Today on Stack and Growth, we're covering how, when, and why to integrate connected TV into your paid media strategy. Evan Hughes is joined by Matt Chinella, Aaron Weeks, and Kyle Taylor, to walk through the tools, measurement, creative, and budget to make a CTV campaign successful. Hope you enjoy. Hey everyone, appreciate you joining today.
We're going to dive into all things CTV. So I feel like a lot of us have heard the buzz around CTV lately, especially in B2B. I think it's like popped up on media plans. People are pitching it on LinkedIn.
A lot of chat GPT is writing about it. And it feels kind of vague for a lot of us, at least for myself for a long time. And I think a lot of us think of it as a consumer brand play too. And I think that's where the conversation we're going to have today really gets into more specifically aligned to B2B and how to leverage it.
And for the people not familiar, you know, or connected TVs new to you, I think it's best to think about it as basically ads delivered on the internet. So they go like YouTube, TV, Amazon Fire, RealCoo, just basically anything that has like an external advice that can plug into a TV. It's all internet streaming based. And I think that the reason that's becoming exciting or more exciting than digital is because of the targeting capabilities that we have now.
So we're starting to be able to target a lot better more efficiently. And the viewership on TV is also just pretty astounding when you compare that to digital over time. And there's still a large audience. So we thought it'd be helpful to bring us all together and kind of chat about it.
You know, kind of we talk about brand demand expand as a key component. This kind of fits in the brand wheelhouse for us and how we think about it as an awareness play. But I'm curious if Matt, Aaron, and Kyle kind of are experts today to dive in there pointing to you there. But yes, we'll tackle a bunch of things kind of what are some of the objectives, how should we think about targeting, what are KPIs.
So I think it's going to be a good discussion. And I think to kick it off, you know, I'm going to pass it to you, Matt, let's get into this. But I really want to understand like why should somebody even consider CTV and really what is like the business case or justification for it? So why you should consider CTV?
For me, I think it is the first off, CTV is the most screen dominant thing that most SMB and mid market B2B SaaS companies can actually do. We live in a two-screen culture, people watch TV, they scroll on their phone, running CTV gives you that gives you screen dominance. It is non-sippable, people consume your entire message. And I think for that, it is the best way in my opinion right now to probably get your message across.
I think you're looking at static ads are super saturated, they are so easy to miss and forget. And a really, really good TV ad, I'm sorry, still even in 2025, whether it's CTV, OTT, linear TV, it works, it resonates. So I mean, to me, it's the best way to be resonant, play up as a bigger brand than you actually maybe are. And it's to me, it's the ultimate awareness play you can do.
I mean, there are lots of companies right now doing it, some better than others. But to me, it's been one of my favorite things to be experimenting with and testing with over the last several months. I don't think I've won CTV with one client who hasn't seen Lyft in their hand raisers from it after a prolonged period of time, even with the rest of the tactics that we've run in Pay Media staying relatively static. So that's much beyond CTV.
I just think it is the way to stand out probably more than any other thing you can do with your advertising budget in Q3, Q4, 2026 and beyond. And I'm curious, what's your take care? As you think about it, working with your clients and some of the pushback you might get. I definitely have something to add.
I'm going to say, not you're going to come with more conspiracy theories, some of them will set that you can do that voice back. I think Matt particularly very well. But one thing I want to hone in on is I think about working with our clients at the performance level and how we build that business case, which is, as Matt said, for S&B mid-market, this is one of the best ways you can get awareness, cost-effective awareness, and get that message in front of the right audience. I think where Matt is right where LinkedIn ads, static ads, they're very saturated.
But now we can use this channel or other platforms we'll speak about later on to really get in front of that audience and cost-effective way to get that message there. Because again, at the end of the day, the best message is the one that gets repeated. If you can do that in a very cost-effective way, make sure you're reaching the right people. And CTV is a great player in your overall measurement performance strategy.
Talk a lot about the awareness as an objective here. And I think that understanding the why, but also how do you pitch it internally? I think that's some of the pushback we get a little bit to. And Matt, you've seen successive clients, but there's some runway there.
