Streaming Innovation is No Longer Optional. CTV’s Guarantee of Survival
Let's face it: sticking to outdated methods in Connected TV (CTV) is like running a marathon in flip-flops. Sure, it might get you somewhere, but it won't get you there fast—or in one piece. The reality? Innovation is not a luxury; it's a necessity. Let's take a look at CTV history. The brave who embrace these new tools win, while the rest fall further behind. And if you're still running your campaigns like it's 2005, you're bleeding money.
Those who've taken the plunge into CTV innovations are already reaping the rewards: sharper targeting, better engagement, and stronger results. The bottom line is clear—if you aren't innovating, you're losing.
So, what are these groundbreaking streaming innovations, and how can they supercharge your streaming advertising strategy? Let's explore.
AI-Driven ads: smarter, faster, stronger
Artificial intelligence has moved from a buzzword to an essential tool in Connected TV (CTV) advertising. As CTV platforms continue to expand and diversify, advertisers face the challenge of reaching fragmented audiences across various streaming services. AI is critical in simplifying this complexity by making ad creation smarter, faster, and more adaptive.
Today’s advanced AI tools, such as Waymark and Veed.io, enable you to create CTV ad videos in minutes, eliminating the traditional need for long production cycles and manual edits. These platforms give advertisers full control over the creative process: you simply provide the core message, select a style (e.g., entertainment or business), choose the tone, pick music, and specify technical details like length and visual identity. The service quickly generates a professional video, with the ability to create multiple versions for testing different audience preferences. It also isn’t limited by the laws of physics or reality, allowing for incredible shots, alternate realities, gravity-defying environments, and a range of other difficult concepts.
How AI-powered ad creation solves fragmentation in CTV:
- Contextually-relevant ad: If your ad matches the genre of movie or TV show you are targeting, the chances of success are growing. So the contextually-relevant ad means that viewers see a sci-fi version of your ad when watching Interstellar, or the ad or home improvement application shown during some home-related reality shows, and the ad of your kitchen utensils shop runs when viewers admire Gordon Ramzi creating his culinary masterpieces.
- Personalization at scale: AI allows you to produce personalized ads for different audience segments across CTV efficiently. Whether you’re targeting families on one platform or sports enthusiasts on another, you can adjust the tone, style, and messaging of your ads to better resonate with specific viewer groups. This helps you overcome the challenge of fragmentation and deliver more relevant experiences.
- Rapid testing and optimization: With AI tools, advertisers can generate multiple versions of a CTV ad—such as one designed for an educational tone and another for an entertainment-focused approach—and test them in real time across various streaming platforms. This rapid feedback loop lets you optimize campaigns quickly, maximizing effectiveness while keeping pace with the ever-evolving CTV ecosystem.
Why it matters for your CTV strategy: AI-driven ad creation tools allow advertisers to produce multiple, tailored ads for different audiences and platforms. Instead of relying on one generic ad, AI enables you to craft personalized messages that resonate with specific viewers, improving engagement and effectiveness. This adaptability is key to navigating the complexity of the CTV landscape, where quick adjustments and targeted approaches are critical to success.
By embracing AI-driven ads, you can stay ahead of the curve in CTV, delivering smarter, faster, and stronger campaigns that break through the fragmentation and reach audiences precisely.
Automated content recognition: next-level audience insights
One of the publishers' best tools in the CTV space is Automated Content Recognition (ACR). ACR technology identifies exactly what content is being watched on connected devices, from hit TV shows to major movies, and it does so in real time. By analyzing audio, video, and images, ACR delivers a wealth of valuable insights into viewer behavior.
Pairing ACR with planning tools and clean rooms adds another layer of precision, as it enables seamless data sharing across platforms while remaining fully privacy-compliant. These innovations work together to offer advertisers a powerful way to optimize their campaigns, ensuring their ads reach the right audience, at the right time, in the most effective way.
Why it matters for your strategy: ACR enables hyper-relevant, context-driven ads, helping advertisers connect with viewers at the perfect moment. This precision enhances engagement and allows you to reach those hard-to-find cord-cutters who are increasingly moving away from traditional TV.
Programmatic tech: smarter spending, better results
Programmatic technology has completely transformed how ads are bought and sold in the CTV space, but not all programmatic auctions are created equally. While the open market offers flexibility, it's also rife with bad actors and requires extra vigilance to avoid fraud and wasted spending. In contrast, private marketplaces (PMPs) — especially when working directly with trusted publishers—are far safer and offer higher-quality inventory. Though CTV is not yet supply-constrained like linear TV, this will likely change as ad spending catches up with viewer time spent on CTV. When that happens, premium inventory will shift towards PMPs and programmatic guaranteed deals that offer more control over pricing and delivery.
