Everyone is talking about CTV. As inventory ramps up in Canada, advertisers are looking to better understand the opportunities. IAB Canada reached out to Derek Fung, Sales Manager at Samsung Ads Canada to gain some valuable perspective on how marketers can leverage the channel and how they should be thinking about planning for success.
IAB Canada (IABC): With the growth of the CTV in Canada — How is Samsung Ads helping Marketers and CPG Brands leverage the benefits of Smart TVs in CTV campaigns to help boost reach and drive outcomes?
Samsung Ads (SA): As Smart TV penetration in Canada continues to grow, brands that don’t include CTV in their media mix risk missing out on an increasing slice of the audience pie. This is especially true for CPG brands that have been late to adopt Connected TV, but have the potential to win incremental reach with CTV buys, helping boost brand visibility, and targeting addressable audiences. Samsung understands that its customers take privacy very seriously and we ensure that all of our products and offerings comply with applicable privacy laws and respect consumer choices.
At Samsung Ads, our data captured from over 5M Samsung Smart TVs in Canada shows that by only investing in linear, CPG advertisers may be missing approximately 50% of their audience within Samsung TV households. Meanwhile, audiences can be overexposed to brand messaging up to 20+ times within a campaign period on traditional linear television, which can lead to wasted budgets and diluted impact1.
To achieve the reach they need to drive ROAS, many brands are increasingly embracing CTV — as well as unlocking the household-level, first-party data that powers it. Here, Samsung Ads is uniquely positioned to help brands leverage meaningful audience data with the largest Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) data sets and Smart TV footprint in Canada2.
IABC: Can we dig a little bit deeper into how Samsung Ads leverages audience data? Specifically, around ACR and Smart TV hardware?
SA: With glass-level data, brands can win insights into the content viewers are watching, and how often. This is all made possible through ACR which, subject to our privacy policy and consumer choices, helps provide marketers with insight into the content viewers are interacting with on-screen in real-time. This can be tremendously helpful in targeting a niche demographic.
Imagine a CPG juice or coffee brand that’s looking to drive incremental reach. With glass-level data, they can better understand how households interact with morning shows and serve O.J. ads for breakfast1.
When used effectively, ACR data can also help balance frequency against the risk of ad fatigue. This empowers brands to make more informed decisions: do they want to run duplicate ads or show viewers a new creative? Glass-level data also surfaces competitor ads, so brands can compete for potential customers that are exposed to similar products.
In execution, glass-level data can also build efficiencies when reaching light to medium linear TV viewers, which can account for up to 70% of a brand’s audience according to CPG campaigns run through Samsung Ads.
Television is no longer just a flat screen in the living room. Today’s Smart TVs are interactive entertainment hubs that consumers use to stream music, play games, surf the internet, watch linear TV, or launch apps.
TV data on Smart TVs can3 help brands better understand consumer behavior, such as time-spent on each activity, giving brands a more holistic insight into viewer engagement levels and device usage habits. For example, Samsung TVs can provide glass-level, deterministic, proprietary data (collected with consumer privacy in mind) to help marketers better understand how households are consuming content.
As a use-case, imagine a CPG brand is looking to target Gen Z video gamers. Here, Samsung Ads hardware data can give insight on what the Smart TV was exposed to, such as gaming, HH reach and frequency, and total time spent. For CPG audiences looking to target hard-to-reach key interest pillars such as gamers, this hardware data can surface previously missed audiences.
IABC: How can including CTV campaigns in a brand’s media mix enhance overall audience addressability?
SA: Targeting is more nuanced and evolved than it was five years ago. Brands can overlay different audience segments across a media mix of multiple screens and devices. Although addressable advertising is still evolving in Canada, it’s winning greater investment as brands use it to build reach and discover new audiences — often at a less cost than traditional TV advertising.
By marrying glass-level viewing data with TV and hardware data, brands can go beyond basic targeting to unlock existing audiences that aren’t reachable via traditional means. Smart TV data is viewed as reliable because it’s the last point of contact between consumer and ad creative. Specific to Samsung Ads ACR data, it allows for 1:1 targeting and is deterministic. All the while, roughly one in three Canadians now watch streaming TV exclusively – meaning that a third of Canadians are not reachable via traditional broadcast channels. This makes tapping into these audiences a strategic imperative.
Ultimately, with the growth of Smart TVs and more audiences watching digital programming, media planning has evolved. While a brand could once invest the lion’s share of its budget into one channel and see guaranteed returns, that era behind us. No one channel, whether linear television or otherwise, can meet the scale needed to optimize ROAs.
Marketers need to consider moving beyond linear TV methodologies and towards activating Smart TV data, to help brands win audiences that have been historically difficult to reach – at scale.
Footnotes:
- Subject to Samsung’s privacy policy and consumer choices
- Samsung Ads, Proprietary ACR Analytics – 2022 CA Only
- Samsung Global TV Database
Stay tuned for more conversations about CTV as IAB Canada plans to host some great discussions in the fall. If you’re interested in leaning in, reach out to Councils@iabcanada.com