I know Kyle, you have experienced running this as well. What is some of the initial pushback you have to kind of set up the conversation? And then we'll dive into getting more about the objectives and KPIs and how to measure. But Kyle, more specifically to you, how do you become an internal champion behind this if you are new to running it?
I think one of the biggest challenges up front was just the question. How are we going to track the success of these campaigns? Because it's not something that you can actively engage with in the feed. It's not something that is going to have clicks attributed to it.
And thus, there's no UTM parameters being captured. It's just you're seeing this video, not on your computer. And what's its influence? What's its impact?
And I think that difficulty in ensuring, hey, these campaigns are worthwhile. We're getting ROI from them is probably the biggest pushback. So I think the challenge is what can we see in terms of that influence? How is it impacting all of our marketing overall?
To follow up on that question, how do we measure CTV? Because I think it's pretty important. We can just go way off the board here. Let's do it.
So you have to have offline conversion tracking setup if you really want to in platform measure CTV. So you need to have Cappy setup for LinkedIn. You need to have offline conversion tracking setup for something like Mountain does a really nice job for instance, helping you set that up. If you have Zapier or any other way that you can track offline conversions for yourself through LinkedIn, you should be tracking that at the lead level, at the deal level, at the close to one level, if you can, that's that is how you track it in platform to justify it.
And I think the clients that I've been able to do that with, I've been seeing, you know, cost per op from CTV for some clients being sub sub $1,500. I mean, if we were to look at it just based on the way that we're tracking it overall, that's just one instance. I've other clients where it's a little more fuzzy 100%. I think the other thing with CTV is like you're always looking at this as a long range play.
It's not a 30 day play. It's not an even a 90 day play. It's like a 12 month play that you want to make for yourself. So you really need to build a paid media experiment that you can actually track and test for yourself.
Now, whether you want to do something like a geo hold out test where you test, you test to like size DMA's, or if you want to do a temporal hold out test where you're benchmarking your past 18 months of inbound and that cumulative trajectory, and then you're going to layer CTV in and then you're going to track the slope of that as a difference of it over time. Like those are two ways that you can look at CTV against your CRM data and say, Hey, here's the incrementality of this overall. One reason is in the month to month with CTV, you're going to be looking at you got to think like, like it's it's an awareness channel. So you're looking at reach, you're looking at frequency, you're looking at CPM, you're looking at a pressure, you're looking at average watch time.
Those are the things that you're primarily going to be checking them when you want to drill down. You want to start looking at, well, where am I getting placement overall? And maybe that gets into where you want to whitelist and blacklist things for yourself as well. And the link, for instance, it does skew a lot towards local TV.
They just added paramount plus actually to their inventory this month. So you'll start to see placement on that now. You have it. So just understand what the publisher list looks like and where you're appearing and then go check that against your ICP.
Yeah, I just want to summarize something. So then I can ask Kyle a question because he's here and we want to get a sec to take some tech. What Matt's talking about is in some, what I'd say Matt is speaking to you is like, it's evolving. And what you need to do is have a mindset on the measurement, how you're going to approach it.
And I think with CTV, we're viewing it as like, this is the brain awareness play, but it's not so you need to have everything else to write. So we can really speak to what's the angle of that to be actually achieved that awareness. I want to ask Kyle because you brought up, which is I think the question everyone's going to be asked if Donna Wrecken, Anna, I'm trying to do this right is what's the ROI? So I wonder Kyle, do you have to do any mindset or change management there when you're hearing that question or just give us some like real world advice of like, how did you tackle that when you were asked that question by leadership?
Yeah. So in terms of ROI, we'd say there's not necessarily pushback. CTV was not something that Jasper had done before. Our team knew that creating video assets was going to be an important part of a rebrand that we had a couple of months ago.
And with that overarching campaign, we had a lot of great assets that were created, longer form that would go in feed, and then 15 to 30 second spots that we used for our CTV campaigns. So I think going into it, there was openness in terms of, okay, it's going to take a while before we truly see ROI. But thankfully, we were getting some good insights working with our LinkedIn reps, I have weekly meetings with them, just to go over some of these different performance metrics. And they gave us some insight as to what the influence is on our other infidads, like the number of people who are seeing our CTV ads, how many of those users were also seeing our ads on LinkedIn?
