Dive Brief:
- Running shoe brand Saucony, a division of Wolverine World Wide, drove a lift in searches on Google and Amazon as well as independently verified sales with a recent CTV ad campaign across YouTube and other platforms, according to a press release.
- Saucony worked with iProspect and Pixability to leverage behavioral targeting to reach potential customers on YouTube, Roku and Amazon who had searched for post-workout and recovery products, optimizing tactics more than 143,000 times on YouTube alone.
- Developed to drive results for the brand's Kinvara 12, Ride 14 and Endorphin Collection, the effort saw a 128% lift in Google searches, a 28.5% boost in product searches on Amazon.com and the Amazon app; and a 21.2% increase for awareness, consideration and purchase among Roku audiences. According to independently verified data, the campaign drove nearly 6,000 purchases, and 65% of purchases tracked on Amazon were new to the Saucony brand.
Dive Insight:
In 2020, Saucony launched its first major connected TV (CTV) marketing campaign with Pixability. This year, the brand aimed to expand the partnership's scope to launch its new Kinvara 12, Ride 14 and Endorphin Collection and incorporate additional platforms. In particular, a focus on YouTube proved to be useful in driving results that point to CTV's ability to steer searches and sales for brands.
"Our partnership with Pixability demonstrates the reach and results that can be achieved by including YouTube in conjunction with other video platforms in a CTV-focused campaign," Grace Smith, senior digital marketing manager at Saucony, said in the press release.
YouTube represents more than 40% of CTV viewing hours among ad-supported platforms but can often be underrepresented in CTV campaigns, according to comScore research cited in the release.
CTV is among the advertising channels that have seen adoption accelerate due to the pandemic, attention that is likely to continue as the health crisis drags on and behaviors become permanent. While scale was once an issue, that's no longer the case: By next year, there will be more than 213 million CTV viewers in the U.S. streaming over 1 billion hours of video content every week, eMarketer forecasts.
While still a small portion of total TV ad spend, CTV's growth is accelerating rapidly — along with the use of programmatic for buying it, according to GroupM. After leaping 28% this year to $16.6 billion, global CTV ad spending is projected to rise another 23% in 2022, to $20.3 billion — for a nearly 12% share of total global TV ad spend.
Still, CTV faces its own set of challenges for advertisers. In October, industry executives at Advertising Week bemoaned issues around fragmentation and measurement, saying they are particularly difficult to solve and that, without a solution, CTV wouldn't be able to fully deliver on its promises.
CTV remains a marketing channel where confirming things like viewability is complex while also opening up opportunities to find new metrics.
"The big advantage of CTV over linear TV is that it can be measured against other behaviors across devices, which leads to more interesting data points than reach, frequency and viewability," Raphael Rivilla, media and connections planning partner at agency Marcus Thomas, told Marketing Dive.
Hulu leads CTV ad spend. It reported $2.1 billion in ad revenue for the year that ended in September 2021, per a new report by Kantar. Its closest competitor was ViacomCBS' Paramount+ with $822 million, followed by NBCUniversal's Peacock with $279 million, and Tubi (owned by Fox Corp.) with $250 million.
Saucony's CTV campaign and its results point to how marketers continue to experiment with an emerging channel that combines the data-related benefits of digital marketing with the creative opportunities of linear TV to find best practices.
