Addressable targeting on linear TV and more precise targeting on streaming have long been sold as the future of converged TV advertising. But many brands, bigger brands in particular, don’t see much financial advantage in that type of audience segmentation.

Their goal in using television is to reach as many people as possible and their audience is broad. Oftentimes, their television commercials are not selling a particular product as much as an image of the brand, intended to create a positive impression in the minds of consumers.

At the same time, their audiences are not monoliths, with significant regional and demographic differences that create a compelling argument for some degree of variety in their messaging.

That tension between the need for scale and the need for better targeting is real and the ability to easily create more personalized versions of a campaign may be just the solution the industry is looking for.

For most brands, the biggest issue with television and premium video is cost.

The higher CPMs associated with trying to reach multiple audience segments via a targeted buy can easily drive up the cost of that buy to a point where it no longer makes sense. 

Similarly, the cost of filming different creative executions to target all of the brand’s different potential audiences is even more costly as production and agency costs would skyrocket.

These high costs stand in marked contrast with digital display advertising, where all buys are targeted and where personalized creative variations are easy to create and generally quite cost-effective.

So how can converged TV compete? 

The solution is to make use of software-based solutions that can create alternative versions of commercial spots without (a) adding budget-busting additional production costs, (b) changing the inherent message of the (inter)national brand campaign and (c) forcing the brand to abandon the effectiveness of a broad-based national buy.

These solutions can be as simple as inserting different still frames into the beginning, middle or end of the spot, or they can go a lot further— current software solutions like  Flashtalking allow you to insert actual video frames within the creative and dynamically deliver them across streaming, CTV, and digital video to specific audiences within a broader media buy.

It's as simple as creating your flagship commercial and then using the technology to create iterations of that ad at very little additional cost. It’s something that’s been used in digital advertising for years, but is only beginning to be rolled out at scale for converged TV.

Brands that know beforehand that they will want different versions of their commercials can actually go and shoot the additional footage during the main shoot. For other brands, those that either don’t have the budget to shoot multiple versions or who are making that decision about an existing campaign, the software is now sophisticated enough to take still frames and video clips the brand already has, and turn those into segments that can be cut into the original spot to create regional or demographic variations.

Brands can then test these versions to see which ones are performing best using CTV’s superior data capabilities for a range of performance metrics–everything from checking to see whether exposure to the commercial resulted in a website visit to seeing whether the viewer simply sat through the commercial to the very end. 

Those learnings can then be used to iterate other versions of the spot and to double down on placement of variations that appear to be having the most success.

As noted, creative versioning is a particular boon to brands with large but diverse audiences. Take a mobile phone provider. Everyone needs a mobile phone, but their reasons for wanting one might be very different and today’s consumers expect brands to speak to their specific needs.

With creative versioning, the brand can keep running the big budget branding spot they’ve been running, while adding in tags that are aimed at each specific audience segment. That gives them the best of both worlds—targeted creative without having to pay for multiple unique audience segments or multiple unique creative units. 

There’s one other party that benefits from creative versioning too: the ad agency. The effectiveness and impact of the creative idea has long been proven to be the biggest driver of success—TV’s sight, sound and motion creates an emotional connection with the viewer that digital display ads simply can’t replicate. 

With dynamic creative versioning technology, the agency still plays the main role in designing the concept, coming up with the idea and creating that original campaign. The technology just serves to let them easily and effectively create multiple variations of that campaign. It’s not AI, it’s not coming up with campaigns on its own. It’s just finding a way to take existing assets and repurpose them in a way that allows for multiple variations of the same spot.

That will ultimately make streaming television a more effective vehicle for advertisers by providing more relevant commercials that better resonate with consumers. So a win all around.