Display Doesn’t Belong in Your CTV Campaigns

Display doesn’t belong in your CTV campaigns. Especially if you are already buying it.

Disclaimer: This is a bit of a rant but an important one.

A tactic that low-quality CTV partners will often slip into their campaigns is to include display remarketing. Sometimes, allocating as much as 50% or more of the total budget.

This is a tactic that only helps them and does not add any value to your campaign. You are essentially burning the total budget allocated to this tactic.

It’s often sold as a way to increase frequency and improve overall campaign performance by retargeting on display inventory, viewers that had previously been exposed to a CTV ad.

What it really is, is a way to game attribution by serving a massive level of cheap impressions on display, and pad their overall margin.

If your CTV campaign includes display the vast majority of the conversions in your campaign will be attributed to those display impression, not the CTV impressions.

Your partner is effectively cookie-bombing consumers with cheap impressions to artificially inflate conversion volume on paper.

Tactics like this rarely, if ever, deliver incremental conversions. It’s a big false positive and instead of allocating your inventory to CTV, you burned it on low-quality display inventory.

So it’s included primarily to generate conversion volume on paper. But these conversions are not incremental to your business.

If you have signed a fixed CPM deal, then the other benefit to the provider is increasing their overall margin.

There is an abundance of very low-cost display inventory out there to fill your IO.

Do yourself a favor. Push back, ask the hard questions, but make it go away. Ultimately, you are wasting your media dollars, and your partner is spinning a false narrative and improving their profit margin.

Or find yourself a provider that operates with integrity and provides full transparency.

At Dial-Up Media we do CTV The Right Way. That includes not including display so that we can pad the numbers. Contact us to learn more.