Introducing Hightouch for CTV
A simple, fast, and affordable solution for first-party targeting and measurement across a fragmented CTV ecosystem.
Ian Maier
October 23, 2024
|8 minutes
Connected TV (CTV) presents a massive opportunity for advertisers, combining the high engagement of TV ads with the precise targeting and measurement of digital media.
However, navigating CTV’s fragmented ecosystem can be challenging. Ad buying spans numerous DSPs, TV manufacturers, and streaming platforms, with measurement data scattered across each. This fragmentation makes it difficult to target the same audience across platforms and to link ad exposures to real business outcomes. As a result, many companies find it too complicated—or too costly—to turn TV into a performance channel.
Hightouch for CTV changes that, offering an easy-to-use solution for targeting, matching, and measuring first-party audiences across CTV platforms.
Hightouch for CTV features include:
- A visual audience builder with access to all your customer data in the warehouse.
- Instant data onboarding to easily match people to their household TVs.
- Integrations with major DSPs, smart TV manufacturers, and measurement providers.
All of this is available to Hightouch customers today—no additional CPM or add-on fees–saving media buyers hundreds of thousands of dollars in unnecessary costs.
Hightouch for CTV offers a modern alternative to legacy systems like LiveRamp, Transunion, and Experian. Unlike in those systems, our customers can create, activate, and automate audiences across multiple CTV platforms in minutes, without needing help from engineers to pull data or push it to different systems.
How do we make it so easy? It all comes down to how our product is built…
Navigating the fragmented CTV ecosystem
We believe that navigating the fragmented CTV ecosystem is a data problem.
Media teams buy CTV ads across many DSPs, TV manufacturers, and streaming platforms. Each platform has a unique integration method (APIs, S3 buckets, data clean rooms) and identifiers that can be used to match devices (IP addresses, hashed emails, mobile ad IDs, etc). On top of that, those data points are often siloed across different data stores across the organization.
Engineers must collect, transform, and orchestrate data across siloed data stores to navigate the web of identity, media, and measurement solutions.
This typically leaves media teams with two options: do nothing and forgo the benefits of first-party targeting and measurement, or hire a team of engineers to build and manage custom infrastructure that is expensive, brittle, and slow.
Hightouch for CTV offers a third option: a fast and effective way to target and measure first-party audiences without expensive infrastructure or LiveRamp’s exorbitant fees.
How Hightouch streamlines first-party CTV targeting and measurement
Instead of bringing your data to your media platforms, Hightouch for CTV bring your media platforms to your data where it already exists - in your cloud data warehouse. This composable architecture breaks down the silos between your audience and measurement data, making activation fast and easy.
Customers access the data through our user-friendly interface to create, match, and measure audiences in minutes, without needing help from engineers.
Key features of Hightouch for CTV
Create audiences directly from your data warehouse
You can segment your data with a visual audience builder that lets you define complex segment rules, preview audience members, and assess overlap to ensure every audience targets the right person and that budgets are not wasted.
The audiences you build query your data warehouse directly, meaning you can access every data point available to the business, unlocking previously impossible use cases. For example, a pet care company could target household TVs based on the type and breed of the family’s pets, and which allergies those pets have.
Onboard to DSPs and OEM platforms in minutes
Instantly sync your audiences to major CTV-supported DSPs like The Trade Desk, Amazon Advertising, and StackAdapt, and to OEM platforms like LG Ad Solutions, Samsung Ads, Roku Advertising, and Vizio Ads.
With the click of a button, Hightouch matches your offline identities (e.g., email addresses and phone numbers) to CTV devices using Match Booster, our proprietary third-party identity graph. Our embedded identity solution makes it easy to onboard data without the need for slow, expensive, and outdated platforms like LiveRamp.
Automatically refresh audiences & manage opt-outs
Outdated audiences can generate millions of dollars in waste per year and put the company at risk of failing to comply with opt-out requests. Hightouch automatically refreshes your audiences so that you can keep your targeting fresh and maintain bulletproof compliance.
Because audiences are queried directly from your cloud data warehouse, your team can feel confident that you are using the most accurate, up-to-date customer data.
