While CTV penetration is increasing in India, with 30 million plus CTV households expected to double by 2025, it remains a fairly niche market, being restricted largely to premium category advertisers.
However, as discussed in our article on Home Screen Advertising yesterday, brands are eager to explore new advertising avenues, even as consumption patterns shift towards a more digital footing (250 million first-time users of the internet are expected to be online in India by 2025), meaning that there’s plenty of space, and options, for marketing strategies in which to expand. Like home screen advertising, for instance.
Market Forces
Preetham Venkky, CDO, DDB Mudra Group, says that at the moment, there are limited categories that are using this new channel to reach out to the readily available affluent consumer base. “The reason is that these are big CPM spends typically, where you're trying to reach an assured affluent audience, with a specific NCCS classification. So we've seen a lot of ads in the automotive category, as well as electronic gadgets, typically smartphones or wearables. In some city markets, there is premium real estate advertising as well. Since these categories involve high ticket purchases, brands are also looking for new premium channel avenues and testing them out to try to see what the efficacy around that is.”
This room, and budget, to manoeuvre is especially relevant, given the limited scale, and new nature, of the medium, with Venkky saying, “Currently, they're all CPM buys or premium inventory. They're not CPC buys and so it's a little difficult, not impossible, to bring attribution or calculate ROI. While there is attribution in terms of CPM, what is happening at the bottom of the funnel attribution can only be determined by surveys.”
And when you're talking about a reach of about 30 million across multiple boxes, it is insignificant compared to say, a Google or a Meta. “So in that sense, I don't think you can build ROI attribution. Also, since this is premium inventory, the CPM in comparison is still quite high. Automotive, electronics, and real estate all play a premium role in our lives, and that's why premium inventory buying still makes sense for this category,” says Venkky.
It’s important to note that Home Screen Advertising is the newest option for advertisers to play with within the relatively new medium that is CTV.
CTV is predominately used for those upper brand metrics. The key ways clients are measuring success are with the usual campaign metrics such as impressions, video completion rates and click-through rates. Prabhvir Sahmey, Senior Director - Ad Sales - India, for Samsung Ads says Samsung’s substantial market share in India’s Smart TV market, and globally makes it a pivotal platform for advertisers.
Performance Ratings
“But savvy marketers are now changing the conversation and looking at how CTV can play a role across brand lift metrics such as awareness, recall and purchase intent. Across over 20+ case studies in the last year alone, we have been able to deliver double digit results for advertisers across all key brand metrics. By leveraging these metrics, advertisers can fine-tune their campaigns to achieve optimal ROI, ensuring their messages reach the right audience at the right time,” he adds.
This makes for smarter media that produces better outcomes, yet still at a much more cost efficient way compared to linear TV. “We have also partnered with third party measurement platforms to bring in added validation,” notes Sahmey.
Nikhil Kumar, Chief Growth Officer at mediasmart by Affle, agrees that for brands leveraging home screen advertising on CTV, performance measurement is critical and tailored to their specific goals.
“Non-entertainment brands focus on reach, impressions, clicks, and views to gauge visibility and user interest. Brands with CTV-based apps prioritize clicks and installs, tracking deeper in-app engagement. Pricing is determined by cost per day for high-visibility campaigns, cost per impression for broad reach, cost per click for direct engagement, and cost per install for app marketers. These metrics ensure brands can optimize their campaigns for maximum impact and ROI,” he says.
Return(s) on Investment
As more categories outside of media and entertainment start exploring newer avenues within CTV, technologies like mediasmart’s Household Sync and App sync are becoming more critical tools for performance measurement.
“For instance, on mediasmart we worked with a leading skill-based gaming brand to implement a unique and highly effective cross-screen campaign with measurable ROI on mobile through a targeted CTV campaign. Through our cross-screen identification technology, we were able to retarget inactive mobile game users on CTV and measure the impact of CTV ads on mobile engagement, leading to a double digit increase in unique app opens and app installs , thereby significantly higher ROI delivered was over the advertiser benchmarks,” says Kumar.
This was also corroborated with the brand lift indexes from Kantar where there was significant score improvement in all five parameters - brand awareness, ad recall, consideration, message association, and purchase intent.
However, in terms of measuring attributions Venkky points to the fact that these ads haven't been made completely shoppable as yet, even though the tech capabilities do exist in other countries. “The problem is that we haven't gotten into the habit of one click purchase from our TV as yet. The other way to usually track is if you put a phone number and people dial in, or you scan a QR code and have an interaction on WhatsApp.”
While other mediums have better conversion due to the relatively frictionless nature of click and action, people aren’t used to doing that on their CTV, meaning conversion rates are going to be poorer, and attributions hazier.
“It's a relatively new inventory, so I don't think the entire journey has been mapped out yet. It will in due course, but I don't think the volume or the newness of the inventory demands it as of now,” notes Venkky.
