CTV vs mobile: Where connected TV wins

Can connected TV really perform better than mobile in some cases and unlock audiences that you just can't get in mobile apps? Hello and welcome to Growth Masterminds, the podcast for growth marketers. My name is John Katsir. We all know mobile's massive.

It's really good. It performs incredibly well. But what if there's a new channel that's not just competing with it, but in some edge cases, even outperforming? A channel where you can repurpose some creative, target some different audiences, and reach people that you might never find in a game or another app.

That's the promise of CTV advertising, which of course we know is growing super fast. Today we're diving into it with someone who knows the space firsthand. We have the head of growth at UAPI. Her name is Michael Schwartz.

Welcome, Michael. How are you doing? I'm fine. Thank you so much.

Very exciting to be part of this podcast. So, yeah, so let's dive into CTV performance. Awesome. Super pumped to have you.

Before we get into CTV performance, we're going to talk about all the stuff, right? Like what's working, what's not working, creative, verticals that it's working for, all that stuff, measurement, tons of stuff. I want to talk about you. You took an interesting path from play to cut to UAPI.

How'd that happen? So, yeah. So I joined UAPI actually a year and almost a year and a half ago, I have to say, to lead the CTV inside of AFL Group. UAPI is part of the AFL Group.

So I'm working with different teams across the AFL in order to grow our CTV. What did you do at Playtica? So in Playtica, yeah. So I started my journey in Playtica as a senior user acquisition.

Afterwards, I went to ad monetization, actually, in cross-platform. Cool. First platform, I have to say. And in the past, like two years in Playtica, I was like basically growth lead, meaning like focus on CTV for brand, but also for performance, working with different DSPs, with different publishers, also buying like CTV for brand purposes on YouTube, working closely with Google.

And yeah, so because of that, based on my experience on CTV and Playtica, I thought it's like the best fit for me after Playtica is to go to the other side and to go closer to the product side. And yes, because when you're on the advertising side, there's a lot of limitation that you can see. So it was for me very interesting to join API and actually to be a part of the growth of the CTV programmatic channel that we have here and to work closely, not only from the client side, but also sales and operations and creative and also to work with different clients that we have here from gaming to fintech to health to everything.

So it's very interesting to come from one hat from the developer side and to go to the second hand of the publisher side. So I think I have a lot of added value in terms of like what is advertising actually looking for. I think that makes a ton of sense. Absolutely.

I think having both perspectives is really, really cool. So I'm looking forward to hearing from you as we go through this. Let's start with the top. I said something a little bit controversial probably.

Can CTV really perform better than mobile? We talked about it when we prepped about this. And obviously, you know, it's hard to outperform mobile across the board in general at large. But there are some instances where CTP is actually doing better.

Talk about that. Yeah. So what we're actually seeing in the past, like, two and a half years, I have to say, thanks to them and P-Sides that, you know, help us to attribute the performance based on CTP. So in some cases, we do see that CTV is performing much better, much more competitive in terms of CPMs and CPIs.

And also don't forget the amazing reach that we have on TV devices. When I'm talking also about CTV, it's very important to distinguish between, you know, OTT to CTV. That OTT is like over the top. It's more on, you know, streaming apps and mobile environment versus, you know, the big screens.

So when I'm talking outperforming from my experience and what we're doing here in UAPI is mostly like focus on the big screens performance wise versus the mobile environment. And we do see like, as I mentioned, like better performance in terms of CPM, CPI, progressions, but it's really changing between types of clients. In some cases, we're seeing it like, for example, on some of the reward apps or fintech app or gaming app. So it's really not the same for each and every vertical that we can say.

It's actually a really interesting thing to talk about, right? I mean, from a lot of different perspectives, because you're going to have a different creative experience. You're going to have a different immersive experience. I, unfortunately, have a lot of streaming apps, right?

And so some of them I've got and they're totally ad free. And some of them, like Amazon Prime, I get some ads on that. And Paramount Plus, I get some ads on that. And so, you know, I get some experience.

It's probably a good thing for me. I get some experience with what it looks like to get ads on CTV and how much attention I pay to that and how much do I pull out my phone and look at other stuff. And how often do I get asked to do something, look at a QR code? Not very often, but it does happen occasionally.

