OTT TV Advertising Takes the Lead in Attention and Engagement

Originally posted in Shelly Palmer’s 2019 Media & Tech Trend Report released January 9 at CES 2019.

OTT content viewing is surging, and viewers are choosing the big screen in their living room as their preferred environment for watching video content. eMarketer predicts 59% of Americans will watch connected TV by 2020, and the IAB reports 73% of viewers are choosing ad-supported video. The opportunities for brands to offer more interesting ways to engage, use data to personalize messaging and create a 1:1 conversation via TV are available today and will continue to scale into 2019. 

At Innovid - the world’s leading OTT advertising platform - in Q4 alone, we saw a 304% higher engagement rate with OTT TV than video viewed on desktop or mobile.

This is an astounding insight -- that people are leaning in to advertising on TV and choosing with their remote to engage with OTT advertising at a higher rate than on devices that are inherently ‘lean forward’ devices. TV is evolving from a brand awareness and reach vehicle to a data-driven performance-based marketing platform.

OTT TV now delivers a much bigger opportunity for brand marketers -- with a bigger screen, in people’s homes, with contextually relevant alignment, this advertising experience is more complementary to the ‘discovery-like’ features of streaming content than the traditional disruptive ad break linear TV offers. New ad formats like choice-based ads, skippable ads, or interactive ads with opportunities to view long form content, bring new creative possibilities to the table. 

We predict 2019 will bring new formats for broadcasters to offer marketers that further drive business outcomes, creating a performance model for TV advertising like never before. We also predict brands will embrace data-driven creative on TV at a high volume, especially those brands that are expanding their media mix outside of traditional media channels to scale their businesses and find new customers through OTT TV.

Learn more about 2019 trends in the Shelly Palmer 2019 Media & Tech Trend Report.