Among the many trends that accelerated due to the pandemic, 2020 was a watershed year for CTV. It’s been reported that 63% of all TV viewing is happening on streaming services today. And, according to eMarketer, by Q4 2020, CTV saw a 67% year-over-year (YoY) increase in the number of CTV advertisers compared to Q4 2019. However, despite this influx of advertising dollars, today’s $72 billion TV advertising market is exclusive to the top 300 to 500 brands that dominate this influential space. 

But that’s about to change, and this will have profound ripple effects across the advertising ecosystem. 

Traditional TV advertising has been largely out of reach for performance marketers, a term that also encompasses DTC marketers. At the same time, performance marketers are confronting the limitations of search and social advertising (limits on scale, high cost; lower performance due to IDFA and other recent developments) as they grow their brands.

Naturally, marketers are very interested in CTV advertising. They just need the right tools. tvScientific’s mission is to provide those tools and empower a more diverse set of advertisers, like the nine million that spend on search and social, to engage in CTV advertising. This is why we are launching a new performance CTV program with Magnite — the world’s largest independent sell-side advertising platform which recently acquired SpotX — so that marketers can more easily engage in CTV advertising in a way that is intuitive like search and social advertising but with the added brand safety and premium nature of TV. The combination of our platform that delivers 1:1 attribution between CTV ad exposure and outcome (website visits, purchases, etc.) with Magnite’s deep relationships with premium, brand-safe CTV publishers, delivers a truly unique solution for DTC performance advertisers.

When speaking with Todd Randak, SVP of Strategy and Partnerships at Magnite, he said, “For too long the vast majority of marketers have not had access to TV advertising’s high quality, engaging brand-building power and we’re excited to change that. By working with tvScientific, we saw an opportunity to build on our previous efforts to help performance marketers tap into CTV and give them the data and flexibility they are accustomed to in other formats. In turn, this has the potential to unlock significant dollars for CTV publishers.”

As businesses continue to focus on recovery, these types of capabilities are key to helping nontraditional players like DTC and SMBs reach the most engaged audiences and scale their conversion and revenue goals. In 2020 according to eMarketer, more CTV campaigns were tied to revenue (70% vs. 59% in 2019), representing a 124% year-over-year (YoY) increase in the total number of advertisers with revenue-based conversions.

The high cost of TV, lack of clear ROI measurability, and a notoriously difficult buying process have previously been barriers to entry for marketers wanting to test TV, but with new technology, CTV advertising has evolved from a small club of a few hundred advertisers to being accessible to millions of performance oriented marketers.

Jason Fairchild is CEO & Co-Founder at tvScientific