Our most popular blog posts of 2024 explore ad serving, Harmony, CTV, QR codes, and more
TV and digital advertising are moving forward at breakneck speed. A look at the most popular posts on the Innovid blog offers a window into the main areas where brands, agencies, and publishers know change is taking place and where they must keep pace with the latest trends.
Our highly read blog posts covered transformative topics in the advertising ecosystem. For instance, our most popular post covered how the modern ad server has become essential for marketers. Other posts in the top 10 covered Innovid’s launch of our Harmony initiative, how to leverage QR codes in TV advertising, and how streaming is transforming Super Bowl ads.
Read on for insight into what topics your partners (and competitors) in the advertising ecosystem are paying close attention to.
1-What the Heck Is an Ad Server, and Why Do I Need One?
Our most popular blog post of 2024 explains how the modern ad server is a one-stop shop for ad management solutions. It’s a centralized place for advertisers to upload creatives, define delivery parameters, implement creative strategies, and track performance — gaining advanced insights and measurement. A modern ad server — like Innovid’s — can automate instantaneous decisions about where and when to serve an ad. Another popular Innovid blog post also explores the indispensable nature of the ad server: “Why the Modern Ad Server Is a Marketer’s Secret Superpower.”
Excerpt: “The modern ad server is like mission control for an advertiser. When you deploy an ad server, your advertising campaigns tap into a reserve of data that fuels personalization, immediately measures performance, and automates optimization to drive ROAS.”
2-10 Trends That Will Transform TV Advertising in 2024
This post predicted the major trends that would impact the advertising world in 2024, and it was pretty darn accurate, if we do say so ourselves. Among its on-target predictions: the continued embrace of AI in marketing, the rise of retail media, and the growth of shoppable TV advertising.
Excerpt: “Although consumers have yet to fully embrace shopping via the TV, this will start changing in the coming year. As the worlds of retail and CTV continue to converge, advertisers who leverage shoppable ad formats will succeed in influencing consumer decisions — and drive tangible outcomes for their businesses.”
3-Ad Tech on Deck: Understanding VPAID vs. VAST
This blog post also made the list of top posts last year. That’s because advertising technology is complicated, and marketers need to understand an alphabet soup of acronyms — like VPAID and VAST. This post explains the differences between VPAID (video player ad interface) and VAST (video ad serving template) and what the distinctions mean for TV advertisers.
Excerpt: “Both VPAID and VAST help advertisers get their message to consumers. VAST is the standard—it’s widely accepted. VPAID tags allow advertisers to deliver highly engaging ads with more robust insights, but are limited to VPAID-enabled video players. VAST tags lack viewability metrics, but reach across more publishers. ”
4-Introducing Innovid Harmony
This blog post covers Innovid’s launch of the first two products of our Harmony initiative: Harmony Direct and Harmony Instant Optimization. This initiative aims to optimize advertising at the infrastructure level by automating the manual and mundane, increasing transparency, and removing unnecessary technology to boost sustainability.
Excerpt: “Harmony Direct offers the most direct and efficient way to launch guaranteed non-biddable media — without charging a percentage of media to activate but instead a significantly lower flat fee. This streamlined supply path redistributes substantial working media dollars back into the ecosystem, benefiting both publishers and marketers while reducing time, effort, fraud, and environmental waste.”
5-9 Cutting Edge QR Code Advertising Strategies
Innovid data shows that consumers are getting used to QR codes as the engagement rate for interactive ads with QR codes more than doubled to 0.89% from 0.37% between 2024 and 2023. This blog post provides examples of interactive ads that have used QR codes to create shoppable ads, to gamify their advertising, to engage their audience with quizzes, and to boost app downloads. Examples covered in this post include Burger King, Avocados from Mexico, and Lovesac.
Excerpt: “QR codes are the new “Buy Now” button for CTV. To create a shoppable ad experience—and drive direct sales—link a QR code to your e-commerce site or the checkout page of a specific product featured in your video ad. Use a call-to-action like “Scan to Buy” and link to a mobile-optimized web page that taps into saved payment options to create a frictionless and immediately gratifying customer experience.”
6-How Streaming Is Changing Super Bowl Advertising
This blog post examines how streaming is poised to change Super Bowl advertising by making it more interactive and measurable. The digitization of TV is making it possible for brands and agencies to take advantage of interactive creative formats available on CTV (such as QR codes) that can push the boundaries of what’s possible in TV advertising — during the Super Bowl and the other 364 days of the year.
Excerpt: “In the past, Super Bowl advertisements were 30-second blunt instruments. Brands could gauge reach, and they could count their press clippings — but measuring the impact on a company’s bottom line was challenging. Interactive CTV ads provide immediate engagement metrics, such as remote control engagement rate. Additionally, InnovidXP, our measurement platform, enables advertisers to measure everything from reach to outcomes (such as online sales, app downloads, and registrations) across linear and CTV.”
7-Disney & Innovid Are Closing the Activation Gap with Real-Time Creative Optimization
At CES 2024, Disney announced that it is “doubling down on translating consumer actions into real-time insights to inform campaign creative through its continued work with Innovid.” This blog post examined how the business press covered Disney’s announcement and showed that this expanded partnership with Disney is just the latest example of how Innovid is helping advertisers and publishers measure and optimize campaigns in real time.
Excerpt: Krista Panoff, SVP-Global Enterprise Development, Innovid, said, "Innovid’s measurement, optimization, and ad delivery capabilities, applied to Disney’s premium portfolio and proprietary Audience Graph, not only helps buyers unlock the value of inventory, but also strengthens brands' reach and performance."
8-TV Speak: Innovid’s Modern Glossary for Converged TV Advertising
The world of ad technology and CTV is complex and filled with complicated terminology. This blog post is a glossary that brings together all of the most critical terms in the digital advertising ecosystem in one convenient and comprehensive place — from API to MVPD to VOD.
Excerpt: “At Innovid, we are in a unique position, working across the global TV ecosystem, including publishers, MVPDs, DSPs, data providers, agencies, and thousands of brands. We know this space and we know how the plethora of terms are used by our many partners in it. The following is Innovid’s glossary of terms that span converged TV. We hope this glossary makes the myriad acronyms and industry jargon more manageable and understandable.”
9-10 Eye-Opening Stats Illuminating the Rise of CTV
This blog post features our infographic, “10 Eye-Opening Stats Illuminating the Rise of CTV.” This infographic underscores growing power of CTV with telling statistics, such as the 110 million Millennial and Gen Z viewers of CTV, the 73% projected growth in CTV advertising investment between 2023 and 2027, and the 92 seconds of additional engagement that interactive ads on CTV produce.
Excerpt: “Television — the viewing of it and the advertising on it — is undergoing a transformation. As the infographic below clearly shows, consumers are shifting their viewing to streaming. And advertisers are following those consumers to CTV. But this revolution in TV viewing is bigger than simply a shift in eyeballs and advertising dollars to CTV. With this shift to CTV, there’s also a transformation in what television advertising can do and what brands can measure and track in their marketing.”
10-How CTV Delivers “Goldilocks” Reach and Frequency to Advertisers
This blog post explores how determining metrics like frequency and unique reach had been guesswork in the past. But now the modern ad server and tools like InnovidXP enable brands, agencies, and publishers to use real-time data to assess a campaign’s reach and frequency across platforms.
Excerpt: “CTV Scales Reach and Frequency. With an average frequency of 7.42 across all CTV campaigns and unique reach of 87% for campaigns using five or fewer publishers, CTV provides advertisers unprecedented “Goldilocks” scale to ensure that your reach and frequency level is neither too high nor too low — but just right.”
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