What comes to mind when you look at these brand names: Hulu, Roku, Firestick, Samsung TV?
The answer is that these are all well-known apps, devices, and SmartTV’s that are utilized to consume media in the home. Clients reach out to us all the time asking why they shouldn’t buy media directly from Hulu, Roku, or their local TV station.
The answer to that is that Roku is just one device, Hulu is just one publisher, and their local TV station is just one TV station. At Above The Fold, we can serve across hundreds of publishers, all devices, and all apps/channels on Smart TVs.
That’s the cool part of running programmatic – you don’t have to call each individual publisher, app, and device to negotiate one-off ad buys. Your job is to define what target audience you want to go after, and we do the work in finding those users across all apps, channels, radio stations, and websites.
The days of calling your local TV station and working with dozens of different radio stations, directly and separately, are long gone. There is a more efficient way.
Think about it this way – if you run only with Hulu, only with Roku, or singly run with one local TV station in your area, you are metaphorically just working with one slice of the pie vs. working with the whole pie (Above The Fold).
There’s no need to pigeonhole yourself to such a narrow and costly source. We recommend being inventory agnostic and reaching across all over-the-top (OTT) inventory to serve ads wherever your client’s target market is streaming. Our connected TV (CTV) solution gives you the opportunity to run your ads across a more varied, premium list of networks, publishers, and content providers.
One thing to consider is that individual TV stations, devices like Roku, or direct applications like Hulu have limited scale for OTT / CTV. They are often not able to layer in deep targeting with their campaigns. The audience targeting tends to be more general, similar to traditional TV (i.e., women 25-49).
The Above The Fold approach offers hyper-targeting at scale, while also offering deep audience targeting at the household level, such as:
- households with children between 0-3
- recently divorced users
- household income of $50,000+
- recent mortgage application activity
- targeting executives at construction companies
- targeting young moms with children
We recommend a full-funnel strategy to help build your brand with your target audience. This strategy historically performs much better and this is something running with one app or one device doesn’t allow for.
We recommend following potential customers across other devices to keep them engaged towards conversion. The strategy includes exposing the audience to your CTV ads on the big screen and then following those same users on their mobile devices to retarget them with your ads and drive them to take action.
Another thing to keep in mind when buying directly with Hulu is that advertisers almost universally complain about their ads playing back-to-back during content. An advertiser’s ads will run 4 or 5 times during a 30 or 60-minute show, which is a bad user experience and also very costly to the advertiser due to Hulu’s high CPM’s.
Above The Fold is able to utilize frequency control settings which is a much better user experience for your clients/customers. And because we don’t run exclusively on Hulu, our CPM’s are more competitive.
As mentioned, Roku is only one device which means Roku offers advertisers access to only a small part of the overall streaming audience/content. As an example, Amazon has recently surpassed Roku in the OTT space as the #1 company. Our OTT/CTV ads DO RUN on Roku devices and content already, so clients have full access to Roku with us as well as all other devices.
If you have questions about how to buy ads programmatically, please reach out to us. We’d love to discuss this or any other programmatic advertising topic with you. Our goal is to help you learn more about the industry.