MarTech Interview with Rachel Dillon, EVP Sales and Marketing at Strategus

Rachel Dillon, EVP Sales and Marketing at Strategus talks about the latest trends in CTV and how it’s impact will define advertising through 2023:

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Welcome to this MarTech Series chat, Rachel, tell us about yourself and more about your role at Strategus

I am the EVP of Sales and Marketing for Strategus. We are a fully programmatic managed service provider that specializes in Connected Television (CTV) advertising–partnering directly with advertisers to serve as their CTV resource for campaign strategy and execution.

Typically our clients have done some CTV, but don’t have the resources or time to keep up with fast moving streaming space. Let’s be honest, CTV is complicated and our job is to help our advertisers navigate CTV by providing them with the latest solutions for data and targeting; execution best practices; and measurement.

We see ourselves as an extension of an internal marketing team, providing expertise and specialization plus  new products and ideas so that our advertising partners can maximize the effectiveness of their CTV investment.

We’d love to hear more about some of Strategus’s newest innovations and how they’re benefiting end users.

We are really excited about the investments we are making in data and visualization. We are investing heavily in this arena because we believe that the more data we can extract and showcase from our campaigns, the better the recommendations we can make for our advertisers to support their successes.

One of the new innovations is  a fully revamped reporting platform that is launching this month. We recognized a need for a more robust platform that could provide campaign insights at a more granular level to our advertisers. In addition, we have invested in our own identity graph that will allow us to activate client data for campaign execution and glean deeper insights about the audience and who is responding to the advertiser’s message. Our clients are continually asking for more data and insights and both of these developments provide a deeper data set to our customers.

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How is the programmatic CTV market today shifting: what key trends will form basis of the segment in 2023?

AVOD continues to expand which is exciting for the industry as a whole. It is clear that ad supported programmatic advertising is here to stay and will be a critical channel for advertisers to reach their intended audience.

We also think that first party data and how brands choose to activate it will be a key trend in 2023, as well as performance measurement. We are already seeing a huge shift as advertisers begin asking for more from their advertising investment as a result of the deeper measurement and reporting capabilities that  CTV offers.

When it comes to digital advertising today: what are some of the things advertisers need to do better to get the right attention?

We still see many of our advertisers not taking advantage of the depth of targeting that is available today from digital advertising. Oftentimes we still receive RFP’s that include broad age and gender targeting that is very linear TV-oriented and not in line with the capabilities that exist today–including using  a variety  of data sources to narrow down the audience through location data, first party data, viewing habits, shopping habits and/or any number of other attributes.

Using the data sources available ensures that you are not wasting advertising dollars on a broad audience that won’t connect with your brand message and ultimately take action.

In addition, the ability of programmatic CTV advertising to pinpoint an audience with intense precision provides a lot of opportunity for brands to create messages that will resonate with that specific audience. We still see many advertisers using a generic linear spot for CTV advertising which can be  a miss. The targeting capabilities  of CTV afford  much greater personalization and present  an opportunity for advertisers to focus a specific  message on a more targeted audience.

What do you feel about the future of adtech and advertising? 

It continues to change rapidly. We make it our job to help our partners stay up to speed on the latest in CTV because the ecosystem is so dynamic right now Whether it’s new data privacy measures, publisher changes, or acquisitions, it’s hard for advertisers to keep track of all of the pieces in this fast growing and quickly changing industry.

CTV remains an exciting opportunity for advertisers in 2023 as we see more dollars shift from linear and  the targeting and measurement capabilities  lead to huge advances in fine tuning TV advertising to serve the right message to the right person on the right device at the right time.

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