The Winning Combination of Advanced Creative and Live-Streamed Sports

The biggest brands in the world are embracing CTV advertising on live-streamed sports for its many advantages over linear TV. 

For one thing, brands and agencies leveraging CTV advertising can reach their audience beyond linear and across cord-cutters and cord-nevers. Live-streamed sports are gathering more viewers every day. PwC predicts that almost 100 million viewers will stream a sports event at least once a month in 2025.

For another, advertisers can gain measurement insight that simply isn’t available on linear TV. Advertising on live-streamed sports offers a significant increase in advertisers’ capability to measure and understand frequency, reach, and outcomes. It also enables campaign optimization in real time to boost ROI.

But one of the most underappreciated advantages of CTV advertising on live-streamed sports is the capability to leverage advanced creative, such as DCO and interactive ads, for personalization, engagement, and commerce.

Personalize advertising messages with DCO

The capability to run Dynamic Creative Optimization advertising is one key advantage offered on live-streamed telecasts. With DCO, advertisers can take advantage of new strategies for personalization that are not available on linear TV. Just as it does online, DCO enables brands to use data-driven signals to personalize their messaging at scale, making it more relevant to specific audiences. With DCO, brands create versions of ads based on a single template, where elements — such as images, text, headlines, and background colors — are automatically swapped out based on data signals like geolocation, weather, and daypart. 

For instance, a DCO ad for a sporting goods store can feature the local team’s gear based on geolocation. Innovid data from the first half of 2024 shows interactive DCO advertising performs — delivering an average of 20.18 seconds of additional engagement compared with standard video ads.

Streaming transforms ads into lean-forward experiences

Designed to drive engagement on big-screen TVs, laptops, and iPads, interactive CTV ads can feature QR codes, overlays, trivia, and surveys to encourage viewers to deepen the experience with the brand — and increase the likelihood that consumers take an action aligned with an advertiser’s KPI.

Interactive ads provide clear insights into how a user engages with the ad, which can inform how brands can optimize their campaigns. The knowledge that a consumer engaged with a QR code, looked at a specific product in a gallery, or scanned a coupon can lead to optimization — such as segmenting that prospect for retargeting or other sequential ads that continue to move them down the funnel.

Innovid data from the first half of 2024 shows that interactive advertising on CTV drives engagement. Interactive CTV ads generate an average of up to 76 additional seconds of engagement compared with standard pre-roll video. And they achieve an engagement rate 4.5x that of standard video on mobile and 3.8x that of standard video on desktop.

Create loyal fans of your brand with shoppable ads

Shoppable advertising — a subset of interactive advertising — enables advertisers to compress the funnel with elements like QR codes, store locators, and add-to-cart buttons to drive engagement and sales. Viewers can shop directly from ads appearing on the biggest screen in the house using their television remote or mobile phones.

Innovid data indicates that QR codes are gaining popularity among advertisers — and consumers. In the first half of 2024, impressions for interactive CTV ads with QR codes have already surpassed the total for all of 2023 by 11% (and counting). Even more impressive, the engagement rate for this class of advertising has more than doubled to 0.89% from 0.37% in the same timeframe.

That surging engagement rate indicates that viewers have become more accustomed to interacting with QR codes in TV ads — making it a highly effective way to drive action. Data from a recent joint report from Innovid and Target Roundel underscores viewers’ rising comfort with shoppable ads. Here are some of the report’s key findings:

CTV advertising’s advantages for publishers

Note that the advantages of live sports transition from linear TV to streaming are not reserved for brands and agencies. Live-streamed sports represent a massive opportunity for publishers. With Innovid’s proprietary creative SDK installed on a publisher’s platform, advertisers can quickly and easily generate interactive creative campaigns. This kind of creative, built for the CTV and live-streamed sports environment, helps a publisher’s clients engage fans with immersive experiences aligned to the game.

Learn more about the powerful advantages of CTV advertising on live-streamed sports. Download Innovid’s guide, “Winning Big with CTV Advertising on Live-Streamed Sports,” today.

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