Link: How brands drive positive attention on CTV - Digiday

There are three obstacles for advertisers and publishers who want to achieve content-ad-audience alignment to drive positive attention. The first challenge is fragmentation. In the days of linear-only TV programming, advertisers could evaluate the entire landscape and select programs that fit their audience’s taste and brand ethos. However, CTV delivery mechanisms, platforms and programming are constantly evolving. Connected TV has become more like display advertising; it’s almost impossible for any media buyer to survey the entire landscape. This requires tools that automatically find connections between an advertiser and available inventory. The second challenge is the availability of tools — or media buying mechanisms — to purchase CTV inventory related to advertising content and appealing to a brand’s ideal audience. Programmatic CTV spend is expected to grow from $21.52 billion in 2023 to $25.34 billion in 2024. TV advertisers are still adapting to programmatic buying methods and testing them to ensure they drive optimal performance. That leads to the third challenge: understanding the actual context of CTV content and gauging which contextual segments to best optimize toward to drive positive attention and boost performance. Popular forms of contextual targeting, like genre-based targeting, have historically been too broad. Shows get labeled, for example, as comedies or dramas. However, many comedies are dark and many dramas are comedic. The real question is whether an ad makes sense in the context of the episode or even the scene against which it appears. New approaches to contextual advertising on CTV, driven by the advancement of technologies like generative AI, are changing how brands can capture positive attention on the big screen. Emotional alignment between an ad and the content an audience consumes is essential in driving positive attention. When an ad matches the audience’s mindset, it feels less like a paid message and more like part of the story they’ve chosen to watch. This connection helps the brand get the audience’s buy-in and puts them in the frame of mind to receive the ad well. Such alignment is part of what it means to take advantage of the video format in particular. TV ads create experiences around brand, sight, sound and motion — experiences only video can elicit. Video ads don’t need to convince people to feel joy or excitement; they already feel those emotions when they watch TV. Well-aligned ads enhance those feelings instead of disrupting them. #

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