[Music] [Phil Cowlishaw] My name is Phil Cowlishaw. I'm Managing Director for Adobe Advertising. I'm really excited to be on stage and share how you guys can Capitalize on the New Cable: Driving Customer Acquisition with Connected Television.
Joining me on stage soon will also be Natasha, who's the Display Programmatic Lead for ThermoFisher Scientific and has an absolutely amazing journey to share with you all.
So I want to get started by just sharing some data, some background on Connected Television.
So not only is everyone thinking about Connected Television, we're talking about it. And according to the IAB, you're all investing in Connected Television. They project an increase of 13.9% in 2025 alone.
Adobe Advertising recently did a study, surveying marketers and key decision makers of brands, trying to understand why they're investing in Connected Television and how they're doing it.
57% of marketers that we researched agreed that they will continue to invest more into Connected Television in 2025.
On the flip side of that though, of course, is the 43% who are saying that they're going to spend the same or less. And when we broke that down further, we still see 20% of brands are not investing in Connected Television at all today.
So the key reasons that we see why people are not planning to increase their investments in Connected Television are, they want and need more granular targeting and reporting options within the Connected Television environment.
They haven't seen strong results.
They do not feel that Connected Television can deliver them the performance metrics that they require.
And finally, the perception of the price of Connected Television is too high. And we have this conversation a lot around CPMs and also the cost of entry into Connected Television, and that mis-direction of, it's the same as a cost of entry into linear television as Connected Television.
And then when we have discussions and what we see on a daily basis is brands optimizing towards reach when they actually want conversions.
Measuring CTV's impact in a silo and ignoring its impact on channels like paid search, your natural search, how it interplays, and works with display. And not only are they looking at Connected Television as a silo, within Connected Television, majority of brands are also optimizing application and channel by channel by channel. So they're actually looking at two separate silos and then creating another silo and optimizing it and measuring by individual publisher.
On the flip side, back to those 57% of brands who are looking to increase their Connected Television.
They are three times more likely to leverage Connected Television as a lower funnel tactic.
They've already seen success and effectiveness of Connected Television, and they see that as a key reason to continue to invest.
And what we always talk about and what we always see, and one of the great pals of Connected Television is buying premium is critically important to them, to enable them to continue to invest more.
And then breaking that down into the winning strategies that we see, the correct KPIs. 60% are using CPA or ROAS to optimize their Connected Television campaigns. Holistic measurement, so removing and moving away from those silos to start, to look at how Connected Television interplays with all of their channels, both in paid media and also in owned media, and across social media, and the ability to be able to more precisely target. So not just buying a network and then going forward with it, buying within that network and understand the content objects, what type of content you're being around, and optimizing across all of those different avenues that you can.
So what are we? Just one slide to a very quick reminder. So we're the Adobe Advertising DSP, a centralized platform for buying paid media across channels. We have AI-powered optimization engine that maximizes ROI, and we have the most advanced connections to the Adobe Experience Cloud. We help you get more out of your investments in the Adobe Experience Cloud.
And I've been with-- Quite a few of us have been around for quite a while. I've been working with both the Adobe Advertising Platform and the technology that preceded that as a client for a number of years. And the key thing that has always been central to the way that we think and operate and the decisions that we make as a business is a long-term focus on accountability and transparency.
And this was actually right at the beginning of when we started our software. We were one of the first businesses to disrupt the ad network model. We wanted brands and agencies to be able to see exactly where they were buying their media and the dynamics that were existing behind that media, rather than at that stage, for those that remember, very much blind ad networks to drive your performance.
Over the years, I'm not going to go through everything, but some of the things that I'm most excited and proud of the work that we've been doing, launching, planning, and buying against audiences, such as Nielsen and Facebook, and using that's measurement to help us to use audience and targeted audience as a proxy for performance.
And then we started to look at how we can optimize your Connected Television as a performance channel using device graphs and looking at it from publisher to publisher, until we linked your Martech investment with your advertising investment, and the ability to put view-through conversions from your Connected Television and see them inside of Adobe Analytics. And most recently, moving from a publisher model to offsetting and supporting your publisher direct buys by using auction-based buys.
