What is Over The Top Advertising?

If you are new to Over The Top advertising, also known as “OTT,” it can be a bit confusing. OTT advertising is a way to display your brand during long form video content (any video longer than 10 minutes) delivered over the internet.

OTT is the actual delivery of film and TV content online. Think: Amazon Prime, YouTube, Hulu, Netflix and HBO-Go. OTT is NOT traditional cable or satellite-pay TV service, such as Comcast or Spectrum. Magna reports that 80% of U.S. households will be reachable through OTT this year. Over 90% of these folks view with other people in the room, making the ad deliverable to a staggering number of eyeballs.

Ads during OTT content tend to have a higher completion rate because viewers are choosing the content they watch, thus they are highly engaged. OTT ads have an impressive average video completion rate of 90%+. We term this “completion rate” rather than “conversion rate” because the vast majority of OTT ads are not “clickable” due to the nature of the delivery.

How To Buy OTT Advertising

According to a fall update to Magna’s U.S. ad forecasts for 2018, ad spending on OTT is expected to increase 40% to $2 billion in 2018. Compared to a very modest growth of 1% for National linear TV ad spend, this boom is indicative of how viewers are now consuming video. Gone are the days of the family gathering around the TV for “appointment viewing” or even simple channel flipping. Viewers know what content they want to consume and how they are going to get it. Most importantly, they make the rules on when that video is consumed. An entire industry of “on demand” video was born out of the need for convenient viewing. Eyeballs are continuing to shift to streaming video in droves. Including this medium in your advertising mix is ever more imperative. In fact, 58% of advertisers are making significant investments on OTT with over 26% of their TV budgets having shifted to OTT.  

On behalf of our clients we manage and serve ads programmatically as well as directly through content providers. We pre-determine ad placement based on geographic, demographic and/or behavioral targeting. This allows us to narrow down the delivery audience based on where in the  state or country the target market resides, who they are, and how they are behaving. In order to achieve optimal completion rates and brand awareness, we need to truly understand each business, the products and services, and your customer persona.

The more populated your target geography is, the more impression inventory there is, thus the more ad flexibility we begin having in terms of days of week and times of delivery.

As a best practice, we suggest multiple ads for our clients to be run concurrently. These ads are run as evenly-distributed as possible according to the app maintained by the content provider. For example, devices like Roku and AppleTV provide a system where content publishers can offer viewers your ad creative.

How to Analyze OTT Ad Performance

When it comes to tracking data of OTT advertising, its not as granular as conversion-based online marketing. The proof of performance for an ad group is total impressions served and completion rate. Reporting for OTT will include the following tracking metrics:

• Impressions
• Completion Rate (previously mentioned)
• Engagement time
• Platform used for viewing (mobile, desktop, connected TV, gaming console)

We cannot access information based on which app or which program the viewer was watching 100% of the time. This is due to the data not always being available through the 3rd party placement/publishing apps. OTT is still a relatively new technology and the analytical reporting is continuing to improve over time.

When participating in OTT advertising, you are all-in across providers. You cannot purchase just one OTT platform such as Hulu unless you purchase them directly at a much higher cost and larger scale.

How Will OTT Help Promote My Brand?

OTT provides unique opportunities to attract viewers, thus widening the scope of brand marketing in this sphere. In a recent study Roku reported that, in comparison with ads on cable and broadcast television, OTT ads were 67% more effective per exposure at driving purchase intent. With the scale of targeting tools at hand, it’s no surprise that OTT ads are a highly effective digital marketing strategy.

For more information on how you can include OTT advertising in your media mix and online marketing, use the button below to contact us today.