Connected television (CTV) is said to become the next disruptive force in the Indian advertising industry.
While the country’s digital ad market stands at Rs 397 billion, at present, CTV ad spends is estimated to be around Rs 7.2 billion, accounting for just 1.5% of the total digital ads. However, going forward it is expected to grow significantly to seven to eight percent of total digital ad expenditure over the medium to long term, representing a 40% year-on-year growth.
As CTV continues to evolve and AI technologies become more advanced, Nikhil Kumar, Chief Growth Officer at mediasmart, expects further evolution in ad serving, placement, and measurement of CTV advertising. According to him, GenAI’s greater role in advertising, CTV ads will further become more targeted and personalised, leading to more engaging and relevant ads tailored to individual viewers.
Kumar further talks about how marquee properties like Olympics are the right opportunity for advertisers to make the most of the CTV ads.
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How are brands increasingly spending on CTV ads?
While exact figures can vary year by year, the trend in CTV ad spending shows significant growth as more brands allocate budgets to digital and streaming media channels. Media planning in the last 4-5 years is heavily dominated by two new-age mediums – influencer marketing and CTV. Our estimates are in line with industry bodies that peg the CTV advertising contributing around $45-50Bn in ad revenue within the total TV advertising revenue mix.
CTV ad spending has been on the rise, reflecting its effectiveness in reaching targeted audiences and driving engagement. While some sectors were early adopters and fast in implementing in their media mix, today brands across categories such as Consumer Goods, Automotive, Entertainment OTTs, Retail, and Consumer Technology, have an active presence in the CTV advertising space.
How do marquee properties like Olympics present viewer engagement opportunity through interactive CTV ads?
The Olympics represent a unique opportunity to connect with a vast and diverse audience, and maximise viewer engagement, being a highly watched global event. Each of these events has its own audience, which gives advertisers a unique opportunity to target diverse user groups during the entire course of the event. For brands, it’s also essential to understand that the same user is also found across devices and platforms. For instance, a user might tune into their CTVs to watch the big games and enjoy the larger-than-life experience on their big screens at home, they may watch news on FAST channels, consume related content on their mobiles, shop and travel and make purchases on mobile and offline.
Hence, personalisation is essential in capturing and retaining viewer attention. It’s important to cut across screens and have a unifying reach. CTV ads are great for brand awareness and engagement through the diverse ad formats available.
What future trends can we expect in CTV advertising?
As CTV continues to evolve and AI technologies become more advanced, we can expect further evolution in ad serving, placement, and measurement of CTV advertising. With GenAI’s greater role in advertising, CTV ads will further become more targeted and personalised, leading to more engaging and relevant ads tailored to individual viewers. This trend will involve dynamic adjustments to the ad elements such as visuals, messaging, and calls-to-action to maximise effectiveness.
Another area where will see CTV technology evolving is using GenAI to make sense of unstructured language based information to identify contexts and create new ones. The dependency on pre-defined content categorisation for campaign targeting or optimization will be greatly reduced.
There will also be greater possibilities for using GenAI for effective campaign optimisation, where advertisers can use GenAI to take a quick look at which segments perform better and at what times, to quickly make decisions and serve ads dynamically. Challenges around more standardized measurement, OS environment and syncing ads across multiplicity of screens will also be addressed as CTV technologies continue to shape up.
How will the future of personalised ads on connected TV evolve?
As user identification becomes more consolidated, the future of personalised ads on CTV will also evolve with the ability to serve ads tailored to individual preferences and become more refined. Just as mobile phones and laptops currently deliver ads based on user interests and browsing behavior, connected TVs will soon follow suit. This evolution will enable TVs to recommend content and advertisements based on the viewer’s preferences and viewing history. This means that the ads you see on your TV will be closely aligned with the genres of content you typically watch. The types of activities you engage in on connected TVs, such as gaming or watching news, will further refine the personalisation of ads. This targeted approach ensures that the advertisements are not only relevant but also engaging, enhancing the overall viewing experience. As the landscape of connected TV advertising evolves, the integration of advanced algorithms and machine learning will play a crucial role in analyzing viewing patterns and preferences.
How is AI transforming CTV ad targeting and personalisation?
AI is gradually becoming the heart of the CTV advertising experience and has transformed linear television advertising into more engaging, personalized, and measurable programmatic-driven advertising. AI enables precise audience segmentation through advanced data analytics and analyses viewer behavior based on the content genres consumed. AI-driven targeting on CTV also goes beyond demographics, allowing advertisers to target at the household level, screen size, time and weather of the day. This allows advertisers to deliver highly personalised and relevant ads, which resonates more effectively with individual viewers. Additionally, AI-driven dynamic ad insertion allows for real-time adaptation of ads based on live events, further increasing the relevance and impact of CTV advertising. For instance, an ad can be dynamically inserted immediately after a significant event, such as a world record being broken, to capture the heightened viewer attention.
Further, using AI-based creative optimisation and technologies on CTV, we can drive more innovative use cases in cross-screen advertising to sync ads across multiple devices. This approach ensures consistent messaging and allows advertisers to reach viewers no matter where they are watching the event.
Now with the advent of GenAI, there’s a possibility to further revolutionise this space. GenAI can generate highly personalised content that aligns with individual viewer preferences. For example, brands can use different creatives featuring sports events based on the viewer’s location or contextualise it based on the winning athlete. For global brands this gives them the scale to make multiple versions of the same ads to reach audiences in their preferred way.