The world of television has undergone a transformation, with viewers streaming content across a multitude of devices and platforms. This shift has given rise to one of the most powerful channels for modern marketers: connected TV (CTV). With a market size exceeding $30 billion and nearly 70% of the US population using CTV platforms, it’s a force to be reckoned with.
For advertisers, CTV offers the “holy grail” – the ability to merge the immersive, big-screen experience of television with the precision targeting and robust measurement of digital marketing. It enables large brands to expand the reach of their linear campaigns and provides smaller brands with access to premium national inventory that was previously unattainable. And, as more live events and cultural moments – like sports and award shows – move to CTV, advertisers can leverage data-driven insights to reach highly-engaged audiences, simultaneously achieving both brand and performance KPIs.
However, navigating the CTV advertising landscape can be a complex process. Marketers face challenges ranging from supply fragmentation and inconsistent measurement to difficulties with identity resolution and data silos.
To help marketers thrive in this dynamic environment, LiveRamp partnered with the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM) and other leading vendors to sponsor a new report, Brave New World: Best Practices for Planning, Buying and Measuring CTV and Streaming Ad Campaigns. Drawing on over 50 executive interviews, the guide outlines how advertisers can use CTV to drive tangible business outcomes.
The 8 best practices to perfect your CTV strategy
The report identifies eight best practices for CTV planning, buying, and measurement. You can download the full report to understand the related challenges, best practices, and benefits you can achieve with CTV.
Here’s a short summary of each.
- Standardize deep, cross-functional collaboration
CTV breaks the mold of traditional media, and as such, it necessitates a new approach to working. The most effective campaigns begin with deep collaboration to bridge the silos between clients, agencies, and external partners. The typical, sequential handoff from strategy to planning to buying is no longer enough, as it leads to fragmented knowledge. Taking a collaborative approach to insights with partners will unlock greater value than programmatic can do on its own, allowing both advertisers and publishers to gain mutual business value by creating contextually relevant and integrated experiences for viewers that drive engagement and brand goals.
The guide recommends formally kicking off each project with a CTV Campaign Design and Measurement Workshop. This ensures all stakeholders – from strategy and investment to creative and analytics – are aligned from day one on business objectives, target audiences, and KPIs. This upfront alignment prevents wasted effort and ensures the campaign is engineered to deliver on its goals. - Consider CTV’s creative capabilities early
Too many advertisers simply repurpose their linear TV assets for CTV, treating it as just another distribution channel. This approach misses a massive opportunity. CTV offers a unique canvas for creativity, including interactivity, personalization, and non-skippable formats that can dramatically increase engagement. As more live events are streamed on CTV, advertisers can take advantage of dynamic creative optimization, serving personalized ads to different audiences, even within the same event.
Ad creative should be a strategic consideration from the start, not an afterthought. As the report highlights, creative quality can double the effectiveness of brand lift on CTV, with strong creative significantly outperforming weak creative. By testing and optimizing creative formats tailored to CTV, advertisers can improve resonance and achieve more effective advertising. - Apply a zero-based budget approach to ad spend
Relying on historical models or previous years’ spending is a flawed approach to budgeting for CTV. That’s because traditional models often undervalue CTV’s contribution due to data lag and a focus on metrics that don’t capture its full impact.
A “blank slate” or zero-based budgeting (ZBB) approach is the recommended best practice. This method requires that all expenses be justified from the ground up based on current media objectives and strategies, rather than past spending levels. This ensures that budget allocation for your CTV ad spend reflects today’s consumer viewing habits and technological capabilities, aligning your investment with actual campaign goals. - Optimize CTV buying channels based on campaign-specific KPIs
In CTV, the supply path should be a strategic choice, not a habit. Teams often default to their usual buying methods without considering whether the channel aligns with the campaign’s primary objective, resulting in inefficient spending and mismatched inventory.
The best practice is to let the primary KPI define the supply path. For brand awareness campaigns that require high-quality environments, premium direct buys are ideal. For consideration-focused objectives, curated Private Marketplaces (PMPs) with contextual signals are effective. For performance goals that demand flexibility and ROAS, agile PMPs and outcome-based buying are best. This alignment ensures every dollar is spent on inventory that can deliver the desired result. As CTV continues to mature, and customer intelligence improves with increased access to partners’ data, the need to trade off between brand and performance metrics will be eliminated. - Guard CTV investments with vigilance and verification
The high CPMs in CTV continue to attract fraud, making robust safeguards critical to protect advertiser budgets. Simply tracking impressions isn’t enough. Advertisers need to validate viewability and make sure their ads appear in brand-safe environments.
Adopting an investigative mindset is essential to verifying that you’re getting what you pay for. This involves collaborating with high-quality publishers and SSPs, regularly reviewing programmatic bidstream data for accuracy, and closely examining delivery logs. The report also suggests considering attention metrics to better measure the quality of inventory and its relationship to audience response. - Use a high-fidelity audience identity source built for CTV
At the heart of CTV’s fragmentation challenge is identity. Relying on proxy identifiers, such as IP addresses – which can change frequently – leads to inaccurate reach, poor frequency control, and flawed measurement. To overcome this, a persistent and high-fidelity identity solution is crucial.
This forms the foundation for trustworthy audience targeting and CTV measurement. A durable and interoperable identifier, such as LiveRamp’s RampID, enables marketers to connect their first-party data across the ecosystem, allowing for accurate deduplication, cross-platform frequency management, and the ability to link ad exposure to real business outcomes. Using the same audience data source to plan, buy, and measure is a critical step toward consistency and accuracy. - Engineer access to data for smarter CTV decisions
Audience and performance data in the CTV ecosystem are often siloed across numerous streaming platforms, content providers, and measurement vendors. This fragmentation makes it incredibly difficult for marketers to gain a holistic view of their campaigns and accurately estimate key metrics, such as reach and outcomes. The solution is to engineer a comprehensive data access strategy. This involves establishing a centralized data architecture and using data collaboration for secure access to ad exposure data. IDC MarketScape recently named LiveRamp a Leader for its Clean Room, which empowers organizations to connect data across platforms, and uncover insights that fuel better planning, activation, and measurement. - Use multiple attribution methods for clear insight into CTV’s impact
Marketers have long struggled to see the full picture of their media performance. Traditional marketing attribution models like MMM use old methods that don’t always show the full impact of CTV advertising. This can lead to missed opportunities and misaligned investments. Increasing privacy regulations and signal loss make traditional approaches even less reliable.To gain a comprehensive understanding of performance, marketers should employ a combination of attribution techniques to obtain a more complete and accurate picture of CTV’s full-funnel effectiveness and its unique contribution to business objectives.
With Cross-Media Intelligence, marketers finally have a unified view of campaign performance across all channels, publishers, and creative variations. Brands can securely analyze deduplicated insights across partners – including major CTV platforms – while respecting personal data.
Realize the full potential of your CTV investments
CTV advertising offers an unparalleled opportunity to connect with audiences in meaningful ways and drive measurable growth. But unlocking this potential requires moving beyond old workflows and embracing a more intentional, collaborative, and data-driven approach.
By grounding your strategy in a persistent identity framework and enabling secure data collaboration, you can overcome fragmentation and turn CTV into a powerful performance channel.
Ready to dive deeper? Download Brave New World: Best Practices for Planning, Buying, and Measuring CTV and Streaming Ad Campaigns to access the full analysis, case studies, and actionable cheat sheets to elevate your CTV advertising strategy.