Coronavirus has changed a lot of things, very few for the better. One thing I can say is that I’m spending a lot more quality time at home with my family, often hanging out watching TV. Turns out that it’s a national trend (if not a global one). Year-over-year viewership on streaming TV is up 50%, averaging 3.5 billion hours a week! Right now, the only way that sports fans are getting their fix is by watching games at home — and they can’t skip commercials on connected TV (CTV). For marketers, this is a rare upside in a challenging year — CTV makes it easy to reach a captive audience with your message and maximize your marketing budget.
At the same time, many advertisers have pulled back on traditional media buys, meaning more CTV ad inventory is available. These factors, along with several sports seasons wrapping up in late 2020/early 2021, make the end of the year a great time to serve video ads to consumers streaming live sports.
Streaming video ads have several advantages over traditional TV spots:
Ads typically cannot be skipped
With the right partner you can layer on behavioral or demographic targeting
Exact impressions and completion rate can be tracked
With programmatic CTV buying, you should expect a range of benefits:
Access to premium live sports inventory
Data-driven targeting
Extended reach and frequency control
Enhanced measurement
Here are some of the streaming partners that offer sports on their networks.
But there’s almost no way to establish relationships with each entity individually AND get your campaign launched soon enough. You’ll need to find a vendor that can facilitate a programmatic media buy across all these networks at once.
These are some of the sports leagues with live events from now until January. Viewers will be tuning into to these games and that’s where you want your financial institution’s TV spots to appear.
In order to fully take advantage of this, you’ll need to dive into the world of programmatic media buying — particularly programmatic TV advertising. Programmatic media buying allows you to select the audience you want to target, stipulate the budget, upload creative assets, and allow a system of networks and algorithms to serve your ads to the right people at the right time.
Contrast this with the manual media buying process that dominated the pre-internet age and you start to see the advantages. For one thing, television programs are rarely synchronized anymore (with the exception of live sports). Consumers can watch a show whenever it suits them, so ad placements must work relative to their viewing behavior, not the other way around.
Programmatic media buying is far more flexible and responsive than anything you could attempt with manual buying. Ultimately, if your marketing team hasn’t explored programmatic media already, there’s no better time to start than today.
The window of opportunity that I’m talking about starts NOW, literally; you should be speaking with your marketing team to lock in placements as soon as possible. And the window closes in January when the sports seasons end.
Your institution may not be a Kasasa client, and that’s ok. I still want every community institution reading this blog to know that 2020 doesn’t have to leave you wishing for a marketing “mulligan.” Consumers need strong financial partners more than ever and the only way they’ll trust you with their money is if you make the first move.