Thu, March 28, 2024

Your TV Ad: The Future Is Here

 

 

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Don MacNeil is the former Marketing Director of Windsor Jewelers and long-time on-air radio professional.

Is it just me, or…

Your TV Ad: The Future Is Here

In a previous chat I took you on a marketing deployment journey into Facebook, finding it frankly a hall of mirrors for you not familiar with online social media ad placement. You may recall I confronted a legion of Facebook tutorial videos labeled, “Easy” and, “For Beginners”, the shortest of which ran 17 minutes, with the majority closer to 30.

Then I found a hero at Hulu.

More about that in a minute. First, if you sensed an exploding world of streamed content ad placement, you’d be right. It’s known as Over-The-Top advertising, or simply, OTT marketing. Services like Netflix, HBO Max and Disney+ are all examples of OTT internet-based video platforms. Put simply, for the first time in media history, while you and thousands of others may be viewing a piece of content simultaneously, you’re all being shown different ads.

In our Facebook ad placement discussion we decided in the end that unless you’re entirely a child of this age and move effortlessly in a cyber world, your best bet as a small business owner is to defer to marketing professionals.

Likewise, since widespread opinion seems to lean toward what’s known as “programmatic” OTT ad placement through providers such as Kedet, MediaMath, Google Marketing Platform, AdRoll and Tubemogul, among others, I’d similarly urge turning to the folks who navigate all of that daily. (Editor’s Note: It should be stated that your favorite, local TV and Digital marketing rep offer this in their “ample toolkit” of solutions)

So what does going the programmatic route get you? As with Facebook, hyper-efficient targeting through known demographics, preferences and behaviors, Zip codes and even the devices on which they receive your message. Yes, even little guys/gals can jump into this world, with metrics on the back end that’ll tell you who saw you, in what numbers and whether your ad motivated them to action.

Further, viewers can’t skip OTT ads, install ad blockers, or change the channel (they’re only on one), so the chances of your ad being watched all the way through are much higher.

So why was I impressed with Hulu? They’ve created a first-in-the-industry self-service ad placement platform just for small businesses. Where once Hulu insisted upon a minimum of a $10,000 investment to get started, this scaled-down version can launch you for as little as $500. 

Mind you, you’re not buying the world here, just Hulu’s corner in a universe of streaming choices. Subsequently, the major platforms have jumped in with self-service, too, but in the name of precise targeting, their forms are considerably more complicated. Which takes us to YouTube.

Viewed through the eyes of a business owner, YouTube’s self-service ad campaign software is a dizzying series of questions, decisions and impenetrable industry/cyber terminology guaranteed to stop any do-it-yourself entrepreneur in his/her tracks. The medical profession learned decades ago that to effectively communicate with folks outside of their world they needed to communicate at a third-grade level. The online marketing industry would have done well to adopt that view, but that train has left the station.

Taken together, this outing, plus our earlier discussion of Facebook ad insertion solidifies a single near-certainty, that only you know whether you’re up to do-it-yourself OTT ad placement or whether it’s time to bring in the pros. If you do, look for breadth of knowledge, experience and that thing you can’t quantify, a winning intuition. Good luck!

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