I think Matt, you mentioned this earlier, I think during the intro where just viewership habits are changing. There's multiple devices, people on their phones, people on TV and how they're consuming media. And that was actually something that was really interesting that we were noticing a lot of people were seeing our CTV ads, but we're not seeing our infidads. So in terms of ROI, it was kind of having a compounding effect that our infid ads were now more effective because users were seeing our CTV ads.
So up front, it was, again, it was openness. We were willing to see, put some ad dollars behind it and see what was going to happen. And then after that initial investment, we pull back or potentially scale up based on that performance. So I think you need to have a little bit of willingness to experiment and see, hey, is this working?
If not, why isn't it working? Is our messaging office or targeting off or where can we go from there? Do you build on that too? You need some runway, you need to kind of rub it out over time, right?
So you're looking at different signals, you're seeing a lift and just general traffic on your other ad assets. But I'm curious, the initial budget, I know this is a big question, a kind of a loaded question, but like, how do you approach that conversation or how do you kind of pencil out what budget to experiment with? And how have you thought about that? And I might still stay with you, Kyle, on that because you kind of ran this for Jasper and then we can kind of tee it off internally.
Yeah, I think with the, with the rebrand in June, we did have a slightly increased budget, CTV and our video assets, we put about 10% of our budget towards this experiment. Infeed the budget didn't, it went up slightly and it was mostly just our new or new assets, but it was one of those things where we knew we wanted to kind of go heavy on video, just because we had so many different assets, both messaging that was more like Jasper as a brand, we had additional videos that was a couple of new products that we that we'd launched in the Jasper platform. So we want to make sure we just had enough coverage. So we came across a number that ended up being about 10% of our budget for that first month, and then it dropped just slightly to about 8% of our budget over these subsequent two months.
So it's still a pretty decent percentage because we've been seeing a good reach and good influence coming from those campaigns. Budget-wise, echo, most clients I'm running CTV with, it's comprising between 10 and 15% of the budget overall. What's interesting about CTV is actually how much cheaper it is on LinkedIn, for instance, compared to other added inventory. And that's something I did not expect to see.
And I think that just speaks to how few people are actually taking advantage of it on LinkedIn and a little inside baseball because I just talked to a LinkedIn rep yesterday about this. A lot of the large businesses are actually not utilizing LinkedIn CTV platform from my knowledge because it's Tv, a linear TvCTV tends to be very potentially good at a programmatic team. They kind of have their tools in place that they utilize, whether it's DSPs or something else. So LinkedIn is really kind of a red ocean for SMB and markets because it's not like you're getting bumped out by a lot of bigger players who are just going to outspend you on the platform.
And I'm seeing that play out in my CPMs. My CPMs for one client here, my static CPMs for this are about $100 and the CTV with the identical audience is $36. So your dollar actually goes a lot further on CTV than it does with statics only because there's fewer people competing for that placement overall, vis-a-vis other LinkedIn inventory. And then the other part is your audience actually be better as well.
That's another thing that I see as well sometimes by a factor of 20 to 30, I've seen 50% more audience penetration on CTV compared to statics, for instance. So I think those are some interesting ways when we talk about budget. It's not just about what you put in to your CTV budget, but it's also about how far that dollar goes relative to other types of ad inventory that you run and it actually goes farther. So I will kind of join and agree with you on that side.
We were exploring a couple of different options for CTV. I was talking with our Google reps about what Google could do for CTV across YouTube, YouTube, etc. We ended up just going with like native YouTube targeting campaigns like not CTV for a couple of different reasons. One, the estimated CPMs were actually pretty similar between Google CTV options and LinkedIn CTV options.
But with Google, you're pretty much stuck with Google ads as native targeting, like the in-market audiences, remarketing lists, which when you're trying to go after B2B audiences are not always the best. Whereas LinkedIn, you have all of the demographic and demographic targeting. I'm using target account lists for some of our campaigns. We have our broader ICP as some of our campaigns, and I'm going after our mid-market and enterprise ICP as opposed to just SMB and mid-market.