Other things like that. I think it really depends on context as well. Like what kind of content am I watching in terms of what kind of ad works or makes sense? so i have to say first of all ctv performance it's a lot of education also in terms of the creative why like for example for when i started when also when i was in platica so we thought that you know the creative that we're putting on the linear also work on ctv so meaning like we can't use on what we doing on the mobile but we need like to do like you know special things for ctv big screens like big promotion big you know productions and stuff like that But from what I seeing like in the past I think year year and a half we understanding that we can take mobile videos and we can convert them to be CTV videos.

And you don't need to do the big production and the big names and the big celebrity that you're putting. Yeah. So I think that actually we have like best practices when we're talking about CTV ads. And as you said, like a lot of more and more streaming apps, for example, like becoming more and more, you know, ads alignment.

We're seeing if it's a Roku, we're seeing if it's like Amazon Plus and Pluto and a lot of, you know, CTV apps that we're buying from them. And we do see that, for example, that they're not necessarily we need to put like we can put the same gameplay that we're putting on mobile, but also on big screen. But yeah, these are a few things that we need to make sure when we have a creative on TV. When you take that creative mobile, when you take that creative from mobile device and you put it on a big screen, are you like flipping it?

Are you like doing vertical in the middle of the screen? What are you doing? No, so we have like the format is like 1699 in terms of like it needs to be like landscape. Okay.

And also, yeah. So we have like the guide that we're like sending our clients. But for example, if we're talking like creative, so the best practice is to have like 15 seconds and 30 second formats. It needs to be with voiceover, subtitles, for example.

It's also something that is very, very important for us. Of course, if the client can do that, also we can do it here in house. Like we have a creative studio here in UAPI, so we can help clients for that. But yeah, but you need to have voiceover, subtitles.

you need also in the end for example to engage the user actually to download the phone as you mentioned like to take the phone and to qr or to you know search for the app for the app store so it's very important that you have like clear cta if it's like a qr code so scan here or also in the voiceover like to put a qr please scan me now and get your if you have any promotion for example yes yes reason to do it now yeah i like that that you mentioned having subtitles because sometimes to be honest, the ads come up and I'll just turn the volume down.

So if you have the subtitles, then it's still communicating. Yeah. Yeah. It's very important.

Also in the end, for example, like in some cases, not necessarily you understand if it's not gaming, for example, you don't understand that it's an app and you need to download that. So it's very important also to put the logo of the stores in the end with a search bar just to make sure that the user is actually understanding that what you need to do and to make sure that it's like, you know, to engage them actually with the ad. Yeah. Cool.

Let's talk about verticals again. We kind of hit it at a very high level and I want to talk about verticals. And it seems to me, and I'm asking for your validation or no, you're totally wrong. Either one is fine.

It seems to me that many different verticals can work on CTV, but context matters and your ad matters and how it works. Talk about verticals, what you've seen work and maybe what you've seen fail? And maybe some verticals are better for this or maybe some aren't. It's an interesting question because like, for example, for the gaming.

So in some cases, I can see that in gaming, we do see CTV performance succeed. Not in each category, I have to say. I have to say in some specific categories in gaming, we see a little bit much more difficult. For example, role-playing is something that it's much more challenging, I have to say.

But for example, casual, social casino, skill base, it's something we definitely see that, you know, it's scaling up. I think that we also seeing amazing, you know, examples from if it's companies like Scopely or Politica or Dream, for example, like doing a lot of CTV ads over there. So you have an example that you can see actually what they're doing. Yes.

But in terms of like, for example, if it's fintech, if it's health, for example, health, it's a little bit tricky. I don't see like much success over there, but I, yeah, but I do see success on a reward on fintech. Travel also, travel is very interesting. I think also some cases it's very important that, you know, we can see success in one region, but not necessarily on the second, like another region.

I will explain better that in some cases we have a client that want to do like city in the U.S. But because we have also supply, it's also something that we are very like working very hard towards that, that we have supply worldwide, not necessarily only in U.S.

