In conversation with Siddharth Dabhade – MD, MiQ – India, China & SAARC

Connected TV has gone beyond just being a hyped tool. Today, marketers are leveraging the power of Connected TV to not only find the right audience but to connect with them effectively. To provide some impactful insights on the CTV ecosystem in India, MIQ launched its playbook, ‘Channelizing the Power of Connected TV’ to equip marketers with the state of the CTV ecosystem in India. To understand more about the report, Agency Reporter reached out to Siddharth Dabhade – MD, MiQ – India, SAARC, China.

Agency Reporter – Can you tell us more about the insights that led to the creation of the MIQ playbook, “Channelizing the Power of Connected TV”?

Siddharth Dabhade – We wanted to create a playbook for marketers and advertisers to better understand the CTV ecosystem in India and get started with CTV advertising.

Modern marketers are unlocking new capabilities and value with CTV advertising, and we’ve put together this guide to bring crystallized insights from our global expertise in data-driven, programmatic CTV advertising. It also includes valuable perspectives on the growth prospects of CTV from some of the pioneers of the Indian media industry.

The key trends and insights that led to the creation of our CTV playbook were:

With a wide variety of content choices across CTVs, OTT and YouTube, and eroding identifiers & cookies, advertisers are looking for media planning across screens.
Marketing budgets are expected to shrink due the economic downturn, putting pressure on marketers to prove the business impact of advertising – making cost-efficient media planning & advanced measurement an imperative

Agency Reporter – What makes CTV advertising a game-changer in the advertising industry in India?

Siddharth Dabhade – TV is the undisputed media channel in India, with over 40% of total advertising spending. CTV brings new creative, media planning, and targeting capabilities to the TV advertising ecosystem, where brands can reach elusive audiences in more personalized and interactive ways, than with linear TV.

CTV has a lot of advantages over linear TV and is well poised to grow leaps and bounds in India due to the following reasons:

TV viewing habits are shifting to streaming, and CTV gives brands the opportunity to reach cord cutters, cord never and cord-shavers on the big screen
CTV offers personalized and interactive ad formats like ads with QR codes and shoppable ads
Brands can efficiently plan & buy TV inventory programmatically vs siloed buying with linear TV
Brands can find & target new audiences by connecting their first-party data with their digital video and CTV campaigns
CTV offers digital-like measurement which is not possible via linear TV
CTV offers reach and frequency control for optimizing media spends across platforms

Agency Reporter – How do you see the CTV advertising market evolving in India over the next five years?

Siddharth Dabhade – CTV households in India, currently over 20 million households, are expected to grow 4x to 80 million households by 2025. The cord cutting and streaming trends will continue as TV, connected devices, and internet penetration in rural markets increase.

From a viewership perspective, the audience that consumes connected TV is affluent, metro skewed, and has more premium lifestyle preferences. This would change going forward, and CTV is expected to become a key element of integrated video planning for brands which target the new customer classification system, the NCCS AB audiences, or the top two segments.

From a content perspective, more local and vernacular content is expected to be produced and made available across OTT platforms. AVOD platforms would benefit as price conscious consumers shift from SVOD, driving higher acceptability for ads. New creative ad formats would increase engagement and personalization.

From a measurement perspective, TV measurement would drastically change as there would be no need for panel based measurements.

Agency Reporter – Can you share some examples of successful CTV advertising campaigns that MIQ has executed in India?

Siddharth Dabhade – We’ve worked with many brands to refine their CTV strategies. We were among the first to prove the full-funnel impact of CTV ads through India’s first brand lift studies, in partnership with Havas Media Group, Samsung Ads, and Kantar. This campaign was for a global homeware brand that wanted to target consumers who were exposed to their competitors ads on CTV and OTT platforms.

Our recent campaign for Scotch Brite combined YouTube, CTV and other OTT platforms to reach deduplicated/unique households. This is important because YouTube has a very large proportion of CTV penetration by itself.

Recently, we helped Zee5 reach NRI audiences in the fiercely competitive marketplaces of the UK, USA, UAE, and Australia. ZEE5 wanted to grow brand recognition and viewership through a targeted CTV strategy and we used our global CTV partnerships to create a solid CTV strategy to build CTV capabilities and targeted strategies based on demographic, behavioral, interest, and intent-based signals to create a high-affinity lookalike audience, using automated content recognition (ACR), advanced analytics and data-driven targeting to drive 1.2 million impressions and 0.8 million unique household reach in the first 30 days.

For MAC Cosmetics, MiQ helped build and target relevant audiences for MAC by mapping their TV behaviors. We identified content played on smart TV screens using ACR data to gather viewership insights across linear TV, OTT, and set-top boxes.

Agency Reporter – How does MIQ leverage data science and technology to optimize CTV advertising campaigns for its clients?

Siddharth Dabhade – MiQ specializes in data-driven programmatic CTV. Our Advanced TV solution is a comprehensive solution that helps advertisers with better planning, targeting, and measurement across the TV ecosystem.

