, to give our partners a more robust picture of who the audiences are, behind our screens.
Together, the data allows agencies and advertisers to understand what genres their audiences prefer, how many apps they launch, how frequently they switch between linear and different types of video on demand (VOD), what types of games they play, and more.
These kinds of partnerships that enhance our data including demographic data and attitudinal insights, will help further improve targeting and reporting capabilities for CTV.
Q3. You mentioned Automatic Content Recognition, could you explain what it is and how it’s used in practice? What role does it play among the multiple data sources advertisers have access to?
Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) usage is becoming increasingly more common across the industry and at Samsung Ads, our proprietary ACR technology powers our insights, targeting and measurement across millions of Samsung Smart TVs around the world.
The technology captures the content that is being played on our TVs and creates a digital fingerprint which is then used to match against a reference library.
This all happens automatically at the “screen” or “glass level” — but only for Samsung devices that are opted-in and we do so in a GDPR-compliant way because privacy is at the heart of everything we do.
What makes our ACR data unique is our scale. As the number-one TV manufacturer globally, we have the largest, continuously growing ACR footprint and can provide agencies and advertisers with exclusive insights into CTV viewership.
Our viewer data is deterministic, and while it is not projected to a national population, it is broadly representative of all TV users and identifies real-life behaviours from Samsung’s Smart TVs.
As viewership further fragments, agencies and advertisers can find it challenging to understand the holistic reach and frequency of their campaigns across linear and streaming platforms because measurement is often siloed.
ACR data helps bridge those silos. Clients often come to us to understand how a particular audience spends time in the streaming ecosystem, and how we can help reach them based on their TV viewership behaviours.
Using ACR, we can identify which audiences were exposed to their ads and devise a plan to engage with audiences that they missed and drive incremental reach.
We helped Vodafone UK with this recently for a campaign targeting heavy bandwidth streamers and gamers. The linear campaign achieved high exposure (92%) amongst heavy linear viewers on Samsung TVs but was less effective for light linear viewers.
Using our ACR technology, we knew which TVs had been exposed to the creative on linear and created a dynamic targeting pool to exclude those exposed from our CTV campaign.
By doing so, we delivered 12% incremental reach for Vodafone, which equates to reaching an additional 320,000 households.
The benefit of ACR is multifaceted: we’re not just able to gain insights into TV behaviours for better targeting but we can also help agencies and advertisers understand the impact of their media investment.
Measurement and attribution is one of the exciting areas we are investing in, and we want to help our customers understand the effectiveness and efficacy of their campaigns by using our data.
Q4. Measurement is a challenge impacting the future of the CTV industry, and there doesn’t seem to be a clear solution everyone can agree on. How will this space evolve?
Standardisation and the development of a common currency for measurement is critical for the continued growth of the CTV industry.
We know that agencies and advertisers need to effectively measure and compare audience reach and campaign performance across linear, VOD and digital inventory to help inform planning and budget allocation decisions. This means we’ll likely see a convergence of solutions and a unified set of measurement metrics, which will be driven from the buy-side.
That said, with new players entering the market — each with their own metrics and methodology, I suspect the industry will become more fragmented before we see it come together.
Until then, agencies and advertisers looking for a more holistic view of TV viewership in order to drive incremental reach, can lean on ACR data, alongside existing data and measurement solutions to bridge the silos.
Without measurement, it will be more challenging for agencies and advertisers to have full confidence in shifting budgets to CTV in a meaningful way that reflects the shift in viewership we’re seeing.
There’s an opportunity for the industry to come together and build this solution collectively – and whatever the solution we come to, we believe it should improve the overall experience for consumers, advertisers and publishers, if we want CTV to earn a bigger piece of the pie.
Minai Bui is director of product marketing, Europe & APAC, Samsung Ads