Between 2020 and 2021, OTT viewership more than doubled with a 115% increase in OTT streaming service use to TVs alone. People spent 239 billion hours viewing on mobile video streaming apps in Q4 2020, which indicates a growing audience for your ads in the OTT space. Don't let the Over the Top (OTT) streaming ad trend pass you by as you search for new and better ways to reach your core demographics.
In this list of tips and tricks for making OTT ads, we cover how precisely they work and how you can make them work for you.
How OTT Ads Work
OTT ads, or streaming television ads, let advertisers reach audiences across streaming platforms. Think of them as the online (and smarter) alternative to traditional broadcast and television ads. They should have the same production quality and call to action as traditional broadcast commercials. The ad space is controlled by the platform and online service providers, rather than traditional distributors, however entities such as media partners can arrange ad space on both through their shared connections.
Distribution of OTT ads is more granular and nuanced, allowing you to target your audience with greater specificity. Since OTT ads run alongside specific shows, you can pair them with the individual viewership of each program, allowing you to target by demographic and other behavioral characteristics aside from geographic location. The analytics you receive from viewership provides further information about your ratings and impressions, which will help you refine OTT ads and offer insight into behavior for other areas of marketing as well.
But how do you get the most use of these more insightful ad spaces online?
1. Cater to Your Audience
Your TV commercials and OTT ads must tailor to your audience and speak to their sensibilities and interests. OTT allows for slightly more nuanced content, especially if it is your primary advertising channel. Because you can target your audience so specifically, you can create highly specific ads since they will likely only appear to that group. However, making an ad that will work on both platforms is the optimal approach, as you will be able to reach a larger group of viewers regardless of their viewing habits.
OTT ads will play whenever viewers watch their shows and are not restricted to time slots across the viewership. If you create multiple ads to play at different times or on different stations, you can set them to rotate through OTT platforms or link ads to certain shows. The insight you gain from analytics or ratings allows you to further refine your ad selections to place ads in their most relevant time slots. you can create a large collection of ads, each aimed at a different buyer persona.
2. Align Your Strategy
OTT ads measure their success using different metrics. Where traditional ads rely on ratings and impressions to indicate generally how many people your commercials aired to. you don’t have highly specific household data. You can gain insight into the commercial’s effectiveness based on other data, such as increases in web page views, but that information is a stand-in for other data.
OTT ad metrics show who ads aired to, how often they did, and what devices they were on. This information provides insight into viewership habits, as well as how many people ads reached per play. For instance, mobile devices usually have one person watching due to their screen-size limitation, whereas Connected TV can play for larger groups. That helps you determine the best platforms and the best individual streaming programs to place your ads over.
The more you understand customer behavior, the more strategic you can be. If you find out viewers play specific shows for background noise or while exercising, you can make ads accordingly to have more of an audio component or a visual component, based on viewer attention while the ad plays. Using surveys to ask your consumers about your viewing habits, either after sales or through email or social media content will inform how you can develop future commercials.
3. Track Your Analytics
In that last point, we touched a bit on the value of data. In the modern marketing space, data is vital. OTT provides clear-cut numbers on how many people your ads play to (both globally and locally), the programs or streaming platforms they're using, the time of day they viewed the ads, and even their engagement levels. Smart analytics tools can even give insight into how many viewers immediately clicked through to your site or took another positive action.
Through your analytics, you can decide if you should shift more of your ad budget into a successful campaign — and warn you when the ROI begins to taper off. You can also identify successful campaign elements you'll want to use in the future, start doing by A/B testing, and add information to your buyer personas.
Start Creating Your OTT Ad Strategy with FOX12/FOX12+ Marketing
OTT ads are quickly shifting from innovative to essential. Knowing how to launch OTT ads properly and make good use of all the data you get is just as essential. Combining your ad strategy with OTT and TV makes for a winning combination. Working with an experienced media partner allows you to leverage their expertise and connections to develop ads that speak to your audience and place them at the optimal times.