And yeah, I'm looking at campaign performance and our in-feed CPMs are over $100, but even going after buying personas across mid-market enterprise, $43. So the targeting is on point. It is better than what I'm seeing over on traditional YouTube campaigns. The frequency is healthy.
And essentially, these users are seeing our ads as if they're seeing a commercial on TV. So it's not invasive. It's not disruptive. It's something that they're already expecting.
And it just allows us to reach audience pretty efficiently. Cost, yeah. It's just a natural part of their consumption habit, right? I mean, especially 15 to 30 seconds, which is what I would recommend almost across the board because it's much more likely to not be skipped overall.
Yeah, I totally agree with that overall. I think the hardest part for a lot of brands is the creative aspect. It comes to CTV. It's like, do we have CTV worthy creative?
And I think that that can- What does that mean? I don't know. Well, I mean, I do know what it means. But I'm talking a little bit.
Yeah. I mean, I'm teasing a little bit here. I'm foreshadowing, but I'm doing that's a huge question for a lot of people. And because I think if you go to a CMO or you go to your CEO, and you're like, hey, I want to run CTV, they look at that as like, wow, we're really going to be showing our brand on a big screen now.
Like, are we ready for that? Do we look good enough for that? And that's kind of a hilarious. It's a little bit of a humorous question because what that really speaks to you is like, well, how good is our brand right now?
It's kind of a forcing function against your brand strength and how sort of tune your brand assets are. Yeah, one thing to follow up to is we're going to get into creative. We all have our own thoughts and opinions and ideas on it. But something because I want to try to get real feedback from Kyle here is, as Matt just said, this is very visible.
Probably the leadership level is going to be very involved and give a lot of feedback and have a lot of opinions. And even before we get into creative recommendations and best practices, kind of, did you have that conversation? Like, how did you tackle that? So the creative was actually done very close with our CMO.
So our creative team and our CMO, they were the ones going through everything. So she had final approval and a lot of input on there. So with these campaigns, this was one where I was more like, hey, what assets you have for me, these are what I think we should run with on CTV versus N-Feed. Let's go with this.
Our CTV ads were more brand focused than they were product focused in this particular instance, partially because, again, Jasper was going through a rebrand video assets were a part of the strategy. But there was very close, not close, they're in-depth work in regards to not just the video itself, but also the script that went along with it. Some in-feed ads, you can have video assets that don't have any voiceover. They don't have any music.
It's fine if people are on their phone, they're only may not even be on anyway, whereas you obviously want to make sure you have audio in the CTV ads. So they worked on developing the script as well as the visual aspect. But yeah, it was definitely something that they were very thorough in terms of developing that and came out very well. Yeah, that's awesome.
I think that's what Matt has experienced before and even in different realms outside of CTV. Matt, if you want to talk high level about best practices for creative art, you can just not search it. Yeah, I mean, we were just talking about this before. We went live on the show, but we were talking about the Clashy ad that ran during the NBA finals.
And then I think it's in Lindy or Lindy AI came out with one that was just recently, they just launched it like DSDEC yesterday or something. And they're getting a lot of, they're getting a lot of attention on LinkedIn because it's one of those text-to-video V03 based ads. And I think like those things are really nice for chasing florality. And it gets a lot of attention because hey, I'm using AI soup to nuts to create an asset.
But I really think you need to think about how people are going to see this ad over and over and over and over again. And I think one of the key things that you want to do is before you get really flashy, I think you want to be really pointed and really make sure people understand who you are, what you do and who you do it for, whether you do that in a brand asset or in more of a branded way or more of a product-focused way. But I do think that there's just certain practices, best principles that you want to employ there. I think if you're going to make this investment, I think you want to make sure you're creative, could conceivably run for 12 months, you could continuously get new people seeing it.
And the message is going to be really consistent and the same and durable for you overall. So one great example of a branded did is been doing a lot of CTV and they're more consumer-facing than they are B2B, but like a true bill slash rocket money, they run basically the same two content formats all the time. They run Man on the Street and they run scripted testimonial. And you understand what they do every single time you watch one of their ads, they help you manage your bank account, manage your subscriptions, and then they have a new feature like they'll help you get your subscription cancelled, you understand that.
