How Marketers Can Extract the Maximum Value From OTT and OLV Advertising
While being deceptively similar, OTT and OLV have different approaches, which marketers must know before advertising. Here, Reid Mitnick, director of sales, BidMind, describes peculiarities between them and instructs how to use them properly to have maximum value from advertising.
Despite linear television becoming less popular, big companies from various industries keep dedicating large portions of their budgets to traditional TV commercials. Such ads remain pretty attractive to many consumers with various tastes, needs, and interests. However, as people born in the digital era grow in both age and income, they are becoming marketers’ most coveted demographic. These people are far more likely to be digital-first media consumers, meaning they utilize video entertainment via various internet-based services. That is why it is crucial for modern marketers to understand the opportunities for advertising available on online verticals preferred by digital natives. By combining ads on OTT and OLV media services, marketers can reach desired audiences more effectively. Let us find out what opportunities the coupling of these platforms can provide.
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What is the Difference Between OTT and OLV Advertising?
While OTT stands for over-the-top, OLV means online video advertising. So, OTT advertising is not the same as Online Video advertising (OLV). OLV is a broad term that describes any advertising via online video. It is an engaging ad format that captures consumers; attention across all devices they might be using on the go, including smartphones and tablets. The term OTT advertising reflects how ads are delivered directly to consumers via internet-connected streaming devices, such as set-top boxes or Smart TVs, so OTT ads, in other words, can be named ‘streaming TV ads.’
Unlike OLV, which can be consumed anywhere, OTT content is often watched by audiences at home. Just because viewers have the option to watch their favorite video content anywhere and on demand does not mean that they do not enjoy the traditional experience of watching that content on their CTV in their homes with their families. That is why marketers who want to get higher scalability, strong brand recognition and relevance for their audience should combine OTT and OLV to achieve their goals.
OLV is an increasingly popular and effective avenue to go down for advertisers to reach potential customers, especially the coveted ones in the millennial and Gen-Z demographics. Just as video always has, OLV offers the holy trinity of sight, sound, and motion, making it the ideal medium to capture viewers’ attention and generate interest. However, coupling OTT/CTV with OLV offers not only the benefit of being viewable anywhere with a good internet connection but also gives brands the ability to optimize their ads with modern machine learning and secure long-term viability with first-party data. It even offers addressable ad content, which varies based on the demographics and interests of the user.
Campaigns that reach viewers both on their devices like phones and computers, as well as on their main home CTV screens, tend to see significantly stronger results.
Making OTT and OLV Advertising Work
Recently, experts from IAB named fragmentation in CTV and OTT the greatest problem for marketers. About 56% of companies operating in this field call audience scale a severe obstacle when using only CTV and OTT inventory. Online video advertising faces similar issues as selecting the right opportunity is a challenge due to the tremendous quantity of available videos, websites, and audiences with different needs and preferences. One possible solution is the services that offer aggregated publishers, viewership, and videos in a single location.
Over-the-top and Connected TV are initially based on subscription-based models. However, more and more viewers who choose these models are becoming more accustomed to seeing the advertising. As for OLV, its pre-rolls are mostly tolerated. They imply that a person should watch an ad per piece of content, which helps to associate ads closely with brands.
Cross-channel ads on OVL and CTV/OTT platforms significantly increase brand awareness (by 211%, as stated by IAB’s research) by adding a desktop/mobile element.
Fragmentation Complications and Contextual Relevance in OTT/OLV Advertising
OTT advertising is a very fragmented market that still lacks reliable measurement tools, unlike other digital mediums. That creates the need for data to understand how viewers are engaging the format and improve communication with them. Another problem with fragmentation is the lack of available inventory for the scale of audience CTV/OTT has. The same concerns revolve around OLV.
With the increasing number of opportunities on dozens of platforms, picking the right direction can be a difficult task. While fighting fragmentation, marketers need to work with platforms that have developed strong viewer bases, reliable publishers, and high-quality content. Another way to overcome these problems is by targeting multiple audiences and different content types.
Contextual relevance is another important concern as it greatly affects the overall user experience. It complements ad effectiveness, increases purchase intent, and even improves return on ad spend by a significant margin. CTV/OTT industry has come a long way in both creative and technological fields to ensure ad relevance. Despite rich possibilities to target specific content categories, shows, series, audiences, locations, and more, the industry still lacks precision in many scenarios, for instance, when multiple people are watching a show on a big screen.
See More: 5G Promises To Bring Low-To-No Latency To OTT Advertising
Takeaways
It is critical for companies to be on the same wavelength as their customers. However, they should also be part of environments with diverse and responsive consumers that raise favorability. OTT/CTV market players are better off when adding an OLV component to a marketing campaign to enhance brand awareness. This approach will help to boost contextual relevance and receptiveness. Still, there are multiple concerns for marketers to keep in mind while utilizing OTT/OLV advertising. Tackling limitations caused by fragmentation and keeping up with contextual relevance requirements are the main challenges along the way.
What steps have you taken to leverage OTT and OLV advertising to draw the maximum value from them? Let us know on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
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