Measure brand, tune-in, and sales lift across segments
Cross-channel measurement is difficult when dealing with multiple CTV platforms that own their own siloed datasets. Getting a holistic view of brand awareness, tune-in, and sales lift typically requires third-party partnerships, excessive additional fees, or fragmenting the insights by running measurement studies with individual broadcasters.
Hightouch for CTV breaks down these silos by partnering with industry-leading measurement providers for brand lift, tune-in, and sales lift.
Measure brand lift with Dynata
Run brand surveys across your target audiences for clearer insight into how well your campaigns drive awareness and sentiment.
Measure reach, frequency, and tune-in with iSpot
Measure how well your targeted CTV ads drive tune-in engagement. Split your audiences into segments for granular attribution insights across different customer cohorts.
Run incrementality tests with Hightouch
Our native Splits feature allows you to build incrementality tests directly into your targeting. You can assign randomized holdout groups and use native reports to visualize incremental sales volume, revenue, order value, margins, and more.
No CPM or add-on fees
CTV activation is available to all of our customers at no additional charge.
Unlike legacy data onboarding providers like LiveRamp, we do not charge our customers or partners additional fees to activate their own data. Your data belongs to you, and you shouldn't be taxed to use it.
In practice, this means that big-budget advertisers stand to save hundreds of thousands of dollars in reduced CPM fees. For CTV partners who have historically taken on that cost for customers, they can rest easy knowing they can advocate for performance-improving use cases without them eating into their margins.
First-party data use cases for CTV
Suppression
CTV CPMs are costly, ranging from $25 to $65 or more. Media buyers can easily reduce waste by not serving impressions to active customers, subscribers, or converted viewers across acquisition campaigns.
Frequency capping
Efficient brand advertising requires ongoing frequency management to ensure spending isn’t wasted by over-exposing households to the same ads.
Data-fluent teams can work with their DSP and CTV platforms to sync exposure logs back to the warehouse where they can model frequency at the personal and household levels. Hightouch can regularly cap impressions by setting audience rules to automatically remove customers when they reach a certain frequency cap and re-add them when the frequency drops.
Lookalike seeds
Sync seed audiences to your favorite DSP for lookalike modeling and targeting. Quickly experiment with more refined audience seeds by segmenting seed audiences to focus on specific product preferences, lifetime value, and purchase behavior.
This is especially useful for companies in heavily regulated financial and healthcare industries where advertisers are excluded from targeting customer lists directly.
Targeted tune-in campaigns
Media, entertainment, sports, and gaming companies can use Hightouch to target groups of subscribers, past ticket purchasers, and gamers to drive viewership using native ads that promote the content on the smart TV’s home screen.
With our tune-in measurement partner iSpot you can measure tune-in attribution and lift across linear and CTV devices for a holistic view of campaign performance.
Cross-sell, upsell, and win-back campaigns
Run personalized highly-targeted acquisition campaigns focused on increasing customer lifetime value (LTV) by selling new products, upgrading customers to higher subscription tiers, and winning back churned customers.
Use Splits to create holdout groups and measure how many purchases are incremental, and how many would have been made anyway.
How real customers are using Hightouch for CTV today
US sports league switches from LiveRamp for same-day onboarding
Using Hightouch’s new CTV solution, a major US sports league switched from their legacy data onboarding provider to run their brand, tune-in, and acquisiton campaigns.
Switching to Hightouch eliminated manual data management tasks and sped up onboarding from 2+ weeks to less than a day, while maintaining high match rates. The lower operational overhead and reduced vendor costs decreased their total cost of ownership by 40%.
Major food delivery app unlocks direct upsell campaign with +81% reach
One of the nation’s largest food delivery apps launched a targeted subscription upsell campaign with a major CTV platform for the first time by accessing their consumer behavior and subscription data available directly in their cloud data warehouse.
Using Match Booster, our integrated third-party identity solution, they increased audience reach by 81% compared to first-party data alone.
The media team is using Splits to measure incrementality by creating a holdout group to compare performance across exposed and unexposed groups.
Get started today
You don’t need to settle for sub-optimal CTV performance or managing a burdensome data infrastructure. With Higthouch for CTV, you can activate first-party audiences across CTV advertising and measurement platforms in minutes using the data already in your cloud data warehouse.
To get started, book a demo today!