So we see in some cases that one title will work amazing in Mexico or Brazil and in APAC, for example. But in U.S., the competition is a little bit too tough.

so we prefer maybe to focus on you know different regions and to give also the added value for the client because we have supplies you know outside of the u.s not all of these speeds that running ctv have supplying outside of the u.s so for us we sometimes like say you know what let us take the rest of the world besides u.s and we see the success there versus you know the u.

s part super interesting what you're saying about different geos i mean it's kind of cool i did a little b report on the singular blog recently about entertainment and stuff like that and how different it is across different geos atam is crazy about these telenovelas or short little video things i mean and we see other other geos that are crazy about that as well what what are you seeing in terms of ctv for different geos are there some broad learnings that you can draw out Yeah So when I started to run CTV I have to say so I really focused on U when I was like in my previous job.

But now I think like in the past year, we're seeing more streaming apps, for example, like Roku, that like have a supply outside of the U.S. They're actually like we are they're working with different, you know, SSPs and publishers. and we're seeing like the major reach that we're like that we have for example in brazil and mexico also europe is very very interesting but europe i think it's a little bit challenging we will get it in a second but we do see like and more and more increase in terms of interest not only from the client side but also from the supply side and different regions and also to have like For example, Japan, like a lot of questions about Japan, like we think that the CTV is getting very attractive there.

And we understand that, for example, in terms of CPM, the CPM is very expensive in Japan versus US. So and also the approach is very different in buying there because you don't have a lot of traffic necessarily on the open market and you need to create deals. It's a different set of rules when you're working, you know, CTV in US versus, you know, Japan or Europe, for example. Yes, we're seeing more and more streaming apps that are actually working very hard to be, you know, globalized in terms of the supply and not to focus more than the US.

I can imagine one of the challenges of Europe is just so many divisions and languages and nations, right? And each one is quite small compared to, let's say, Mexico or United States. You know, you've got Germany, I guess, maybe 100 million people, maybe 80 million, something like that. Right.

And it goes down from there. Right. So is that one of the core challenges or is it just customer behavior? It's also I think the main challenge in Europe is privacy, I have to say.

So we know that not necessarily like the measurement of CTV is relying on IP, meaning that we can track the users and as we know there's a lot of restriction in terms of tracking and privacy regulation in europe so it's for us like when clients want to do ctv performance in in germany so or in uk for example or france or italy so we do have the supply but from my experience and also past experience when i did we're saying that you need to understand that not everyone not all the traffic will be trackable and we need to look on europe as more much more as a brand formance and less than pure performance in this case and then adopt measurement technologies like incrementality or other other things like that to see what's going on yeah yeah exactly to do like incrementality brand lift search lift service if they like to do other metrics and and also to look at the organic trends, of course, in order to track the CTV efficiently in Europe.

Question that came up as you were talking about different GLs was device, because sometimes we have this assumption that CTV, it's on the big screen that hangs on the wall, right? Or it's furniture. But is there a significant chunk of CTV, CTV, that whether it's Amazon Prime or paramount or disney plus or apple tv plus or whatever is happening on a tablet or even a handheld device first of all yes think about you like for example when i'm flying or you're flying you have your streaming apps on your tablet yes mobile phone no i'm working every second of every every yeah every set employee of the month of the year yeah so yeah of course there's a lot of streaming apps like you know on on the mobile device and tablet and i think like in the end of the day it's like a measuring part because it's like mobile and mobile you know flow it's not like cross device i have to say so we treat it a little bit different but one is because of the mmp's i have to say as you know like there's like mmp is really distinct distinct distinguish between CTV to OTT, like to different devices.

So yes, there's a lot of inventory on mobile and tablet to fund and streaming. And it's definitely something that we also have access and we can do. But I think that for now, like our main focus is to do like the cross device journey between the big screen to the small screen, because this is the most successful journey that we saw so far in terms of performance. Yeah.

Yeah. Makes sense. And it's interesting, right? You mentioned cross device there's cross-platform as well right because you're on cdv and then you need to get it it's interesting to see if eventually the big streamers the big companies here media companies start making their mobile and and tablet apps clickable like ads clickable inside them we know roku is doing some interesting things there with roku remote there's some pretty cool stuff shoppable ads that they've got basically you know the connections that they've got into shopify other things like that that's pretty cool you gotta assume amazon's gonna do something like that at some point in prime i mean come on you've got the world's biggest store pretty much and there's probably a bigger one in china but i'm not sure you know that's a streaming service if you're asking me i think that first of all it's going to be like for now we're using like regular format in terms of the creative but if you're asking me like a year from now we will see like special dedicated creative that like Amazon Prime will ask us, you know, to implement, for example, on a mobile environment.