So I think just, I come out of every rocket money slash true bill commercial understanding what they do, and I became a customer not for long, but I became a customer because I wasn't treated enough by that value proposition. So I think the key is like you want to make sure people when they go to your website, it complements a lot what they consumed on the asset, right? And I think that's where you try to, you don't want to be cute here. Yeah.
I think in terms of the assets as well, like there are some video assets you can create that can be very broad, speak to everyone whether or not they know who you are, like if they are your potential customer, they're in your ICP, maybe they've never heard of you. Cool. You can have some that's more brand focused. But you mentioned like you saw a video testimonial that can be something where if you feel like it's an asset that maybe shouldn't go to a cold audience or go to a warm audience, cool, that's where you have a link in the ability to, hey, maybe you have a target account list that you've already engaged with before, maybe you build a remarketing list that you want to be in front of, hey, you've engaged with us in X, Y, Z, way, here's an ad, like here's a video asset to for you to see while you're watching TV so that we were we're still top of mind and you're getting additional additional value, additional insights from us of how we can help you.
So like it doesn't have to be a one size fits all approach. It could start that way where you have something more broad, but then as you continue to develop, hey, what do we do next on CTV? That's where you can get more granular on both your audience targeting and your messaging based on where someone might be in the buying process. Yeah, I've seen a lot of like websites with a little bit higher traffic or volume of traffic, their FAQ pages are like really being able to answer that audience in a remarketing or retargeted ad is so interesting.
And it's been a fun test at a couple of clients that I work with have utilized because they're able to answer the common questions like almost without them asking it. They just know they've visited the page, they're making those assumptions. So it becomes a much more targeted ad where if you try to do that to the broad audience, I think that that's where some people maybe like create one ad that's two pointed or two focus that it kind of loses that kind of goes right over the top of somebody's head or they're not to the buying point. So it's interesting to think about like how do you design creative in the last 12 months, but also how can you build it in a way that you can slice it or potentially cut it to different elements?
So then it's useful across different targeting different audience layers, but Aaron, I'm curious, do you like your experience around this? Yeah, I think Matt and Kyle offered a lot of the guardrails of how to think about this because it's not one size fits all. I do think there is some graded guardrails you should really think about, which is clarity over cleverness. This is why it's important when you're going to do something broad.
It's like, because we're not going to be targeted. It'd be really weird if you just started with futures and benefits, our conditioning, when you don't really know us. So you need to be really clear what that broad brand message is. So I think that's number one.
Number two, I just want to mention this because I'm wondering about the AI videos that Matt was discussing is sometimes there's too much emphasis on the possibilities of the creative, not the possibilities of what we need to say. And I think with the creative is like your team's going to be strapped, is you're going to have time to do all this polished work. But yeah, you can use AI to help you get that message across. But what you don't want to do is lean too far to one side where it's like, now the creative is overshadowing the message, right?
Because the best message is the one that gets repeated. So it can be really clear. It needs to have some polish and you need to understand that this is more broad for brand awareness. And you have that mindset, I think you can get your creative team or maybe it's your leadership team, you have to change your mindset.
You can get better feedback on what this creative needs to be for CB. Yeah. Actually, I pulled the classy example for CTV just as, because I thought it was really instructive because they got a lot of attention to June when they ran that bump out for the NBA finals. It was all over LinkedIn.
Every agency that we follow was posting about it. And I had mixed feelings on it. And so I was actually looking at the brand organic traffic on Sembrash about it. They got a big, they did get a huge job in the mechanics.
They went from like, and they do be quite a bit. They went from like 260 to get to 260,000 to 330 to 2000 in June. That's a big job, man. That's like, you know, 25% thereabouts.
And then it immediately cratered right after that. So they got a big bump and then it went down to 240 for the next like two months. So really, they wanted, but I think what happened is like, you know, people saw that Attica there attention, they went to it. And then just like, really wasn't for them overall, it started to check back up, triple back up for them.
