The Power of Shoppable Advertising: Q&A With Innovid's Dan Mouradian
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Editor's Note: This interview with Dan Mouradian, SVP, Global Client Solutions, Innovid, originally appeared in "CTV x Commerce: Data-Driven Insight to Reach Shoppers With CTV Advertising," a report produced jointly by Innovid and Roundel, Target's retail media network.
Q. What’s your sense of why advertisers are beginning to embrace CTV as a medium?
For years and years, digital advertising has been influenced by traditional advertising. You have your big brand and their television spot and their big moment. Then they take that core idea of the spot, and they move it down into all of the places where they need scale: digital display ads, digital video ads, and so on. Usually, they're just taking the same thing, copying it, putting it in a video ad server, and hoping that, when it shows up on the pre-roll for some content that the target person is getting, it's going to have the same resonant effect.
Said another way: We're repeating the mistakes of the past. But I think we have finally reached a point with CTV — because consumers are moving there and watching more streaming — where digital is now setting the standards that are influencing traditional.
If you need any further evidence that digital creative is influencing traditional TV, go back to 2021 for the Coinbase ad from the Super Bowl. It was a QR code literally just floating on the screen. Paramount+ used the 2024 Super Bowl to partner with Innovid to debut interactive “Add to Watchlist” ads on CTV. These ads promoted “Halo,” “The Chi,” and other Paramount+ programs, and when the game was over users had made commitments to watch more Paramount+ content — ideally reducing churn.
We've now reached an inflection point, where, because TV is now connected to the internet, the best practices from the online world — like interactivity and personalization — can now be executed at a scale that wasn’t around before.
Q. How can brands leverage the first-party data of retail media networks to create more effective CTV advertising?
Retailers can use their media operations to help brands find the retailer’s customers on the open web and on CTV. Brands can use a retailer’s audience data that is made available in targeting platforms to reach and engage these customers. As brands are preparing for more and more signal loss — like the coming demise of cookies — this is one way they're going to continue to find audiences.
Retailers have first-party data they are making available to the brands, and that data can be leveraged for not only new interactive experiences like the shoppable ads, but also for additional opportunities for personalization. The retailers have the data, and a brand can benefit from being able to reach the right customers with more relevant messages.
Q. Roundel’s survey data shows that 60% of consumers look up products after seeing video ads. What can advertisers learn from that statistic?
That stat validates the fact that linear TV and CTV work as awareness drivers, but you're still putting the onus on the customer to go and take an action. That’s where CTV shoppable comes in.
If you know your campaign is going to work from an awareness perspective, you should then test the next question, which is, will they buy? Will consumers add your product to their cart? Can we shorten the time from exposure to purchase? Interactive CTV allows brands to use shoppable ads to introduce a moment where the customer can actually move down the purchase funnel in the app.
Q. What advice do you have for advertisers exploring shoppable ads? Are there any do’s and don'ts you can share?
The first rule is to make sure the QR code is there from the first millisecond of the creative. Don't take a 30-second ad and wait five seconds to show the QR code, because it still takes time for me to get my phone out of my pocket, open up the camera app, and activate the QR code. I would also say that brands should explore other ways of optimizing what that QR code does. So rather than just adding to cart, maybe there's a path to direct purchase.
The other thing is, be explicit about your calls-to-action. Instruct consumers to open the camera app on their phones, scan the code, and click on the link. Finally, think of other value propositions that retailers can bring to a customer.
Adding to cart is one of them, but so are adding to an existing order, pickup in-store later. Those are all things that can be leveraged from a creative technology perspective. My strong recommendation to advertisers: using QR codes is something you should be doing to drive engagement with viewers.
Q. Beyond the QR code, how can brands effectively leverage interactive and dynamic creative options?
An example of DCO in retail is being able to automatically change products, items, prices, and brands in an ad based on the audience and what’s performing. A shoppable ad is one that has an interactive component to it, where a consumer can, for example, buy a product or access a store locator directly within the ad. And interactive and DCO don’t have to be separate! For example, one way to combine elements is through carousels, where each product is a dynamic element. The interactivity might be an “explore” feature. In the case of back-to-school, a consumer can interact with the ad and dive deeper into kids’ clothes, backpacks, lunch boxes, etc.
Q. With CTV, how can advertisers measure their ad performance in ways they can’t with linear TV?
With internet-connected TV, you can optimize in real time. With CTV, every “click” (whether clicking through to look at more products or scanning a QR code) is information you will get from an analytics perspective. Let's say we're showing a back-to-school creative that has three products in a carousel, and we see the majority of people scan the QR code on the second product.
That's great to know after a campaign, but it’s even better to know during a campaign. With CTV, we can actually change the position of that second product to the first position, which will drive engagement even higher. It's about seeing the data and also being able to optimize it automatically.
Q. TV has long been seen as an awareness medium for advertising. Will the rise of CTV and shoppable ads and other advanced creatives move TV advertising to a mid- or lower-funnel tactic?
TV classically has been seen as an awareness driver, and that aspect will continue to be crucial. TV has also driven direct-response advertising. The reason why people pull back from the concept that TV advertising can work in the lower funnel is because it's hard to measure.
It's often a very slow and cumbersome process to understand the effectiveness of advertising on linear TV. This is simply not the case with CTV. Speed to insight, instant optimization, dynamic creative, the interoperability of data sets that actually matter to advertisers — are all at the fingertips of marketers with CTV advertising.
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