It’s Saturday night and you’re binge-watching Succession from the couch. When you hit a commercial break, what do you do? Reach for your phone, grab a drink, or check on your kids? Whatever you’re doing, it’s not looking at the TV. But every once in a while, a commercial is engaging enough to keep your attention. As an advertiser, you know what happened—a brand hit its mark with both content and targeting.

Keeping viewer attention is one challenge, but encouraging action is even tougher. With traditional TV, commercials simply ran, ended, and hopefully left a mark on the viewer.

With interactive content, CTV advertising has a critical advantage over traditional ads. But just because viewers can interact, doesn’t mean they will. Brands need to deliver engaging, personalized ads. And they need to give viewers a compelling reason to act.

Understanding the value of engaging content

Viewers can’t skip most CTV ads, but that doesn’t mean people are actually watching them. On average, you have eight seconds to capture viewers’ attention.

CTV users accept advertising, even if they don’t love it. Research shows 64% of viewers would rather watch commercials than pay more for a subscription. With interactive features, advertisers can go beyond acceptance and build engagement.

Engagement with CTV ads could look like:

• Scanning a QR code
• Opting into SMS or email advertising
• Clicking a button to see optional content
• Making a purchase on the CTV device

Interacting with ads isn’t unique to CTV, but the results are. Interactive CTV ads drive engagement rates of over 5%—more than five times PC or mobile.

Building engagement through personalization

Half of engagement is finding the right audience. For marketers and media buyers, that increasingly means laser-focused targeting and messaging. Research from McKinsey & Company indicates 80% of consumers want personalization from brands. 

Untargeted ads might fill your pipeline with leads. But you’ll burn through ad spends re-marketing to low-quality prospects and chasing audience segments that never convert. To maintain a good ROI, you need personalization.

CTV’s targeting capabilities are well-suited to delivering personalized content. And you can integrate ad-buying platforms with your internal technology stack to manage the process:

• Directly market to existing customers by leveraging your first-party data to build targeted lists.
• Use your customer intelligence to automatically refine audience segments based on campaign performance.
• Make ad-buying decisions in real-time with granular performance metrics from streaming platforms.

Creating compelling interactive CTV ads

Engagement is half the battle, but you still need a user to take action. For traditional TV, the customer journey often breaks down here. Viewers need to disengage from the TV to call a number or open a website. Anything advertisers can do to reduce friction points is a win, which is where CTV shines.

By making integration feel seamless, advertisers can minimize fallout and push more people through their funnel. Here are two ways to optimize for interaction.

1. 1. Fulfilling viewers’ immediate needs and desires

The average American has about five hours of free time per day. And they spend over 100 minutes—a third of that time—watching connected TV such as Roku, Apple TV, or Amazon Fire TV. Activities like shopping or cooking are necessary, but they cut into leisure time.

With interactive CTV ads, brands can encourage viewers to take action with minimal effort. Roku has had some success with this, with two partnerships in the past 18 months aiming to integrate daily activities into online promotions:

• Together with Walmart, Roku allows viewers to make purchases directly on their CTV in just two clicks.
• Their deal with DoorDash drives people to the delivery service and allows restaurants to deliver targeted promotions.

Roku’s applications are broad—after all, everyone needs to eat. But they reflect how convenient brands can make the customer journey. Targeting focused audiences to deliver contextually relevant ads opens a world of possibilities.

For example, an online gaming company can:

• Segment prospect and retargeting audiences based on demographics and existing users respectively.
• Develop a creative with QR codes to either download an app for new users or display promos to entice returning customers.
• Programmatically place media buys on sports-related content.
• Use a customer intelligence platform to view customer journey analytics and optimize the campaign in real time.

1. 2. Elevating advertising to an experience

Most CTV viewers wouldn’t think twice about ordering dinner from an interactive commercial. But, asking them to buy a car or book a vacation the same way might not go as well. Where a transactional approach will often fail, delivering an experience piques user interest. Volvo’s interactive CTV ad executed this concept wonderfully, giving viewers the chance to explore the car and connect with a dealership.

Many industries can utilize interactive CTV’s flexibility, but entertainment and media are uniquely positioned to capitalize. Imagine setting up a campaign to promote a pop star’s new album and subsequent tour. Existing music video footage is an ideal creative base for a range of promotions in varied formats: 

• Provide a QR code to stream the album.
• Collect viewer phone numbers to text them ticket information for tour dates nearby. 
• Offer interactive behind-the-scenes footage to maximize engagement.

As CTV evolves advertisers will have increasingly detailed analytics. And streaming platforms will develop more robust interactive features. Brands that combine engaging and innovative content with customer intelligence are poised to dominate CTV advertising.

Learn how the right customer intelligence platform can help you leverage CTV advertising to connect with your ideal audience.