And we're excited as well to-- And I'm going to share some of the data insights around this to launch Performance Pro in 2026, which is going to be, help you as marketers maximize your investment and maximize the conversions that you're driving by understanding and loading in your display and your CTV to help you drive performances.
And why are we thinking around that, and why are we thinking Performance Pro? We know that we need to make smarter AI-driven optimization. Our shift from publisher to publisher buying to auction-based buying has already seen many brands achieve 20% improvements in their CPAs and increase their reach.
You as brands and marketers want cross-channel attribution and we need better data integration. And we continue to build that out, especially on top of the Adobe Experience Platform products, where we're, again, pushing out the signals and data into analytics, but we're also taking that information out into our platform to feed our algorithms to make your media performance campaigns perform better.
That things like data collaboration, privacy-first audience strategies, whether that's one-to-one collaboration, whether that's working with publishers and using authenticated and publisher IDs, we're seeing this reshape the way that we think about buying. And when we do this, we see increase in site engagement of up to five times.
And then the final one is-- I know a lot of this conversation is around performance, but we're starting to see brands and performance come together.
Connected Television is the most powerful asset that you have as a brand. Sight, sound, motion, 30-second ads, a very engaged audience leaning in and watching your content. It's your chance to create an emotional connection with those consumers. Start to build your brand, start to build the emotional connection, and take those users through the journey from not knowing about your brand to falling in love with your brand, and then becoming in-market and buying your brand.
And this all sits inside of Adobe's solution to drive customer acquisition.
The way that we think about this is plan, reach, measure, optimize.
Adobe Advertising can help you reach your audiences at scale, whether that's via data collaboration, whether that's by using publisher signals to enable you to help optimize. We reach your audience at scale, and then we also help, of course, optimize within those channels. And the way that we think of it, though, and this is so critical, is customer acquisition isn't just about driving sheer volume of traffic to your properties.
What it is, is about driving quality traffic to your properties and that's going to maximize your conversions on-site.
And the way that you do this is starting to think about different ways of buying Connected Television.
And the way that we think about it is there's four unique ways that you can really buy and trade Connected Television. And I don't think there's a wrong way, but there is definitely a right way. And that's starting to think about, how do you use these altogether to help you maximize your reach and maximize your impact? The first is publisher direct. The publisher manages activation directly via their Ad Server. So if you're using something like data collaboration, you would create a deal, you would do a partnership with the publisher, and then you would send your data over to the publisher, and then they would serve your ads on your behalf.
A private deal is fundamentally the same thing, but they send us over what we call a Deal ID, and we're actually able to optimize that. So it's not just serving every ad that the publisher wants us to serve. We can actually decision on that because we know, for example, a Monday is a higher converting day. We're going to send more money and invest more of your time and advertising investment on a Monday, in the afternoon, and it help us to understand that.
Audience syndication is basically the same as the private deal, but it's based on audiences. And again, they send that over to us. And then finally, auction-based, where the DSP does all of the decisioning for you. It dynamically values and buys the media on your behalf.
And when you think about that and why this is important is publisher direct, the publisher is doing the execution and they're buying the media. Well, they're not buying the media. Sorry. They are placing the media on your behalf.
The other three is all decisioned via a DSP.
Now why is that important? The reason that's important is, we want to understand all of the nuances that exist inside of your brand. And we know that if we can make better decisions, we can drive better performance. I mentioned that's that early when we move to auction-based buying rather than publisher-based buying, 20% improvement in CPA.
We know that buying premium inventory helps you to improve your CPA as well. And so you need to buy across as many publishers as possible to enable you to buy those and decrease those CPAs. Not only is it important to buy across publishers, it's also critical to understand how you're buying within those publishers.
Now borrowing from the legacy of linear television, where, first in break has a loading on it and costs more than the second and third in break, and that data is based on Nielsen viewership consumption and has been a long way of trading television.
The same effect happens in Connected Television, which is exactly what you would expect.
But obviously, it's always wonderful to see that data backs up your intuition.
When you buy the first slot in the pod, and so a pod is fundamentally a group of ads that exist when you're watching Connected Television.
The load can sometimes-- The load can be three, but it can be up to five, seven.