We have one of the largest data lakes in India, bolstered by our partnerships in the CTV and OTT ecosystems, which gives you curated inventory buying and advanced measurement across platforms. We connect data across sources to offer audience analytics and comprehensive campaign insights.

With over 300 data science, analytics, and programmatic trading experts in India. MiQ can help marketers see where their consumers are, and how they’re consuming TV and OTT content, so they can plan effectively.

We work with Samba TV, Amazon, Roku, Pubmatic, Magnite and Samsung Ads and among popular Indian OTT platforms to drive integrated CTV strategies that lead to incremental reach, cost efficiencies, and reduce ad waste with frequency control.

Our YouTube API, we can connect data including ACR data, channel data and video data to improve your ROI on YoutTube.

Agency Reporter – What advice do you have for brands and advertisers who are looking to incorporate CTV advertising into their media mix for the first time?

Siddharth Dabhade –

Take an integrated approach to video planning and activation
Don’t buy in silos, it leads to skewed targeting, ad waste and different reporting KPIs across platforms. Let programmatic empower your CTV strategy.
Pilot with an audience-targeting approach to CTV, then pivot to data-driven CTV strategy
Experiment with personalized & targeted creative ad formats with DCO
Spend time and energy on developing measurement frameworks for CTV. These could be expenditures on Brand lift surveys or measurements combining linear TV/ digital with CTV.

Agency Reporter – What challenges do you anticipate brands and advertisers facing when adopting CTV advertising in India, and how can they overcome them?

Siddharth Dabhade – The biggest challenge that brands face when it comes to CTV advertising currently is the knowledge gap. The fact that CTV is a nascent ecosystem with a lot of siloed buying points and misconceptions leads brands to go about it incorrectly. For example, there is massive duplication of reach between the big CTV publishers, but brands still buy individually from them. Or, a lot of marketers buy CTV inventory from the open exchange, which is generally non CTV inventory being masked as CTV.

The other challenge is around measurement, advertisers align existing mobile/ desktop brand KPIs to CTV performance. Because CTV is a programmatic channel, brands compare it more with mobile advertising than with TV advertising.

We need to understand that CTV is for a laid back viewing experience, and that needs to be seen closer to TV as an awareness medium and not right beside the mobile device as an performance or action medium. But it still needs to be planned together with mobile with each i.e., CTV and mobile support the other. And i think that mindset of planning different platforms together and still being able to use or see them for their USPs will be the key evolution point of CTV and our industry in the next 5 years

Agency Reporter – How does MIQ differentiate itself from other players in the CTV advertising space in India?

Siddharth Dabhade – We have 3 big differentiators in the India market

Our rich data lake which gives us the power to provide unparalleled audience insights, access to inventory across CTV, OTT & YouTube for maximizing scale and quality of your CTV ads
Our partner-agnostic approach to CTV – we work with all the leading players in the CTV & OTT space for better campaign planning & real-time optimization
Our insights on reach & frequency, competitive & contextual intelligence
Our unique targeting capabilities on the basis of device attributes, content genres, ISPs, geo targeting and retargeting to show impact on business metrics
Our advanced measurement and reporting capabilities which helps you see performance of your campaigns across screens

Agency Reporter – Can you discuss the impact of CTV advertising on reach, frequency, and outcomes for brands and advertisers in India?

Siddharth Dabhade – With more households cutting the cord and preferring streaming, premium audiences are harder to reach via linear TV. Today, most households have multiple OTT apps and switch from one to another for their preferred content. For advertisers, this means that TV planning, media buying, and activation are of utmost importance.

Reach and frequency management can reduce ad waste or overexposure and skewed targeting. Data signals from that can be leveraged to retarget audiences across devices and drive sequential messaging.

Agency Reporter – What role do you see programmatic advertising playing in the future of CTV advertising in India, and how is MIQ positioned to take advantage of this trend?

Siddharth Dabhade – Right now we are investing heavily in educating the market on CTV. We are working hard to bring our learnings from our western markets to India, China and SEA.

Video 360 – This year our product focus is offering a unified video product that can help a brand plan-execute and measure its video campaigns in a unified approach that maximises reach and helps optimise frequency within the target audience. Basically deliver the right mix across platforms without compromising on efficiency.

MiQ is focused on becoming the world’s largest managed service provider for buying TV. We are agnostic of publishers, platforms and data providers. Our focus is to partner with the best in the industry to tailor an omnichannel solution for our clients that delivers outcomes. We work with all leading dsps, publishers and measurement providers to ensure that our clients get what they need for success. Along the same lines, we have been investing heavily in CTV capabilities like ACR data and access to niche DSPs like Roku. We have partnered with the likes of Vizio and Samba for ACR data. The likes of iSpot for measurement and we have also signed a deal with Netflix to be one of their demand partners. All this helps us to connect the rapidly growing and fragmented CTV (and digital) advertising ecosystem.