MiQ defines Connected TV (CTV) success based on four key criteria:
- Campaign performance
- Inventory quality
- Audience saturation
- Cost-efficiency
With this focus, its built an approach that has helped them improve the consumer experience on CTV across campaigns, and while solving key advertiser challenges. Looking across its CTV campaigns run on The Trade Desk, MiQ shares the following tips to help marketers achieve an effective cost per unique household reach.
“Helping marketers understand cord-cutting behaviors was a great way to help transition linear dollars to CTV; however, there’s now an expectation that CTV needs to be accountable to delivering efficient outcomes for brands,” said Moe Chughtai, global head of ATV at MiQ.
Benchmarking success with cost per unique household reach
MiQ looked across its CTV campaigns to measure success at delivering efficient cost per unique household reach (a calculation of how much it costs to reach each targeted household within an ad campaign). This analysis helps marketers find new audiences at a lower cost. With the use of savvy programmatic techniques centered around frequency and quality management, which we’ll dive into next, MiQ saw a significant decrease in cost per unique household versus its peer set. Compared to this peer set, MiQ achieved a 200% to 400% more efficient cost per unique household.
Focusing on quality inventory without sacrificing reach
While keeping an eye on cost per unique household reach, MiQ also ensures it runs on high-quality inventory through the use of private marketplace (PMP) deals negotiated with select publishers. To measure CTV quality, MiQ uses The Trade Desk’s TV Quality Index (TVQI). TVQI considers factors such as content quality, publisher transparency, and advertiser relevance to provide a score that helps marketers to assess the quality and relevance of CTV investments and ultimately helps MiQ prioritize spend into higher-quality ad environments. Across MiQ’s top 10 publishers (by spend), the cost per mille (CPM) was 26% to 51% lower than the average CPM in the U.S., depending on the publisher.
Taking this approach allows MiQ to maintain its cost per unique household reach while also focusing on more quality CTV inventory.
Managing seller overlap with frequency control
The CTV landscape is characterized by the fragmentation of channels and programming across various sellers. For consumers, this creates the challenge of seeing the same ads over and over. It’s imperative marketers manage the overlap and narrow in on the most efficient sellers. When looking at automatic content recognition data (ACR), two-thirds of MiQ’s CTV impressions were served to heavy streamers as indicated by a study conducted across a selection of large national and regional CTV brands.
“National and local brands consistently overexpose their ads to heavy advertising-based video on demand users. This is largely due to advertisers buying in silos using direct buys. By simply consolidating buys and implementing frequency controls, advertisers can enhance the user experience and invest more efficiently,” commented Chughtai.
When looking at the audience overlap across the top eight CTV sellers by MiQ spend without utilizing frequency controls, MiQ saw on average a 26% overlap, but going as high as 64% depending on the publisher. This means advertising dollars could potentially be wasted by advertising to the same households over and over.
By using PMPs instead of programmatic guaranteed and looking at frequencies across publishers, MiQ was able to reduce the overlap across sellers to less than 1.28% on The Trade Desk. Further, Innovid reported in 2022 that with over six CTV publishers in a campaign, the average audience overlap was around 17.7%. With MiQ and The Trade Desk able to manage overlap to around 1%, that’s 94% less than overlap reported by other platforms. Managing overlap can help avoid continued spend toward households that have hit maximum exposure and supports a better consumer experience.
“When it comes to precise inventory management, at MiQ, we find you need to have a direct relationship with your key CTV publishers, but the most effective way to manage the problems of fragmentation and overexposure is to implement best-in-class programmatic technology partners like The Trade Desk to manage reach across publishers,” added Chughtai.
With CTV continuing to be one of the fastest-growing channels for programmatic advertising moving into 2024, now is the time for marketers to develop their own approaches to success. Find out more about the capabilities of CTV on The Trade Desk. Or, interested in learning more from MiQ? Read how MiQ manages inventory using supply path optimization and volume control.