Using a DSP can help you to bid on the exact slot that is going to drive the best performance for your brand. This is an example of a dataset where we tested buying slot A, the middle, and then also the final slot. And you can see the significant increase in return on media spend by buying the first slot. The great thing is as well is unlike linear, there is no loading. I'm going to say, today on buying the first in slot because it's an underutilized tactic to help drive performance, and it's an underutilized signal that is used inside of many buying platforms.
So when we're thinking about premium and we're thinking about how we buy, we're also so excited that we're including Amazon inside of our buying platform. So you can now trade and execute on Amazon the exactly the same way that you can trade on all of the publishers that exist inside of our platform today.
This is so exciting because it gives us significant access to scale, and it also enables you as brands to get in there and test and understand how is it working and how is it driving performance for your brand.
When we start to think about all of that, and now we need to start to think about the way that we're making those decisions and the data infrastructure that we're building for our future. And we fundamentally know AI is going to change the way that you trade programmatic media, and we're starting to build towards that future today.
The way that we see this and the infrastructure that we are building is the marketable input, goals, the block lists, third-party vendors, and also be able to query and pull in historical campaigns, whether that's year-on-year campaigns or it's a similar campaign that they've run last month and help them understand exactly what is taking place.
We will then feed out three key things, recommended setup, your forecast, and, of course, then you'll be able to do in-flight optimization.
Your recommended setup will help you with formats, your budgets. It'll help you understand what audiences and IDs that you need to buy, and your site and publisher mix.
Best of all for many of the traders, if there are any traders in the room, or your team who are traders, it will also automatically construct your placements, making speed to market.
We'll then deliver an AI-powered forecast.
We'll predict spend, impressions, CPMs, and KPIs. And that's really important because some marketers have a set budget, some marketers have a CPA that they need to hit, and so you will be able to either put in, I have a million dollars. What is my projected output? Or you'll be able to say, I have a CPA of $50. How am I going to be able to achieve that and what is the model that's going to be able to do that? You will then have conversational scenario planning.
You'll be able to query why the software is making those decisions. And you might also be able to say, "What channels you don't want?" It may project that a certain channel or a certain publisher, and you can say yes and no and have a conversation and continue to evolve those media plans.
Once we get into optimization, we'll be looking at propensity, so the understanding of how exactly we're going to buy that media, what is the likely outcome? And then also, of course, being on the buy side is, how can we drive that media efficiency for the lowest cost as possible? It'll all be underpinned by conversational interface. And having actually been a trader many, many years ago, the ability to be able to not have to pull reports and try to find the answer, but actually just ask a question and have the software help you with the answer. For example, why did my CPA change yesterday? And be able to surface that insight and then have a conversation around that is going to be so critical for how you drive your success, and also, how we demonstrate the work that we're doing inside of the business. I just remember, writing crazy media reports and having to do a summary in an email of a click-through rate changing and having to try to work out why, and quite often having no idea why.
But it'll take six hours to do, instantly just having a query and finding the data.
And so this looks like, this is a future-facing vision of where we're seeing it. But we are building this today. Performance Pro is the start of what we are creating, especially in the AI-powered optimization.
And what I want to do is demonstrate a couple of data assets that I think is really interesting and help you to understand the way that we are seeing the relationship that exists between the media channels that are bought in our software today.
So what we're starting to think about is the role of CTV and how it drives performance, but also how it drives brand and its relationship that it has with your other media channels.
What you're seeing here is a normalized conversion rate, the CTV and display. And where in the path CTV is appearing, and then where in the path display is appearing. What you're seeing here in the campaign one is that CTV early on has a really high conversion rate, when it's early in the path, and then it lets display do the work.
Overtime though, its effect wears off and you see that display actually maintains a consistency.
However, for the exact same brand, for a different campaign, the exact opposite is also true.
So here, you're seeing that display early in the path is actually driving higher conversion rates than CTV. Then when CTV is later in the path, it drives faster action and faster conversion.
So what we're building is the ability for you to be able to load me a budget and a CPA and have AI, understand that and not dictate the journey, but have the machine learning help you to understand the journey and then optimize based on the best path possible.
And the key to that is, all too often in traditional media funnels, CTV is brand, then you have display as your performance driver. But that fundamentally is no longer the case. You need to understand what is the role of the channel and then how can software help you to use that to maximize performance.