But in my opinion, this goes back to like, you want your CTV created. And when you run CTV, you're looking at an asset that again, you're going to run it for a long time. I mean, this is not a static image where you're willing to swap stuff out over and over again to test. Like you want to run the same CTV piece probably for a good amount of time, because you want people to consistently see it, remember you, your building memory structures to go back to all the things that people like the Harrison talk about on when it comes to building brand awareness and memory recall and eventually salience.
So you want to make sure whatever you make past the test of time and stays there. So to your point, Aaron, I think that right now, because they I just create so many possibilities, there's this real predilection to one almost TikTok, I buy every single CTV. And I don't think that necessarily for most people who are going to be running CTV and piloting it for the first time over the rest of this year or next year, it's probably not the best for step. I mean, not everyone here has Coinbase or Doritos advertising.
You can run a big swing like that. And if it fails, oh well, we'll just do the next thing. You know, you want to put yourself in the best position to succeed. Something you brought up Matt, and I think it's going to help us segue to think we should speak about measurement more specifically in tactical fashion.
So with that Kalashi, Kalashi is actually Kalashi. That and like you said, when we think about timeline and like memory recall, like that and premiered three months ago, and I forgot about it until you brought it up today, right? But guess what? I mean, you did.
I'm like, Oh, yeah, I remember that. I know what that is. And what I do, I went to the website, but I forgot what this company does. I did all these things.
And that's what we're talking about with CTV is it's going to take time. And it's going to work how brand awareness works, which is you get that initial first impression, it builds over time, and then all your other marketing should help that customer move down the funnel. So I think that was really interesting, Matt, you have a lot of different POVs on how you should measure CTV. I think it'd be interesting, like geography lift.
I think that's interesting. I want to talk about as a group, but I'll let you run up it. I mean, I'm curious with Kyle actually. How are you guys when you're when you're doing your reporting on CTV, like, what is what is your CMO most interested in?
I'm sure that she is looking at it. We know what your CMO is. We know just for us. So like, what is what is she when you were part of that in a vacuum?
What are you looking out with her or with whoever it is you're pointing it up to? And what are they interested in? Yeah. So I think for me looking at things in platform, it's which video assets on CTV are getting the most number of of of conversions.
Obviously, CDV and GATI metrics are completely different from in-feed. There's no clicks to website. There's pretty much a 99.8% view rate. You have to pretty much close the app you're on in order to not have a full view.
So you can't go through typical metrics. So it's a combination of like, who is the audience that are seeing our ads? Like, what's the volume of like the reach of people in our mid-market audiences versus our enterprise audiences for each of those audiences? What's the number of demo requests or free trial signups or potentially like gated assets on our website?
We look at things in like talking with our data science team of just what's the on-site impact of organic and inbound traffic because obviously there's no associated click with these campaigns. So it is a little bit different reporting than just our typical in-platform analysis and optimization. And I think this is where speaking with our LinkedIn reps about like this post-rebrand launch performance is where they also provided some interesting insights into CTV that aren't immediately available to us in platform. And that's where we were seeing that there was only a small overlap of those users who were seeing both our CTV ads and our in-feed ads.
But they also showed us the influence of those who did have that overlap that we were seeing lifts in click-through rate and engagement rate. We are running some some lead form ads on LinkedIn and the lead form completion rate. Those who saw our CTV ads and then saw our lead form ads, there was a significant jump in lead form completion rate. So that's something that not only am I trying to report on what I can see in platform, but I'm getting those additional it's called behind-the-scenes type of metrics that are showing more influence as well.
So it's a little bit more nuanced than just what we typically do as performance marketers to review campaign performance. I can't just rely on the in-platform conversions. I've got to rely on influence as well. Yeah.
So other measurement things on CTV, I'm a really good nugget there. I want to like un-flush that a little. Because you guys are a PLG company, you're going to see, I think you're going to see conversion things happen probably more quickly running CTV because you have a trial offer. But I think a lot of people will see who run sales side notions.
So you have to have offline conversion tracking set up if you're going to run around LinkedIn. Let's just use LinkedIn as an example. I'm all with your own LinkedIn and I know there's five and I know there's mountain and I know you can hulu. But for most people here, they're going to try to keep it in the same platform because of just a budget, just a budget.
