Creating Personalized Experiences in CTV

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In this week’s podcast episode, we invite Tal Chalozin, Chief Technology Officer and Cofounder of Innovid to join us for a discussion on the challenges of digital ad personalization, particularly in connected TV. Innovid is an advertising and measurement platform serving some of the world’s largest brands and advertisers.

Ad Personalization is a Spectrum

One of our central topics of discussion with Tal is the challenges of creating personalized experiences in a CTV environment. Consumers and advertisers alike tend to think of personalization as a binary: either everyone gets the same ad, or every individual gets hyper-personalized ads that some consumers might find too personal. Yet personalization is actually a spectrum, argues Tal, and the ability to create relevant ads that don’t encroach on a consumer’s sense of privacy is much easier than marketers might think. Rather than making thousands of ad variations that are hyper-personalized to each individual, marketers can template-ize small segments of an ad to swap in relevant information, like the closest retail location to a consumer. The technology exists to build these ads and serve them to the right audiences programmatically, making the process of producing ad variations much more manageable for marketers while also protecting consumer trust. 

The Future of CTV Measurement & Currency

Once ads are in-market, how can advertisers more effectively measure their impact with consumers? Impressions has been the flawed measuring stick since the earliest days of linear TV, but at Innovid, Tal and his team are working with marketers to measure digital outcomes. Impressions, he argues, is actually an input metric, whereas digital outcomes – from website visits to app downloads, search lift, or ‘bookmark’ and ‘add to cart’ actions – are an indirect but more meaningful metric of whether an ad captured a viewer’s attention. 

We also discuss the impact of ad placement on performance. Currently, there are very few measurement tools that give marketers visibility into the length of the ad pod, their ad’s placement within the pod, and other ads they are sharing the pod with. Yet each of these factors can have a significant impact on consumer attention and whether they’ll take a digital action in response to an ad. 

The Future of Shoppable Video 

The concept of shoppable video has been around since the ‘90s, but the media industry has been slow on making the vision come to life. Tal predicts that will change in the next few years as technology reduces friction in the consumer experience. In fact, we’re about to see a mass-scale experimentation of shoppable video with Amazon Prime Video’s takeover of the NFL 2022 – 2023 season. Consumers will be able to take a digital action within the ad experience – whether it’s ‘add to cart’ or ‘bookmark for later ‘ or a one-click purchase. Time will tell if this is a winning strategy and whether other streaming platforms will ever be able to match the user experience.