And we see all of the time in so many campaigns that CTV plus display actually drives significant improvement in CPA and our AI models are going to help you to value those higher users and understand exactly what ad and ad format to deliver to help you to maximize the number of conversions.
We're also, inside of our software, building out insights dashboards, which helps you to visualize that data. I'm first to admit those previous charts are not the most intuitive. But what we're helping you to build is simple, intuitive insights to help you to understand how users are engaging with your brand across those channels and how you can better plan and buy your media.
We see huge demand for this and huge insight and huge appetite for this, to help them to understand when you're using multiple channels, how are different consumers engaging with your brand.
And then, of course, so important to our business model and you're driving your success is the ability to be able to integrate across your entire digital experience ecosystem.
We have the ability to be able to push view-through conversions from Connected Television into your Adobe Analytics package and use that as your single source of truth.
So you can see all of your conversions driven via CTV, via natural search, via your email campaigns, and also the interrelationship that those media campaigns all have on each other.
We then also take event-level data and what is taking place on your site and push that back into our software to help power our algorithms to deliver better performance for you all.
So the key things that I want to takeaway from this is, align. Make sure that we're setting the right KPIs and align your KPIs with your performance goals. It seems obvious, but all too often we do see mismatch goals for the channel versus what is actually the campaign goals.
Integrate your measurement and strategies across all of your channels, including non-paid to deliver a Unified Cross-Channel Attribution and help you to maximize your conversions.
And then also balance your CTV buy.
You're going to do buys direct with publishers. How do you balance that and offset that with data collaboration and then also making sure that you're integrating that all into one software that can maximize your reach and impact via auction-based deals to enable you to help you to maximize your reach and those conversions? And underpinning that, is that, we continue to say that AI is beating and is improving on the status quo.
We want to not only give you ROAS, but we also want to share insights with you and help you to understand why your campaigns are performing, why they performed historically, and what's going to happen in the future.
I'm going to hand you over to Natasha now to take you through her journey with ThermoFisher. Thank you.
[Natasha Hassnain] Good morning, everyone. Can you guys hear me, okay? All right. Perfect. I hope you guys are having a great Adobe Summit experience and truly enjoyed the Bash last night. I know it's hard to do a 9am session, so I will try to be a little bit funny for you.
Before I speak about my success of performance Connected TV, I'd like to take a few moments and introduce myself. My name is Natasha Hassnain, and I am the Programmatic Lead and Strategist at ThermoFisher Scientific. My background encompasses a variety of industry and services from CPG, entertainment, healthcare, and energy. I have lived coast-to-coast, west and east, but I will not tell you which one is best.
My background encompasses a variety of-- I'm sorry. So I've worked at many agencies building my digital marketing career in not only programmatic, but social media, SEM, affiliate, and influencer marketing. So before I go into my section of measuring ROI with performance TV, I want to say I've been in your shoes. I know the challenges you are facing when it comes to strategy and activation at the top tier funnel tactics. So let me show you how I achieved ROI in CTV for my campaign at ThermoFisher.
So who is ThermoFisher? ThermoFisher is a global leader in scientific research and laboratory solutions. We provide a wide range of products and services in healthcare, life sciences, pharmaceuticals, and industrial applications.
Our mission statement is our purpose to enable our customers to make the world cleaner, healthier, and safer.
We have a depth of capabilities that are bucketed into four.
We have life sciences solutions, analytical instruments, specialty diagnostics, and laboratory services and products.
Today, we will focus on the life science solutions, specifically the bioscience, which is also known as BID, bioscience division. My division primarily focuses on providing a broad range of products and solutions for life science research, drug discovery, and biotech applications. But, hey, if I'm talking to scientists without a PhD and explaining to them what a CTR is, you can talk to your stakeholders.
So before I show you, my CTV game plan and the data that backs it up, let's talk about the ThermoFisher relationship with Adobe.
In 2019, we started our relationship and tested their technology across a smaller line of business. We tested DSP, Search, Social, and Commerce.
In 2022, we expanded our relationship and onboarded more lines of businesses and scaled our media spend and started diving deeper into their tech. This helped us measure our campaign success.