Why it matters for your strategy:
Programmatic technology enables you to target audiences more precisely, ensuring that your ads reach the right people at the right time. This improves the effectiveness of your campaigns and allows for better budget allocation. The result? Smarter, more efficient ad buys that maximize reach and minimize waste, giving you a competitive edge in the evolving CTV landscape.
Privacy-compliant targeting: precision without compromise
Targeting in CTV is undergoing a significant transformation as the privacy landscape continues to tighten. While IP addresses and device IDs have been commonly used for targeting, they are not fully privacy-compliant. Many experts predict governments will soon classify IP addresses as personally identifiable information (PII). As a result, relying on these methods may expose your campaigns to regulatory risk and damage consumer trust.
Why it matters for your strategy:
To stay ahead, advertisers must shift towards privacy-compliant targeting solutions like pseudonymization, where PII is hashed to protect user identities. However, hashing personal data isn't a foolproof method for ensuring privacy. Hashes can still be traced back to individuals, and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has been cracking down on companies that misuse this approach, citing cases where hashed data was re-identified, compromising user privacy.
Publishers may need to do more in the long run to ensure compliance, as the FTC has shown that even hashed data can lead to privacy violations if not handled properly. The future of targeting is moving towards more privacy-centric methods, such as panel-based seeding, probabilistic lookalikes, and contextual targeting. These probabilistic methods allow for precise audience targeting without directly handling sensitive data.
Automated optimization: the key to precision and performance
With the complexity of budget allocation across target audiences, platforms, and time slots, manual optimization becomes increasingly inefficient and prone to error. This is where automated systems like Simulmedia's TV+'s Automated Performance Optimization (APO) become indispensable.
APO dynamically allocates spending across key parameters, such as daypart and streaming app, to ensure your campaign delivers the right message at the right time. The beauty of more advanced automated optimization capabilities lies in its ability to set multiple objectives to balance and optimize throughout the customer journey, from raising awareness in the upper funnel to driving conversions at the bottom, using multi-objective settings. This kind of precision allows you to make the most of your ad budget without constant manual intervention.
Why it matters for your strategy:
Thanks to APO, three things will be the keys to a successful CTV ad strategy.
- Timing as APO focuses on when audiences are most engaged, ensuring your ads are shown at the right time for maximum impact.
- Dynamic budget allocation ensures ad spend goes where it drives the best performance, improving efficiency and results.
- Transparency helps advertisers understand and verify performance while reducing uncertainty for more confident decision-making.
Brandformance: where brand building meets performance in CTV
Are you still thinking that you can use Google Ads approach in Connected TV? Exclusively focusing on driving up conversions and driving down cost-per-conversion are the only things that matter. Those days are gone. One of the most significant innovative approaches to transforming Connected TV advertising is the rise of brandformance—a blend of brand awareness and performance marketing. Branding and measurable results matter more than ever, brandformance has become a critical tool for advertisers. The most fantastic thing is that with CTV ads, brands can engage audiences at every stage of the funnel, from creating emotional connections with immersive, story-driven ads to driving measurable actions like site visits and conversions.
Why it matters for your strategy:
Using CTV for brandformance builds awareness and pushes viewers down the funnel with targeted, actionable content that leads to conversions. Traditional TV has always been great at driving broad-based awareness, and with CTV's digital origins, performance-based acquisition is far more easily measured. Leveraging CTV for both (a holistic perspective) smartly recognizes that their audiences are in different stages in their journey. This holistic strategy strengthens every stage of the customer journey, creating a seamless loop where awareness, consideration, and conversion feed into one another, driving more impactful and efficient campaigns.
The innovations transforming CTV aren't just buzzwords — they're powerful tools that can elevate your advertising strategy. According to Comscore reserch that was published in TVRev , only 13% of ad viewing time occurs on streaming devices — 87% still occurs on cable and broadcast. This means, that your CTV ad ad must be as competitive as possible, impress, capture attention and give an incredible experience.
Sure, your first AI-generated ad, created from a script you uploaded to a video-creation tool, might feel rough around the edges. But here's the advantage: you'll be ahead of the curve. While others are still learning from their early missteps, you'll already be mastering the process.