While it may seem counterintuitive given uncertainties with the economy and the industry, now is the perfect time for advertisers to innovate on their video investment planning with new strategies and tools.

With budgets being slashed and the marketplace growing more fragmented, it’s hard to locate target consumers, and it’s even harder to measure effectiveness. To combat these obstacles, advertisers need to stop relying on old tactics and start seeking new ways to optimize spend.

Sharpening the data strategy is a key step, but data alone won’t solve the issue; new tools and strategies are necessary to achieve effective investment results.

A recent LG study reveals that brands can end up spending more than half their budget to reach just 10% of the total audience available. Advertisers can’t afford to waste shrinking budgets on unchecked ad repetition in the current economic environment, much less thrive long term.

Brands need to stop playing defense and start going on the offense when it comes to how they plan and invest their TV dollars. By investing in technology that allows them to control who they reach and how many times they reach them, brands can stop wasting money and frustrating consumers with ad fatigue.

Why data alone is not the answer

The evolution of digital video has introduced a wealth of data into the media ecosystem. However, most advertisers are still employing old tactics for investment planning, despite the new trove of information they now have access to. Others may be eager to develop new media buying strategies and advertising campaigns based on the data, but are unsure how to deploy that data to drive better performance.

Brands need to stop playing defense and start going on the offense when it comes to how they plan and invest their TV dollars.

Advertisers now must incorporate AI-enabled technologies that can unify audience data across platforms for a holistic view. The television landscape has become too complex to build an effective investment plan without it. Loyal linear TV viewers watch over three hours of programming per day, but in Q1 2022, 94% of all linear ads reached the same 55% percent of households.

Without a cross-platform strategy and the crucial combination of granular data and technology, advertisers won’t be able to avoid reaching these same consumers too many times, while other target viewers will be missed entirely, and marketing KPIs will suffer as a result.

One-off tech deployments with a particular point solution won’t do the trick, either. Sure, you can optimize with a given vendor, but that alone only makes you “smart in a silo,” meaning you have perhaps optimized one particular buy, but not your total buy. To do that, you need a technology solution acting as the brain to unify the whole buy.

Premium video investment requires technology

In programmatic media, marketers have embraced a variety of tools and technologies to get the job done, including demand-side platforms (DSPs), supply-side platforms (SSPs), data management platforms (DMPs) and customer data platforms (CDPs). In the programmatic media ecosystem, data and technology help drive a better outcome, but in premium video, this same approach has yet to occur.

The paradox is that premium video represents the lion’s share of advertising budgets. The promise of CTV is about premium content that can be invested in, similar to digital. Today’s technology can help advertisers unify CTV spend with linear TV spend to reach more of a desired target an ideal number of times.

Advertisers already pay for technology in the programmatic ecosystem; in these uncertain economic times, it’s more important than ever to get that same kind of value in premium video by investing in the right technology.

Now is the time to innovate

Given this economic climate and the scale of audience fragmentation, organizing and measuring first- and third-party data requires smart technologies that can unify and deploy it at scale. Throughout the media buying process, data signals need to be merged with AI-enabled, privacy-compliant technology to make more informed predictions about consumer intent. This is critical to advertisers’ ability to effectively target high-value audiences in today’s TV ecosystem and stop wasting money.

Now is the time to embrace a technology-enabled, cross-screen investment plan as capabilities are available to do something about it. This is a win-win for not only consumers, but the brand’s bottom line.

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The industry is keenly watching as consumers continue to cut cords and increasingly adopt connected TV (CTV) and OTT as their preferred viewing options, making the task of reaching prospects even harder to do now as there is more fragmentation and exceedingly more complexity.

This quickly evolving video ecosystem leaves the marketplace looking very different heading into the 2022/2023 Upfronts. How will advertisers navigate it? Do they have the necessary technology to manage this complexity?

Navigate this brave new world

The entire landscape has changed. Where you used to have a playing field dotted with the giant boulders of linear TV networks and scattered with CTV and OTT options among the dunes, you now have an oasis of traditional linear TV alongside digital streaming video and social media. Taking the metaphor a step further, you have new hybrid programming fitting easily between connected devices and mobile screens, creating redundancies and potential waste for buyers.

How do you locate and engage audiences now? How do you understand where they will go and how to reach them?

“Today’s planning tools were built for a different era and are ill-equipped to solve our present needs.”

Is anyone truly equipped to operate effectively in this brave new world?

This more complex environment means you can’t get around without technology to help navigate through it. Technology that helps forecast consumer viewing patterns across an entire video landscape, as well as taking into account heavy TV viewers, light TV viewers, cord-cutters, cord-nevers, etc. to better control media spend. And, of course, technology that reaches advertisers’ desired audience segments, in the proportion that they want.

Today’s planning tools were built for a different era and are ill-equipped to solve our present needs. Too much has changed. The future does not fit into the containers of the past.

To achieve success, you will need a total video strategy that is different and is purpose-built to solve the next generation of challenges. One that has the ability to optimize and analyze media holistically with an eye toward the future. The strategy also needs to be able to score linear TV KPIs with those of CTV, digital video and mobile in order to give buyers a birds-eye, 360-degree topographical map of the media landscape. It’s an approach that swaps siloed planning and buying with true incrementalism, delivering a more effective use of client’s budgets and reclaims control from the sell-side alone (as they look only within their portfolio) and allows buyers to make holistic decisions across their entire video portfolio.

Drive incrementally

Look at it this way: Linear and mobile are parts of an ecosystem with interactive micro-environments that can expand advertisers’ reach. Total video planning and investment can eliminate the redundancy and waste advertisers experience when these environments overlap.

Implementing total video planning technology—which incorporates a smart approach to data that effectively forecasts viewership across TV, CTV, digital and social media, unifying it on one platform and driving incrementality—is a true cross-screen planning solution.

Avoid being smart in a silo

Ironically, 2020-2021 proved to be a time of fast and positive development in the video world; people cut cords in record numbers and turned from cable boxes to streaming.

Meanwhile, the network’s technical teams were busy developing platforms to capture viewing data even as it moved toward hard-to-capture media. But this is still siloed information. It’s good for networks to understand their own footprint, viewership, incrementality and overlap within their own world, but it does not enable advertisers to fully understand these same things to guide their overall investment strategy. Data in silos is still siloed investment and siloed decisioning.

This year, it is more important than ever that media buyers have access to multi-network, cross-screen, granular data unified on a single platform. Using technology to transform siloed data into holistic data will empower advertisers to take control of their overall investments. It will also allow them to reduce waste and drive the outcomes most important to them—across the entire ecosystem—as they approach the upcoming Newfronts and Upfronts. Data was a great first step, but without technology, it does not solve for siloed investment.

Unite the data; bridge the gaps

After negotiating the Newfronts and Upfronts, your media portfolio should not resemble a series of desert snapshots with boulders and sand dunes marked out in separate frames. You do not need to end up with a static photo book of your individual media investments. You should have a full 360, high-def picture of the entire video landscape; one that allows for a dynamic visualization of your plan and evolves as your plan unfolds throughout the year.

This article was originally published on AdWeek.

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