In 2023, we evolved our KPIs, not only looking at onsite engaged visits, we further tracked internal searches, form starts, form completions, and we moved from a click-through attribution into a view-through attribution.
In 2024, we embarked our cookie-ish world where we live in still. We decided to expand our creative capabilities from display and moved it into video. We tested online video at the start of 2024 in 1H and then tested CTV in 2H, and trust me it was a great decision.
Now in 2025, we plan to expand our CTV and bring more lines of businesses, and then test the new capabilities that Phil just recently mentioned.
So just like any activation, we had to come up with a game plan. And like many of you in this room, budget is a huge factor when it comes to deciding on what to activate. Let's be honest. Paid search continues to get the majority of it and gets the credit. But without top funnel tactics like CTV and display, what would an audience search for? At ThermoFisher, we like to take the crawl, walk, run approach, and it wasn't easy convincing my stakeholders that I wanted to invest in a new tactic. So when molecular biology received incremental budget in July, I seized the opportunity to test Connected TV. This wasn't a standard ad placement for a brand that sells lab instruments and products. It's not like I'm selling $20 water bottle. I had to be very strategic and very crafty when leveraging the additional budget with already existing creatives. So what did I do? I repurposed paid social media videos of polymerase chain reaction. I know that's a mouthful, but it's called PCR for short. And instead of using just-- So solely focusing on one product, we focused on a array of products. And that helped us expand our brand awareness, as well as the opportunity to scale targeting. Additionally, thereafter, we utilized the exposure pixel that the CTV opportunity in Adobe Ad Cloud provides and retargeted the exposed audience with product-specific within the molecular biology business unit. That alone increased our engaged visits month-over-month. And not only that, we optimized our packages to have CPA and ROAS optimization goals, and this helped us reach new households through the programmatic premium CTV providers. We leveraged ESPN, Samsung TV Plus, and DIRECTV to name a few.
Remember when I said I had to talk to scientists about CTR and explain that. Well, now I had to explain the halo effect to them and prove the impact that CTV has on mid to bottom funnel channels like search. We leveraged Adobe Analytics and segmented the data for CTV and found an increase in visits through multiple marketing channels, like organic search and paid social.
But that's not all. We even gained more internal searches, like I mentioned, which is part of our new KPIs since 2023 within the websites due to Connected TV. The first month alone our internal searches surpassed 100% when compared to the previous month.
Now I knew the CPMs were going to be more expensive. It's video after all, but ours was four times more, but my cost per visit was 29% less than a standard display ad or a display placement for that matter. Additionally, what we found was that, audiences who were exposed to the CTV video were then coming back to our site and staying on our site 10% longer than a regular standard ad. So Connected TV helped ThermoFisher basically streamline our customer journey and nurture our audience down the marketing funnel.
So what does this all mean at the end of the day? Adobe Ad Cloud gives us the opportunity to diversify our tactics. So when using Connected TV and display synergistically, the audience is converted at a much higher rate. For ThermoFisher alone, Connected TV and display had 286% higher conversion rate than just a standalone CTV placement. And then when you add search to the mix, we saw 500% increase in conversions.
This alone gave us the fuel to not only request extra budget, but also recommend Connected TV in the DSP. Now I'm able to speak to my scientists about CTR and the CTV halo effect when kicking off the new go-to-market strategy plans.
So what's next for ThermoFisher? We're going to continue leveraging our Connected TV tactic alongside display and other channels like social and search to provide a better customer journey. We're going to launch CTV and retargeting with the CDP integration. We want to utilize educational content videos like how-to videos to drive customer success. If the customers are successful, we're successful.
We will set a new standard in CTV measurement by incorporating the halo effect reports in our dashboard. This helps understand the impact Connected TV has for the customer journey.
And lastly, we'd like to experiment in Connected TV, slot A pod bidding, and I don't mean the slots downstairs, but definitely testing this tactic to capture the audience first before the content is streamed. And then we'd like to feature the demand gallery opportunities for more publisher testing and piloting the Amazon Publisher Services via Adobe Ad Cloud.
I appreciate your time. If you guys have any questions, feel free to ask now or we can hang out and keep asking. But thank you.
[Music]
