Connected TV. What Is It, Really?

I wanted to quickly talk about CTV.
Last year I attended Programmatic IO in New York and learned quite a bit about what is going on lately in the digital advertising industry.
The biggest buzz words during the conference were, data privacy, people-based marketing, and connected tv, among a few others.
Yeah, two of those are big picture ideas and one is simply one of many vehicles of delivering ads.

So, what’s the big deal with CTV?

Well, as you may well know, business tends to follow where the money is.

And in today’s world of quick, online, media browsing, money tends to follow where the attention is - the consumer’s attention.

Attention is the new currency.

Platforms that can attain and hold consumer’s attention are the ones that are profiting most.

It’s the reason why social media algorithms don’t like when you post links to external sites - you are taking the attention away from their platform and sending it somewhere else.

CTV? OTT? The advertising industry loves coming up with acronyms and when one acronym falls to the wayside, we find another one to replace it.

What exactly is CTV?

You’ve probably heard the term. You’ve probably heard of OTT as well. And you’ve most definitely heard of streaming services (This is Hulu, Sling, YouTube TV, Disney Plus, Amazon Video, Peacock, etc. etc. etc.). There are more and more streaming services available all the time.

First, a very very brief history lesson:

As you probably know, Linear TV is the traditional way of broadcasting TV and movies over cable and satellite.

OTT is the new way of broadcasting TV and movies over internet-connected streaming devices.

OTT stands for Over The Top.

I honestly don’t know why it’s called that and you don’t need to either.

All you need to know is that this is the method of delivering these shows and programs via the internet to our phones, tablets, gaming systems, and any other device that has access to the internet and can stream media network-level content.

CTV is technically a device…

CTV or Connected Television is simply a “smart TV” that is able to connect to the internet and display these streaming services (Hulu, Disney Plus, etc.).
A Connected TV can also be a non “smart TV” that is plugged into a streaming device like a Roku, AppleTV, Amazon Firestick, etc. that is able to connect to the internet to access the streaming services and then display them on a TV.

…but we use CTV as a general term.

Because of the confusing nature of all these acronyms, non industry-jargon-loving folks have simply started using the term CTV and Connected TV as THE term when they refer to the concept of streaming services being watched on devices.

At least, this is the case in my experience.

Advertising on CTV

Like many things in the digital advertising world, the technology and capabilities are constantly changing at a crazy rate.

Advertising on CTV (or OTT or streaming services…) is able to be done programmatically.

I personally hate the word programmatic, but it is the term the industry has chosen to use when referring to a certain method of buying up digital advertising space across the internet. To put it another way, it’s an automated way of buying and selling ad space on publisher’s websites.

Unlike the old days of Insertion Orders and having to make real life connections with publishers and networks to get ads served on Linear TV spots, programmatic makes advertising on your favorite streaming channels a breeze.

In a matter of hours (or less) you can have an ad up and running on the Discovery Channel reaching your ideal travel prospects, for instance.

Is that it?

Like many aspects of the programmatic world, you can go far deeper into the ins and outs of how all this stuff works, but as is the nature of this blog, I want to keep things simple.

As always, I am happy to answer any questions you may have about CTV or the programmatic space in general.

It is definitely an exciting space to be in right now.

Feel free to reach out to me directly at my email below or hit me up on Twitter or LinkedIn and we can chat or set up a call.
So, yep! That’s it for now. Thanks so much for reading the LeisureMedia360 Digital Dispatch. I’ll see you next time!