But let's just use LinkedIn as an example for CTV here overall. You have to have offline conversion tracking. You have to get your zappier stood up or work with a tool like Stape or work with your DevOps team or SuckOps team to like stand up offline conversion tracking correctly for yourself for LinkedIn. But Cappy, get it across the age if you use a dream data or a hockey stack or one of those multi-touch attribution or user journey platforms that can give you data as well and you can run conversions through that as well.
But if you really don't have any of those things available to you, then the best thing you can do for yourself is to look at your Google Analytics data and run a split test. Like run it in a certain DMA where you're benchmarking your site traffic, your direct traffic and your brand or organic traffic over a long period of time, go look back 18 months and see what your average business were from that from that certain region that you want to measure to and that you want to run to whether that's San Francisco or New York or Robustner or wherever and then see what the difference is in in site traffic overall like that. That's probably the best way to prove it out in 60 days for yourself. You know, just look at it from that standpoint and see what the difference is there overall what the lift is.
And if you look to my point, what I said earlier, if you want to run a longer test than this and you want to validate it over a longer period of time. So the best thing you can do is run a temporal holdout test assuming that all your other advertising stage, relative to static, spend targeting objectives, things like that, you know, benchmark what you're getting from a lead from an inbound standpoint, from an opportunity standpoint, and then compare once you layer in the CTV look at your cumulative inbound and layer on the CTV spend see how that cumulative inbound changes over time over a 6-9 12-month period and you'll be able to see the difference. So like it's you just put it on the graph it'll be pretty obvious whether you're seeing lift from it or not from that exposure. So I think you need to come in with your execs to your point Kyle, like you're not going to be able to do clicks or and you're always going to be 96, 78%.
You know, so you have to come in with a measurement plan that's going to validate it for you. I think that's one of the biggest challenges is like what does that dashboard look like? What are you creating or what are the two or three bullet points you're putting on a slide to present to your exec team to prove or disprove that it's working? I think I would love to hear kind of the different perspectives here on how you'd pitch that or how you sell that each month because you do have to check in, right?
You do have to share some sort of signal without kind of the marketing regurgitation of just everything and all the numbers for that stuff that we like to look at but that's not something that the executives necessarily understand or want to hear. Who wants to tackle that one? Yeah, I think if it's something that you haven't done before, there's a couple of different things you do have at your disposal when trying to potentially pitch CTV. I think it starts with what are you currently doing in feed?
Whether it's a static asset, whether it's a video asset in feed, report on those metrics, especially if it's something that is product or brand focused. Look at the performance metrics there and what you're seeing in terms of conversions, in terms of ROI there and then use that to say, hey, this is what we're doing in feed. We have an entirely different, or not different, we have a part of the audience that we're not reaching. I know month to month, we'll see an audience penetration on what 30 to 40% maybe lower if budget isn't high enough.
And that's where CTV allows you to reach that remaining 60 to 75% that you're not reaching in feed in a cost-effective way. And you have actual data to start from your in-feed performance and use that as your baseline of this is what we're seeing. This is the influence we're getting both influenced and directly attributed to. Let's test that out on CTV.
It's not like you're coming in with, we've never done this before, so give me money to give me budget to try it out. You have something that's similar and are just saying, hey, let's do something similar. What we've been doing that we've seen success on on a different platform, a different network, a different strategy. So it's a different thing.
You don't have to come in with nothing. Yeah, and I totally hear you there and it makes a lot of sense. And I'm trying to think, you get the buying, secure the buying, and then you're presenting the data. And from you, it's not like audience penetration is a key metric to kind of the volume of reach or breadth over a period of time is an important signal to suggest that we are reaching this audience in this different ad format, but also understanding CPMs and how those compare or benchmark against other channels like our two good data points that seem to resonate a little bit.
I don't know, Aaron, do you have any that have kind of worked well with selling the story or selling the signals to clients? Yeah, I think specific signals we may want to build your case for the business. We're going to use a LinkedIn example, because I think it is a good platform probably to get started is you can actually see where my ads and my pressure are going based on that for every kind of data, right? Companies, job titles, you can use that to build your cases.
