Target the Right Audiences Across Video Streaming Services: Blueshift Extends Audience Syndication to OTT

Logos for Hulu, Comcast, Freewheel, Roku, and others

Consumer media habits are constantly evolving — people are increasingly spending time streaming video content across Over The Top (OTT) providers such as Hulu, Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Roku. As the number of “cord-cutters” continues to grow, more than 76% of US households subscribe to at least one OTT solution and spend a staggering 62 minutes per day using it. This is a golden opportunity for brands to target engaged users in the media where they’re most engaged. It also provides marketers the best of what TV advertising and digital advertising have to offer — the marriage of highly-engaging, immersive video content with the precision and flexibility of today’s digital ad solutions. However, making sure you’re actually targeting the right audiences and not wasting your ad spend still remains a challenge. So how can brands drive Return On Ad Spend using OTT?

 Blueshift is excited to help marketers take full advantage of OTT by extending our Audience Syndication offering to OTT providers including RokuFreewheelHuluComcast, and more to come. Through our partnership with LiveRamp, the leading data connectivity platform, marketers can now synchronize audiences they create within Blueshift to any OTT provider in addition to syndicating across display, social, and mobile platforms. Whether you’re just beginning to advertise on OTT or it’s already a part of your marketing mix, Audience Syndication will make your ads more relevant and impactful, while making your ad spend more efficient. By honing-in on high-quality audiences and excluding low-value targets, you can drive more ROAS than ever.

Audience syndication across video streaming services

Why OTT belongs in the Marketing Mix

It’s nothing new that engaging video content drives brand perceptions, encourages customers to interact with your brand, and leads to sales. That’s why TV commercials have been a mainstay on media plans for decades. OTT advertising is defined as:

“Individualized content provided to the viewers’ streaming sets while they watch the same show, movie, or event. OTT advertising is a targeted ad delivery on Internet-connected streaming platforms and devices enabled by programmatic technology.”

Marketers who capitalize on this momentum can accurately target the right audiences across any content streaming provider (like Hulu, Roku, or Amazon Prime), but with the same level of precision you expect from your traditional campaigns. Marketers have realized the potential of OTT due to its ability to:

  • Captivate highly-immersed audiences when they’re watching their favorite video content
  • Showcase non-skippable ads with nearly 100% completion rates
  • Deliver consistent and cohesive experiences by targeting the same users across devices
  • Dynamically insert the most meaningful ads to each user as campaigns run
  • Effectively measure ad campaign performance and impact

OTT advertising can be extremely effective, but only if you have the right data foundation. So, how can brands readily access first-party data and the tools needed to align messaging across channels?

Using the first-party and behavioral data that you’re already collecting across data sources and channels, Audience Syndication makes it simple for marketers to build tailored audiences through a point and click interface. With powerful behavior and interest-based targeting options, marketers can hone-in on quality audiences they want to target across OTT providers and other channels such as Email, Push, In-App, SMS, and more. Brands can run OTT campaigns targeting audiences based on behaviors or interests:

  • Behavioral-based targeting provides brands with the ability to precisely build audiences based on online behaviors, recent activities, past campaign engagement, geo-location, and even past purchases to showcase the most relevant add to them.
  • Interest-based targeting gives advertisers the ability to target audiences based on expressed and derived interests, affinities, preferences.

How does OTT advertising work with Blueshift?

Blueshift’s SmartHub CDP continuously collects and unifies a brand’s first-party data, including CRM data, onsite activity, campaign engagement, and other key attributes and events from across channels and devices for both anonymous and identifiable users. With Blueshift’s easy-to-use Audience Segment Builder, marketers can use this data to build hyper-focused audiences based on any combination of customer interests, affinities, recent behaviors, activities, demographic data, or other key attributes and events

Edit segment for high-value users

Then, in a matter of clicks, marketers can seamlessly sync those precise audiences to any OTT provider. Audiences update with the latest customer data and behaviors at your defined frequency so you don’t have to rely on engineering or IT resources to ensure they are up-to-date. Once audiences are synchronized, behind the scenes LiveRamp will safely and securely match those audiences in the intended OTT destination

When paid media teams are ready to start using these audiences to target their ad-campaigns, they’re readily accessible in each OTT provider’s UI.

Roku advertising platform with Blueshift

The best part? Marketing teams no longer need to switch from platform to platform to monitor and maintain audiences. 

Within Blueshift, you can manage every audience within a single, easy-to-use interface. Marketers have every tool they need at their disposal to target and engage users across the OTT landscape, as well as traditional channels like email and mobile more effectively and efficiently than ever before.

Audience Syndications page screenshot

Delivering relevant, personalized video content across premium OTT networks has never been easier thanks to Blueshift’s Audience Syndication. By quickly accessing precise audiences based on first-party data and customer behaviors, you can create the video ad campaigns that you’ve dreamed up. Start targeting high-quality audiences with meaningful content that drives awareness and conversion today.