Flip Makes Winning at OTT Simple

David Zapletal, COO at Digital Remedy, was recently featured in MarTech Zone, discussing how Flip provides advertisers with a smarter way to buy, manage, and optimize OTT campaigns during a time where streaming media is exploding and cord-cutting continues to rapidly accelerate.

The explosion in streaming media options, content, and viewership over the last year has made OTT advertising impossible to ignore for brands and the agencies that represent them. The cord-cutting that began in earnest before the pandemic has accelerated dramatically with an estimated 6.6 million households cutting the cord last year, making nearly one-fourth of American households cable-free. Another 27% are expected to do the same in 2021.

With streaming now accounting for nearly 70% of TV viewing, this massive audience is drawing a lot of attention from advertisers. Spending on OTT advertising is expected to jump from $990 million in 2020 to $2.37 billion by 2025, creeping slowly toward overtaking linear TV’s top spot for spending. 

Despite the huge opportunity, executing OTT advertising can be a challenge for both big and small brands and agencies. With so many platforms, it’s hard to know which one to choose. Managing relationships with multiple publishers is cumbersome and it can be hard to track the right metrics to know what’s working and what’s not. 

To solve that challenge, Flip, the performance OTT platform from Digital Remedy, provides a smarter way to buy, manage, and optimize OTT campaigns. But beyond just video completion rates, this Digiday award-winning platform provides brands with detailed insights into top performing creatives, geos, publishers, dayparts, and more. It delivers full-funnel attribution, brand lift, and incremental lift analysis to let advertisers know not only which campaigns are driving results (and how), but puts these insights to work immediately, optimizing campaigns in real time towards top-performing variables. The full-service solution handles the entire OTT advertising lifecycle, enabling brands and agencies of all sizes to capitalize on the OTT opportunity with simplicity.

Source directly from premium inventory

Through extensive industry partnerships, brands and agencies get direct access to every premium OTT publisher to maximize audience reach. The Flip platform leverages more enriched data to fuel real-time optimization, ensuring campaigns are performing to their full potential while providing in-depth insights and making the most of an advertiser’s budget. Because there’s no middleman, brands get the most efficient pricing possible, creating higher ROI and return on ad spend (ROAS). And because the entire OTT strategy is managed within Flip, there’s no need to hassle with multiple vendor relationships or contracts. It’s simple, consolidated, and efficient. 

Measure actions, not just views

As OTT measurement continues to mature, brands want to look beyond video completion rates (a binary yes/no), clicks, and impressions. At the end of the day, advertisers want to know how their campaigns are driving measurable outcomes, and ultimately, sales. Flip is able to connect those dots, to measure KPIs like app downloads, website visits, shopping carts started, and even in-store visits. The platform ties views to the actual outcome of the advertising, so you can see what’s working and what’s not working.

“This is one of the key features that makes our solution really unique—we can tie the outcome to the advertising and do it across every device, so you can see what’s really moving the needle,” said Michael Seiman, Digital Remedy CEO. “That means you get real, actionable insights to make meaningful adjustments to your campaigns to achieve your bottom line business goals.”

Broader data for deeper insights

Most marketers have access to their own first-party customer data and that’s it—nothing about your competitors’ customers or even potential customers. With Flip, you can bring your own data and combine it with Digital Remedy’s extensive third-party data sources and leverage this broader data set for deeper, more refined audience targeting and reporting. That means you can capitalize on your competitors’ data to get better results.

Real-time brand lift results

Beyond just views and low-funnel conversions, Flip also allows marketers to track brand lift by combining OTT engagement metrics with survey-based insights to measure awareness, recall, and perception. So even for those who haven’t converted yet, Flip lets you take a pulse on brand affinity to see whether your ads are resonating with your target audience.

Find out what really moves the needle

In digital advertising, there are a lot of variables that can be attributed to campaign success. The truth is, audiences can, and most likely will, be exposed to your ads on other media channels simultaneously throughout your OTT campaign run. Wouldn’t it be great to pinpoint what parts of your campaign are actually driving results? With Flip, brands can answer the question: of everyone who took action, how many of them did so because of an OTT exposure specifically? Flip provides in-depth incremental lift metrics, measuring and identifying which variables of your campaign have the truest impact on your bottom line in the consumer pathway to purchase. It offers a level of granularity by isolating the effect and establishing the value of OTT within your overall campaign. By comparing conversion rates of exposed and control groups across variables like creatives, publishers, and audiences, we’re able to see how much more likely someone is to convert when exposed to your ad on OTT or based on certain campaign variables.

Decades of expertise on your side

The machine is only as smart as the humans behind it, and the team at Digital Remedy has been working in video and OTT since before you could track anything. With more than 20 years in the digital space, they’ve been executing across all types of media, since back when you still had to manually optimize. And with roughly five years in the OTT space itself, this institutional knowledge means you get data-powered technology that’s backed by deep expertise from professionals who have been on the other side as marketers themselves, and have a deep understanding of the metrics that advertisers really want to see. The workflow, visualization, and reporting has all been built from a clients’ perspective to provide the insights you need to fully understand campaign performance. 

Jumping into a new medium like OTT can seem overwhelming, especially with the added pressure of knowing that you really have no choice—it’s where your audience and your competitors are going. But with the right tools and expertise in your corner, even the smallest brands and firms can compete with the big guys in this hot new channel. With the Flip OTT performance platform, Digital Remedy is making it accessible, simple, and affordable for brands and marketers at all levels to win at OTT.