“When programmatic launched, ad outcomes were quite easy to define: did I get a click on my display ad?
“Today, with CTV, digital out of home, audio and everything else that now sits under programmatic, it’s much more complex. The question is no longer just performance metrics; it’s how we continue to define meaningful brand outcomes.”
Meredith O’Brien, Group Agency Director at MiQ, summed up the shifts in the programmatic landscape and the challenge of attribution in this way in a conversation with Retail Media Age Editor Rebecca Sentance and Paul McGee, Head of Video Planning at Goodstuff. Alongside this, O’Brien highlighted the numerous challenges posed by fragmentation of the media marketplace:
“There’s fragmentation of data, fragmentation of buying and fragmentation of measurement. The opportunity is consolidation bringing together the right data, the right activation strategy and the right measurement – all tied back to the business challenge.”
With this said, McGee put forward that fragmentation is as much an opportunity as it is a challenge, noting how CTV has opened up television-quality brand building to a much wider range of advertisers.
“Today, brands of any size can access the kinds of brand-building effects that were once reserved for companies with multimillion-pound TV budgets,” he said. “That’s a huge opportunity for challenger brands.”
To illustrate this, McGee dived into a successful omnichannel campaign that Goodstuff and MiQ had carried out for one such challenger brand: Dr. Squatch, an up-and-coming brand in the highly competitive male grooming market.
The evolving playbook for reaching audiences
With a small budget but “high ambitions” and evocative creative, MiQ, Goodstuff and Dr. Squatch were able to get the maximum impact from CTV through a hyperlocal campaign that honed in on the best audiences for the brand.
“The Dr. Squatch campaign shows there’s a real benefit in smart planning, understanding your audience, good creative and a really interesting brand platform that will resonate,” said McGee. “You don’t always need enormous budgets if you’re making intelligent decisions about who you’re trying to reach.
“Our relationship with the client was built around a shared belief that quality media planning creates value. Once you’ve aligned on those principles, it allows you to get further into the detail rather than rewriting the rulebook every campaign.”
The campaign successfully built frequency of message with the target young, male, urban audience via CTV and later, online video, and achieved an 112% average revenue uplift in targeted London stores during the campaign period, plus a halo effect of 24% higher direct-to-consumer (DTC) sales and an 8.4% incremental growth in new audiences.
O’Brien noted how AI has transformed the traditional marketing funnel by shortening the path to conversion dramatically. “We’re starting to think less about awareness, consideration and purchase, and more about behaviours,” she said.
“What are people watching? What are they browsing? What are they buying? Understanding those behaviours gives us a much richer picture of the consumer.”
The rise of CTV underpinned by “really smart data” has opened the TV space up to some interesting data collaborations, said O’Brien: “The biggest opportunity is using commerce, ACR [Automatic Content Recognition] and contextual data together. It’s not about relying on one signal; it’s about understanding the relationship between multiple signals so you can reach the right audience wherever they’re consuming content.”
“Whenever we see CTV working alongside channels like YouTube or display, we see uplift. I’d encourage agencies to connect those plans more closely because, ultimately, what we’re trying to do is connect with consumers throughout their day.”
“If people trust the brand … they’re much more likely to buy”
O’Brien advises brands to focus less on buying channels and more on buying audiences: “If I know someone has bought a competitor’s product or is in-market for the category, I want to reach them wherever they’re consuming content, not just on one platform.
“Being independent and media-agnostic in your planning and buying is incredibly important. It means you can continually evolve your strategy as new channels emerge rather than starting from scratch every time the market changes.”
McGee agrees that audience creation should focus on interoperability: “I don’t want to throw all my chips into one basket with one supplier or one platform. We need an audience definition that’s useful across every buying point.
“For Dr. Squatch, for example, we defined the audience really clearly, used data intelligently to refine it, and focused on quality environments rather than simply [chasing] cheap impressions. If people trust the brand and connect emotionally with it, they’re much more likely to buy.
“That combination really helped the creative resonate and delivered strong results across both retail and direct-to-consumer sales. It doesn’t benefit anyone to have a siloed piece of activity where we get a report back but don’t understand how it affected the business. The value comes from connecting media activity to real business outcomes.”
Listen to the full conversation with Rebecca Sentance, Meredith O’Brien and Paul McGee on The NDA Podcast.