So you have Dovs and native, you have interstitials, you have rewards, you have like different kinds of creatives on the mobile environment So I do think that also under CTV it will be like that It will be much maybe more interactive ads that you can you know that you can do so i do think that ctv in terms of like you know in you know evolution i have to say like the next step is definitely is going to be much more oriented to mobile and you know mobile creative i think or more in terms of form of so what you're saying is right now you took you talk cdp ad units and it's pretty much pretty much the same thing across the board right you've got a small unit maybe five seconds you've got some of that on youtube tv right you've got you've got 15 you got 30 you've got some minute long chunks but they're pretty much all the same whereas on mobile you've got a great diversity of different ad types that come in at different times for different lengths of time as well even playables imagine playables on ctv that'd be kind of cool what remote are you using how would that work i'm not totally sure but you're saying you're gonna see a greater diversity of ad types on ctv yeah this is yeah this is exactly what you said you said that's awesome i don't think so no no i'm just saying that like it's very interesting when i started like i think almost like three years ago and to see now the CTV in terms of, you know, we have much more supply.

We have like in terms of the MMPs, we have CTV user acquisition, but you also can do CTV retargeting. It's something that we're seeing that it's like more and more clients also want to test like, okay, we know CTV is a user acquisition channel, but in terms of retargeting, it's also something that we're also educating our clients that there is an option. What is an option? And it's actually, we're seeing that and we're doing that, that we're seeing that, that cases, we're reaching users on TV that we didn't reach it on mobile in terms of the segment we're targeting.

So we do like internal analysis and we're seeing, okay, so 20% of the users that we reached on TV and we touched them on TV screen, we didn't touch them on mobile at all. So it's also something that clients understand the added value of, you know, cross device. also retargeting aspect. So many things come to mind as you say that.

I still remember, and I brought it up a couple of times on Growth Masterminds over the years, the surround sound marketing, which I heard from a brand, a performance marketing manager at Clorox of all places. She's since moved on to all kinds of different places and done cool stuff. But that surround sound marketing is getting the same message or a similar message about a particular product or app or service or whatever it might be from multiple angles, multiple directions and multiple media right and that how powerful that impact can be all of a sudden a brand is everywhere right not everywhere but there are three places that you happen to see them and that strengthens the message that makes a ton of sense like well so let's talk about the future of ctv i mean we've seen tremendous growth there there we're still seeing it's still kind of early days especially for mobile publishers to come there and and and and to adopt the platform for marketing what should marketers be thinking of right now and what should they how should they be thinking of ctv over the next let's say 12 to 18 months i do think that we will see much more brands not brands but much more different categories from gaming to e-commerce and retail understanding the power of CTV programmatic buying, understand that they don't need to spend huge budgets in order to see performance over there.

And they will start to understand that CTV is actually one of their regular channels in terms of marketing and budget planning. I think we still have measurement challenges, education challenges, fly challenges in some cases, but it's going to be very, very interesting because I think we just in the beginning, of making CTV as one of the biggest growth marketing channels out there. And yes, I think that in the end of the day, with the help with the different MMPs, we'll have much more availability and access and also to the client side that they will have much more transparency because I think one of the challenges that we have in CTV is a lot of education.

They not necessarily understand how to set the attribution window, to understand, you know, the boundaries between mobile to CTV to organic and how to find the perfect mix in terms of, you know, budget-wise and allocation-wise. So I think there's a lot of, you know, education part that we need to do. And we're already doing that thanks to the partnerships that we have with the different SPs, publishers, MMPs, that we do see a lot of, you know, interesting and a lot of clients ask us a lot of questions around that.

And so I do think, and also, as you see, also Amazon is going towards there. Netflix is going towards there. You see the huge streaming apps going towards ads because they understand the impact of that. They understand the added value for that.

So I think, you know, once we're seeing the supply out there growing and we see the education is growing and we see the different MMPs that helping us with attribution wise and also give us the right tool to measure the CTV, I think we will see much more explosion in the next, you know, two or three years from now. Well, cool. Awesome. Thank you so much for doing this.

Really appreciate your insights. Great chat. Thank you. Thank you for your time.