CTV Advertising Strategies for the Holiday Season - A Q&A With Angelina Marmorato of Lemma Technologies
With the holiday season upon us, consumers are ramping up spending and turning to connected TV (CTV) more than ever. This creates a unique window for advertisers to connect with audiences during a time when brand and performance marketing can yield tremendous results.
Angelina Marmorato, AVP of Sales and Partnerships at Lemma Technologies, has put together a set of actionable strategies for brands to maximize their holiday advertising impact on CTV. From optimizing data and creative to deploying high-efficiency targeting tactics, these insights offer practical guidance for capturing holiday shoppers at this critical time. Here’s a list of Angelina’s top strategies:
- Test Early: Use November to gather insights that guide December campaigns. Adjust and tighten targeting as more holiday shoppers enter the market.
- Update Data: Ensure all customer data is current to sharpen campaign focus. Agencies should encourage clients to provide up-to-date insights for maximum accuracy.
- Target Efficiently: Avoid broad bids; instead, focus on high-value audiences. Angelina suggests using Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) data for targeted conquest against competitor viewers.
- Optimize KPIs: Go beyond lower-funnel tactics. Consider upper-funnel KPIs and CPM buying to capture the holiday audience’s broader reach.
- Adapt Creative: Real-time creative updates are key. Lemma recommends dynamic creative testing in November to optimize what performs best in December.
In this Q&A, Marmorato talks with Streaming Media’s Tyler Nesler in further detail about each of these CTV holiday season strategies and how advertisers can best optimize them.
Tyler Nesler: I want to go through each one of these bullet points that you have for the CTV holiday season strategies, starting with testing early in November to gather insights that guide December campaigns and to adjust and tighten targeting as more holiday shoppers enter the market. Can you talk about some of the best ways to gather these particular insights at this time of year?
Angelina Marmorato: It's a tight time period of the year, but there are still enough weeks to use to test, learn, and optimize throughout the time period. Sometimes, people feel so rushed they forget about that. Even if your creatives are ready and your overall plan is ready on the programmatic side, there are things that you can do week-to-week and day-to-day to continue to learn and optimize your campaign so that you're really using those dollars effectively. So what that means is just within your target audience, is it working better on one channel?
And taking a step back, the key to this is really a kind of campaign set up around several different line items for each kind of campaign tactic and different types of targeting strategies. It could be different inventory types, etc. Just try to be as specific as you can to find ways to A/B test because there's this influx of consumers during this time of year, and you can really get the most of your money. So not only is there a great time to make more money, it's a great time to learn and inform your strategies for not only the rest of this holiday season but for next year as well.
TN: You mention that agencies should encourage clients to provide up-to-date data in science for maximum accuracy. What are some effective ways to motivate agencies to do that?
AM: I think it's just keeping your advertising agency up to date on everything you're doing. From a marketing perspective, it could even be what feels like a product or a merchandising decision, but it often is something that would be fruitful in terms of how the people actually working on the advertising campaign can do some tweaks that would really make your campaign more efficient.
If you fully run out of one product, you need to remove that creative so that people aren't consistently coming into a store and looking for something you don't have. Or if you burned through a lot of your coats, you did a deep discount, and those are sold, [then] change the creative [and] change who you are targeting and for what purpose. That fits with what products [you have] available and what will continue to drive sales during that period.
TN: What are the benefits of avoiding broad bids and instead focusing on high-value audiences, along with using ACR data for targeted conquest against competitor viewers?
AM: So as a brand that may not have as much money to spend as some of the top players in your specific category during the holidays, what you can do is you competitively conquest folks that have seen [the top player’s] advertising. That allows you, at a cheaper price point, to reach who your competitors are targeting and [use] a conquest-type of strategy for a much more efficient price point.
TN: One thing that I also found interesting is you're recommending dynamic creative testing in November to optimize what performs best. What does that entail exactly?
AM: Many agencies and DSP companies have these types of services available. If you have a general creative, then it's so easy to make that creative itself dynamic in terms of whether you need to change out this type of person for another person. Should [there be] a dog or not? Should the person be wearing a jacket or not? What should the exact wording be? Should the wording be different for one part of the United States versus another?
And so what you can do with dynamic creative is not only change what you're serving to people but then take back that with information. You can do what's called multivariate testing, which is where, at any given time, the algorithm is just sending out different versions of the same kind of template. And what it's doing is automatically optimizing over time to what's performing best for a given geography. This is a great way to use the increased volume of people shopping for products during this time of year. You're going to get a good sample size for dynamic creative. So you're going to be able to learn faster, essentially.
TN: You also emphasize optimizing KPIs, and you mention going beyond lower funnel tactics and considering upper funnel KPIs. Could you talk about what exactly upper funnel KPIs are and also cost per mille (CPM) buying to capture the holiday audience on a broader reach? What does that mean exactly?
AM: When it comes to CTV for a streaming campaign, I think it makes sense early on to do a more upper funnel kind of target audience-focused campaign so that you're more focused on reaching the audience than you are on hitting a super-efficient price point. At that point, you're really trying to fill your marketing funnel with folks who have been exposed to your message and who had that first check in their consumer journey for this time period.
In doing that, you don't need to necessarily spend the amount of money you would for retargeting this person for the 12th time, as they’re most likely getting closer to buying. What you want to do instead is give a wide blanket, but you want to make sure that it's still targeted, [that] you're hitting this target audience and in this CPM range of what you want for these few weeks, [with the] goal to get this message to as many people at this price point that you can during this time period.
TN: How might some of these tactics be effective for other times of the year, not just necessarily for holiday periods?
AM: I think it's a good question. Things that reflect a similar buying strategy as the holiday season would be another important time for your product. Maybe it's a big product launch, another important season for you, [such as] back to school, where you have an influx of services or products to offer. You want to put the marketing dollars behind it, and then you also want to get a quick return on that. So all of these strategies, from dynamic to starting the upper funnel and moving people along the path as quickly as you can, would be great for any of these types of things, too.
The world of ad tech is constantly changing. There are various market factors at play, so you really need to have at least something out there at all times to know what's going on and to get a feel for what your consumers are reacting to. And finally, the other message I really want to leave people with is ad fatigue is very real. We're being hit with more ads in more places than ever before. Updating the creative, whether it's dynamic or small things, makes a big difference, but keep the messaging consistent, [and keep] the visuals and the small touches different because that's what makes a difference.
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