How The Trade Desk gained greater insight into the power of Connected TV
When The Trade Desk launched its new “What Matters” brand campaign, the marketing team wanted to go beyond standard Connected TV performance KPIs like reach and frequency. Learn how they leveraged their own platform — and a powerful partnership with Lucid — to gain a deeper understanding into how the campaign drove brand lift among target audiences.
The Trade Desk is committed to making digital advertising better. To drive awareness of The Trade Desk among marketing leaders, the ad tech community, the software and technology industries, and prospective employees, the company launched its “What Matters” campaign in Q4 of 2021 on multiple channels, including Connected TV (CTV). The Trade Desk used its own platform to activate the campaign.
Until The Trade Desk launched the “What Matters” campaign, its digital marketing team had mainly focused on standard media performance KPIs, such as reach and frequency. For this campaign, however, the team wanted to go beyond those proxy metrics to gain a deeper understanding of how they achieved their primary KPI: driving a lift in brand awareness among the target audiences.
Additionally, the team wanted more granular insights based on specific data cuts at the creative and ad-group levels, so they could understand how certain messages were resonating with audiences. These insights would help inform their mid-flight campaign optimizations, as well as future media buys and budget allocation across channels.
MEASURING BRAND IMPACT
To measure the impact of the digital marketing team’s campaign, The Trade Desk used its own Brand Lift solution, which it launched in 2021 in partnership with Lucid, a Cint Group company. This survey-based solution gives advertisers the ability to set up surveys and view brand lift reports directly within The Trade Desk media buying platform. The reporting shows lift across a variety of branding metrics, with results broken down by age, gender, and ad frequency.
Lucid tracks campaigns and matches the impression data against campaigns in The Trade Desk platform to identify respondents who have been exposed to the brand’s ads. Respondents are then surveyed, and their responses are measured against the client’s KPIs.
The study polled respondents across The Trade Desk’s key B2B brand campaign audiences, which The Trade Desk reached by leveraging its first-party customer relationship management-based Unified ID 2.0 technology and third-party audience segments built with the company’s data partners.
MOVING FORWARD WITH CTV
The brand lift study quickly showed that CTV drove lift across multiple metrics — including brand awareness, which was the team’s primary campaign goal. As a result, the team now approaches media buying with a CTV-first mindset and has also increased media spend on CTV.
“With our Brand Lift integration, we have greater insight into the campaign’s impact, including lift in awareness, favorability, and ad recall,” said Jeff Kerestes, digital marketing director. Within a week of launching the campaign, the team could view results in real time and adjust the campaign in-flight.
Next, on the heels of this success, the team extended the “What Matters” campaign to high-profile CTV inventory, including Super Bowl shoulder content, the Olympics, March Madness, as well as the NHL and NBA Playoffs.
“We’re taking advantage of the great partnerships available through the platform, activating private marketplaces across our premium publishers. When we pair these tactics with the tools available within the platform — to control frequency across channels, activate rich data, and smartly reach our target audiences — we feel confident that we’ll be even more successful in reaching and engaging our target audiences,” added Kerestes.