Taking Over The Living Room

August 29, 2024

As seen on Cynopsis

As consumers devote more waking hours to screen time, marketers are losing the luxury of picking just one screen on which to engage them. Increasingly, the smart money is on integrated campaigns that bust silos and demonstrate that the whole truly is greater than the sum of its parts.

According to recent Nielsen data, American adults spend an average of 59 hours and 56 minutes with media per week. This time is split between mobile, desktop and the TV. Importantly, mobile and CTV are the two channels that are still seeing an increase in minutes spent per day which are often used at the same time as people multitask on their phones while watching content. For advertisers, this means that competing for attention requires meaningful engagement on multiple screens.

“It’s more and more difficult to break through because we’re being inundated with so many competing interests. Marketers need to be more high-impact and creative in their approach,” says Michael Shaughnessy, COO of media marketplace Kargo. “And the media landscape has become so fragmented that once you do find the consumer it’s really important that you’re fully capturing their attention.”

Enter Kargo’s Living Room Takeover. Kargo’s innovative product suite addresses the increasingly fractured market by connecting disparate dots across CTV, mobile, desktop and social in ways that in the aggregate garner more meaningful attention and consideration from consumers.

“For us it’s always about captivating and engaging the consumer with a message that is beautiful and relevant,” Shaughnessy says. By seamlessly integrating a brand’s presence across mobile, desktop and CTV glass, Kargo enables the delivery of consistent messaging and brand recognition that results in lasting, actionable impressions wherever, whenever and however content is consumed. That’s a coveted position in today’s landscape, as marketers increasingly vie to own 100% share of voice and consumer attention, he notes.

“There’s a difference between targeting someone with an ad and giving them a meaningful moment that actually attracts attention,” says Billie Hirsh, Kargo’s VP of marketing. “That’s our ethos and the bow we put on it—building experiences for brands that resonate in an otherwise cluttered or commoditized space.”

Case Study: A Tech Brand Boost

Shaughnessy says, “brands and agencies are increasingly taking an integrated approach to campaign strategy and measurement and are seeing positive results from The Living Room Takeover.” Kargo delivered incremental brand lift and higher ROI for a tech company using the Living Room Takeover to bring a new product to market. By combining impactful creatives and laser-focused targeting, the activation broke through during the holiday rush and delivered a six-time lift in consideration and three-time lift in ad recall. The campaign also out-performed benchmarks across all target metrics including:
- Over 90% unduplicated reach against other OEMs and connected streaming services on the CTV carousel unit
- 76% in-view rate, compared with the benchmark of 54%
- 257% boost in CTR due to favoring contextual cohort targeting vs. ID-based behavioral targeting
- 90% brand recall performance among the carousel unit
- 45% brand persuasion performance among the carousel unit

“Kargo’s high impact advertising formats like The Living Room Takeover are proven to drive lift across the funnel, from awareness to performance. As viewers lean into the interactive elements of CTV and as more advertisers embrace the addressable nature of the channel, Kargo will be ready with the creatives that power the next phase of big screen advertising,” said Mike Shaughnessy, COO at Kargo.

Right Time, Right Place, Right Content

Another key to Kargo’s success is its ability to help brands target consumers at the times they are most receptive to engaging. “It all starts with the supply. Make sure you’re delivering your message in the right places at the right times so that you’re not wasteful,” Shaughnessy says.

Whether on a website or a connected TV screen, much of the magic happens by contextualizing the content with AI. “There are contextual moments that you can get through CTV—the way we’re scanning the content and using image recognition as well as closed captioning to deliver contextual alignment with the type of show, the emotion. And then also digitally we’re able to scan the content and use natural language processing for the readability, the sentiment, the key words,” he notes.

“We process content themes and trends, making sure we target ads that are relevant to that content and placing them in the first ad pod of a show on CTV. We’re leveraging and activating the content information in a very cohesive way.”

Then there’s the creative itself. In a marketplace cluttered with repurposed ads and one-dimensional content, the Kargo team digs down to a deeper level to ensure each element is primed for deeper interaction, not superficial transaction, at every juncture.

“There is a difference between banners and branding, there is a difference between commercials and branding—and that’s the lens we bring to everything we do, leaning into all of those differences to build something that is perfectly designed for the advertiser’s goal and for the ad format and screen,” notes Hirsh.

“Brands can exert their influence when they are able to really own a placement. A great creative concept still needs to be interpreted through the lens of the context, ad format and screen,” says Shaughnessy. “We’re elevating the consumer experience which then also enables the publishers to provide better content.”

Balancing Tech and the Human Touch

As new technologies become available, Kargo is continually assessing and optimizing to embrace game changing innovation. That means using AI for things like workflow—the ability to quickly generate 10x versions of a color background to test, for example—and data analysis. “AI gives us better predictive intelligence for our creatives and improves our design process,” Shaughnessy says.

But he’s quick to point out that the rampant use of unchecked artificial intelligence is actually causing more clutter. “Content and advertising is only impactful if it’s high quality and that is true across screens. It’s easier for content farms to emerge now because it’s less time consuming to use generative AI or open AI to create content. And some of these pieces of content that are very thin are popping up within the search engines and consumers are finding their way there,” he says. “One of things we did before the industry even talked about it, was, we made a pledge and we ensured we had a marketplace that didn’t have ‘made for advertising.’ As technology advances, you actually need more human curation and more checks into where you’re communicating your message.”

The media landscape may be fragmented and noisy, but by extending custom solutions to all devices in the living room and beyond, Kargo is enabling brands to engage with consumers throughout their screen journey in a cohesive, nonintrusive, native way. And that’s the kind of takeover that gets results.