With total streaming usage taking 36% of overall TV share, you can be sure to find your audience on connected TV (CTV). We’re committed to helping you deliver high quality ad experiences to all streamers by bringing the best of digital ad technology — like delivering the right message to the right audience — to the TV screen. That’s why earlier this year, we introduced Google Audiences to CTV campaigns in Display & Video 360.

Successful businesses lean into existing customer relationships and the information they willingly share to drive performance. This information, known as first-party data, can be the basis for privacy-preserving, future-proofed ways to connect with customers. Today we’re announcing new features to let you reach your first-party audience on CTV devices and automatically find more users who look like your core audience.

Engage with people you know as they watch CTV in the U.S.

First, we’re making it possible for you to engage with your first-party audiences on connected TV devices. Now, when you select a first-party audience list for your Display and Video 360 campaign, the list will automatically be eligible to reach your most engaged customers as they stream connected TV content. This is an easy and effective way to ensure you reach people who already have a connection with your brand, on the device that they are using at the moment.

Let’s say you’re a cosmetic brand preparing for the holiday season and want to build on the direct relationship you have with customers who have downloaded your app. With Display & Video 360, you can now reach this first-party audience as they’re streaming their favorite shows on Disney, Tubi, or other premium publishers.

It’s easy to benefit from this new capability. All you have to do is select and add your first-party audience to your insertion order or line-item, in the same way you would have done for web and mobile devices. Display & Video 360 will automatically start reaching people who have an existing relationship with your brand when they are watching on CTV. This feature is available now to all advertisers in the United States, you can learn more about how it works by visiting our help center.

Reach more streamers similar to your first-party audience around the world

Once you have engaged with your first-party audience, reaching additional people who have similar behaviors or characteristics to your core audiences helps you boost campaign performance.

We are also launching audience expansion for CTV. Audience expansion makes it easy to reach more people that matter to your business and achieve your marketing goals. By utilizing contextual and geo signals, Display and Video 360’s algorithm will create a model to find CTV streamers who are similar to your core audience.

Let’s go back to the example of the beauty brand trying to reach relevant seasonal shoppers. You could now apply audience expansion to your first-party audience and show CTV ads to streamers who are similar to those who have downloaded your app.

You’ll be able to activate audience expansion across all regions globally in Display and Video 360 early next year via controls available in Display & Video 360’s TV insertion order.

These new features are just some of the ways we’re helping businesses connect with their most engaged audience while respecting people’s privacy. As we invent fundamentally new audience solutions, we’ll ensure they seamlessly work on CTV and allow you to make the most of the streaming boom.

In an increasingly fragmented media landscape, making good use of your ad dollars is a tall order. Using a siloed strategy means you’re at risk of unintentionally reaching the same people more often than desired. This can lead to an ineffective use of your budget and poor user experience.

For years, we’ve seen leading brands improve the efficiency of their ad operations and media using Display & Video 360 as a way to unify their campaigns across inventory sources, devices and markets. Today, we’ll share these marketers’ three best practices with some of their latest success stories highlighting key features to unify their media. Display & Video 360 continues to future-proof these tools using a combination of advanced machine learning technology, first-party data signals and privacy-preserving APIs.

Plan and forecast reach in one place

This is where it all begins. Plans that take your entire media mix into account are inherently more accurate. And planning solutions that are tightly connected to your media buying platform can let you more accurately and quickly assess the potential reach of your plans. Display & Video 360 planning tools let you estimate the reach of your campaign across any type of environment or inventory source — including web, audio, connected TV (CTV) and even linear TV.

Reckitt is a global brand that found success optimizing its budget allocation for Airborne campaigns using Display & Video 360’s reach planning capabilities. Reckitt decided to diversify its media mix beyond traditional TV ads to boost its presence on CTV. So, it started looking for a planning tool that could account for CTV streamers. Harnessing Display & Video 360 forecasting solutions, the company estimated how much incremental reach could be gained by bringing together all its CTV deals — YouTube, Disney, The CW and Discovery — in the same campaign. The tool let them create accurate, custom media plans. By pulling insights like optimal spend and reach, Reckitt could compare the effectiveness of different campaign types. Armed with these insights, the company reached over 11 million CTV households within their core audience while keeping its spend under control. Reckitt also ensured these viewers weren’t duplicative with their traditional TV audience, generating 18% more viewers by adding CTV ads to their TV mix.

Combine various inventory sources in one place

I remember days when programmatic buying was just about serving standard display ads on the web. We’ve come a long way since then. Over the years, we’ve added access to thousands of publishers and all sorts of new inventory sources in Display & Video 360. For example, using digital out-of-home, brands can now reach people out in the real-world with the efficiency of programmatic technology. Today Display & Video 360 already partners with exchanges Hivestack, Magnite, Place Exchange, Ströer SSP, VIOOH and Vistar Media. These exchanges give access to large media owners around the world like Clear Channel Outdoor, Intersection, JCDecaux, Lamar and Ströer.

With more top media companies like Disney making their inventory available programmatically, connected TV advertising gives brands another exciting terrain to engage with their customers. Today 93% of ad-supported connected TV households in the U.S. can be reached with Display & Video 360, according to comScore.[caf5bd]We’re also continuing to unlock top CTV inventory around the world. For example, you can now reach people watching Peacock, NBCUniversal’s ad-supported streaming service in the U.S. or Channel 4's programming in the U.K. And all these top CTV placements can be purchased alongside other programmatic ads in a consolidated CTV workflow featuring parameters applicable to any source of CTV inventory — whether it’s Hulu, YouTube, Paramount or any other publisher. This TV-specific insertion order makes it easier to optimize for common goals or control ad frequency across your entire CTV media mix.

Manage frequency in one place

With Display & Video 360, you can manage ad exposure across media buys while respecting user privacy, even when third-party cookies and identifiers are not present. Frequency can be managed across any type of device and transaction type including CTV and Programmatic Guaranteed deals across a variety of exchanges.

And you can get a tailored assessment of the impact of cross-channel frequency management solutions: Display & Video 360’s self-service data visualization shows how much reach was gained due to effective frequency management at the campaign level.

This is how Audi turbocharged its incremental reach. To launch its all-new Q4 e-tron electric model in Germany, the automaker needed a cost-efficient way of reaching as many cord-cutters as possible with a new video campaign. The brand decided to use frequency management across a mix of standard in-stream video formats and exclusive Programmatic Guaranteed deals from Sky, DAZN and other well-known publishers in Germany. Having a real-time view of reach gains gave the brand and its media agency more precision in evaluating campaign performance. During the six-week campaign, Audi assessed that managing programmatic campaigns across channels in a consolidated way allowed the brand to reach 1.2 million additional unique users — or a 13% rise in incremental reach — without bumping up budgets.

With a similar approach, L’Oréal Germany was able to increase the reach of its Garnier Greentalk campaign by 16% at no extra cost.

Looking forward, we’ll ensure these media unification capabilities remain accessible to all Display & Video 360 users while respecting people's privacy online. In fact, we’ve already started enhancing these solutions using a combination of machine learning techniques and first-party data signals so they keep working in the future. For example, Unique Reach metrics already go beyond basic cookie measurement to help you understand how many times people were shown your ad across different devices, formats and networks. And Display & Video 360 already uses modeled frequency management in situations with limited user signals.

These are just a few examples of the benefits of consolidating media. We also see advertisers who take a unified approach to media buying enjoy unified reporting, rationalized budgeting, and streamlined billing. As we move forward, we’ll keep adding more functionality to advertisers’ and media agencies’ toolbox to help them get better return from their unified media budgets.