If you were trying to scale your CTV placements on content surrounding the Super Bowl, assuming you don’t have a $7m budget for in-game placement, what categories would you choose?
The Super Bowl audience and content related to it is so large that basic demographic targeting won’t be enough.
Specific channels? That's a lot of clicking and researching and runs the risk of limiting scale and driving up your CPM.
Sports Channels?
That's probably pretty good but in addition to the Super Bowl there is also NCAA basketball and Premier League soccer on the same day.
Navigating the complexity of CTV targeting drove us to find ways to categorize content down to the genre level. We know that advertisers often need more than Channel categories with genres attached. There are many instances when broad categories work and there are also situations when you need to drill down into the specific content's genre.
And with the added attention for the game, non-sports programs will have football and celebrity angles as well.
With Content Genre categories, you can target Celebrities (think of all the watch parties with A-list names getting covered in entertainment shows), Gambling (it's the biggest betting day of the year), Music (halftime show from Usher and lots of Taylor Swift-Travis Kelce content), and Football (we would hope ;)
While this example is fairly obvious, and admittedly an excuse to use the image below, advertisers need the additional granularity and precision that Content-level genre categories bring.
Because increased relevance improves campaign performance and it allows for scaling, Content Genre categories can also be used for exclusion.
Perhaps you want your brand's ad on Dark Comedy content, because that fits your brand voice better than Romantic Comedy or Sitcoms. We have more than 125 genres and a half-dozen ratings categories, so you're able to bring your ads to the right audiences, reduce wasted spend, and maximize your investment.
While it's too late to get your Super Bowl-adjacent campaign live, keep this example in mind the next time you're planning and executing a CTV campaign.