In January 2021, advertisers breathed a sigh of relief. 

2020 retail sales, which many forecasts predicted would dip in the face of the pandemic, were stronger than predicted: up 8.3% over 2019. As testament to changed consumer behavior over the past 18 months, those numbers were bolstered by a 23.9% surge in online spending.

Whether 2021 sales will be as good is still an open question.

This year, as advertisers ramp up plans for the holiday season, here are five ways they can adjust their media plans to maximize their results by making use of the growing power of connected TV.

1. Update how you connect your CTV buy to ecommerce.

With ecommerce sales sluggish heading into the holidays, advertisers should set their sights on CTV. In addition to offering the emotional impact of sight, sound and motion, smart TV OEMs can now offer new tools to help advertisers better target the audiences they want to reach.

Let’s say you’re a retailer focusing on an audience of heavy ecommerce shoppers, and you need deep data about their viewing and shopping habits. Samsung Ads has a new tool called Samsung Ads Audience Advisor, which makes use of the proprietary consumer insights  from an industry-leading 57M+ smart TVs in the US.

Using Audience Advisor to take a deeper dive into the retail segment shows that Samsung Ads has 13 million heavy ecommerce shoppers on its platform. Nine million of them are “mostly streamers” who spend 85% of their time in streaming, which makes it hard to reach in linear. 

Fortunately, those “mostly streamers” spend half their time on CTV, and launch CTV apps six times a day. By using Samsung Ads Audience advisor, advertisers can identify which types of programming their targets consume including genre and channel, and what the best times are to reach them. 

By making use of Audience Advisor, an ecommerce advertiser can even pinpoint the budget they’ll need to reach that audience 5x per week until they hit their reach goal.

2. Strategies from previous holiday seasons probably need a pivot.

In uncertain times, it’s natural to look at what worked before — and for many advertisers that means linear TV. Which, until recently, was the best way to maximize reach and scale. But be careful: when buyers make no allocation at all for CTV (meaning 100% of the budget is allocated to linear), linear-only homes will be over-delivered by roughly 2x. Planners are finding Samsung Ads’ “Rule of 40”  to be a useful rule of thumb: when 40% of the media budget is allocated to CTV, their reach to linear viewers and streaming viewers reaches parity, achieving balance. It means you're putting your media dollars where the viewers and business results are. 

3. Rethink where you look for audiences at scale.

Is it already a hopeless cliché to say that audience behavior has changed since the pandemic began? Maybe. But it’s easy to underestimate just how profound the shift actually is. Instinctively, we all know that an audience like Millennial Moms streams more than their grandmothers. But the data shows that linear viewing accounts for only about 1/10 of total TV viewing time among Millennial Moms. So if you need to reach an audience like that at scale — especially to buy toys for the kiddies this time of year — the place to look for scale is definitely CTV, not linear.

 4. Update your planning to give you more flexibility and a broader view

As baseball great and world-famous philosopher Yogi Berra once said, “​​It’s hard to make predictions, especially about the future”. Yes, last year’s holiday sales were better than expected, but how many advertisers were locked into buys that made it impossible to take advantage of market shifts at the right moment? CTV offers advertisers the flexibility to be more agile as the marketplace evolves. The data from Audience Advisor, based on Samsung first party deterministic data, offers an overview of the audience’s scale, behavior, and time spent in streaming that is unavailable from within the industry’s walled gardens.

 5. Unwrap all the holiday gifts and see what’s inside

We’ve learned a lot over the past year about how to make buying CTV more effective for advertisers. Samsung’s  Audience Advisor campaign planning tool gives advertisers the ability to make better predictions this holiday season and to act on them accordingly. 

There’s a lot to unpack, so learn more about Audience Advisor and our Shopper 360 Solution plus, an overview of the IAB Fall Marketplace video replay, and a download of the “Rule of 40” White Paper.