Take Advantage of OTT Advertising During COVID-19
The State of Streaming Services
The reality is incredible numbers of consumers are moving to streaming services to view content. Marketing your product and services to potential customers should include targeted OTT advertising campaigns.
• 61% of Americans own a Smart TV, and 52% use OTT services
• Netflix subscribers passed 60 million in early 2019
• 1 out of 3 Americans does not have cable
• 25% of sports content is viewed online
• 73% of U.S. consumers binge-watch
For additional information about cord-cutting and usage of streaming services, read the Colling Media blog posts entitled, National Survey Reveals Dramatic Shift from Cable to Streaming Services and National Survey: Consumers Are Dramatically Changing Media Consumption in Wake of Coronavirus.
What is OTT Advertising?
OTT, or Over-the-Top, media services deliver content through the internet and bypass cable, broadcast, or satellite television channels. OTT advertising allows companies to deliver ads to consumers watching content on streaming services like Amazon Fire, Apple TV or Roku, Smartphone, Smart TV, or gaming device. Advantages to using OTT advertising include non-skippable ads, view-through conversion tracking, greater recall, less interruption, and advanced (compared to traditional channels) targeting capabilities.
For more about OTT advertising, read the Colling Media blog post entitled, What is Over The Top Advertising and Why Your Business Should Be Using It?.
Creating OTT Advertising Campaigns
Target by Demographics
Demographics like location, age, gender, income level, occupation, marital status, education, or a host of other information available about your customers, can help deliver more productive and profitable advertising campaigns to target audiences. Adjusting messages based on demographics allows for better audience segmentation. For instance, a car company could run an advertising campaign during programming aimed at women highlighting safety features of a particular model and during programming aimed at men highlighting sporty features. Leveraging different demographic targeting ensures the right message is delivering at the right time when it matters most.
Target by Behavior
Using information from viewing and search behaviors, brands can create effective ads by pushing products related to previous purchases or what a consumer is researching. Targeting by behavior increases ad relevance to what customers see as they hunt to buy products putting the advertiser or brand in a great spot to find the best potential user vs. just finding them on the website they view most often. Targeting an actual person versus a website is essential here for success.
Target by Interest
Targeting by interest is about where customers spend time-consuming content. Matching products and services to related topics is a great way to ensure your campaigns are getting in front of consumers more likely to purchase. Interest targeting can include campaigns with influencers and other authority figures who consumers trust. Trusted influencers are a form of word-of-mouth marketing and help customers move to purchase.
Conclusion
OTT advertising is part of an omnichannel strategy. COVID19 and safer at-home behavior has led to a significant spike in digital content consumption. Streaming services are benefiting from increases in subscriptions and an uptick in time spent viewing content. And with the success of Disney+ and NBC’s Peacock, streaming services appear to be here to stay. Avoid missing out on a larger and larger number of potential customers consuming content not supplied by the broadcast or cable networks. OTT advertising can help campaigns reach more customers, target consumers like other digital channels, and help deliver a higher ROI to most marketing budgets.
If you are interested in learning more about OTT advertising, and how it may help your company’s marketing efforts, call (480) 889-8944 or visit our Contact Us page.