In comparison to CPMs and other brand awareness platforms, we can say, well, we're actually tighter with our brand targeting on these type of customers and these type of companies are seeing this brand awareness message and gets a little more powerful and something you can actually observe and track over time as we're saying, like, we're going to run this for a long time to be see a shift of a particular job title, seen our CTV more, and then as Matt's saying, I'll look at more holistically, it's now we're seeing a geography, this job title is coming to the website and requesting product information are asking for a demo. I need to get tie those signals together, you make a really strong story. And I think kind of what calls things is like, those signals are there, but you put those pieces together to like build that narrative and that's what's going to sell it. Yeah, measuring CTV, I think you have short term and long term indicators that you're going to be looking at all the time.
To Aaron's point, for CTV, you're going to be able on LinkedIn in particular, you're going to see the job titles, you're going to see the company, you're going to see the industry, you're going to see locations if you want to get that granular of where you guys are appearing, that should assuage executive concern about, are we getting in front of the right people, LinkedIn's going to give you that data on CTV the same as it would on any other ad inventory that they have. I think another strong thing is to bring the CPM comparison, you will see the reach and you will see the impressions and you will see the CPM and you can literally tell your executives, like, hey, we're people are watching our entire 30 second ad for, you know, let's say we reached, say we reached 12,000 people and we spent $3,000, it's like, you know, 40 cents, 40 cents per person reach basically, like, and to be on TV, to be streaming on TV and to get that kind of exposure for that cost per is going to come off as attractive when you kind of boil it down, especially when you want to look at it compared to actions and events that you're going to be tracking with other ad inventory. So like, in terms of like micro sorts of things, like that, but those are the first things I really focus on 30 45 days in is just that demographic data that costs per action that you want said CPM comparison, those things are going to get your executives happy and giving you the one way that you're going to need to let CTV run longer because it is a longer term play. In terms of like more medium term things, you're going to once you start looking at the offline conversion tracking, like I talked about, like, you have to have capping set up, I've said it four times, but in order to actually is capping important?
And then long term, like you should be presenting this as a P media experiment where you're not relying on in platform data or even software for attribution to really measure the effect on this, you should be able to like run an actual long tail experiment using geo allows or temporal allows those are the two different testing methods to do to validate whether you're actually getting a lift in the primary metric that you want to be affecting, which for most people here is going to be hand raisers. So that to me is those are those are those are that's the short medium long term way to look at CTV measurement. Well, that's kind of blending that qualitative quantitative together, but you have to tell the story with it. You can't just put numbers on any sort of deck and help it resonates.
You didn't mention it. So I have to ask have any of you seen as I actually mentioned a CTV idea? I have impressive. I like it.
Multiple times actually I've seen YouTube TV I've seen. Yeah, I've seen I have seen SRA is for us. Yes, I love it. We talked a lot about it.
The good of CTV. All right, and we talked about like how incredible it is for B2B and like some of the ways that we should think about targeting and kind of more broad reach and just a different avenue. But I would love to kind of dig into some of the challenges that you've had when you first started running to CTV. What are some of the learnings or what the lesson that you kind of walked away with that you were like, I'm glad that I went through this.
But if I was to start out now, this is what I would do differently. Maybe we'll kind of round table it here. Kyle, if you want to kick that off. I think it's something that requires a lot of patience, not just from a like us analyzing the campaigns, but you know, Matt and Aaron have both talked about it like executive and leadership asking questions about what's the ROI?
What are these campaigns doing for us? It is not an immediate turnaround. Like especially if we're working with mid-market and larger companies where the maybe the buying cycle is months and not weeks. Like if you're just starting out with CTV, those are brand awareness plays.
So it does take time in order to see the true impact of those campaigns. I completely agree with Matt. Like some of your assets should be able to run for six to 12 months without feeling stale because they are descriptive. They're not descriptive.
They're yeah, they're kind of they are descriptive of what you do and what your brand is, what your product does. And you shouldn't expect that immediate turnaround. And there are unfortunately marketing teams that have restaurant and that don't have the ability to be patient. So it's something that they may look to forego because they need to see and report on more immediate results.
So I think that is a challenge of times for teams that are a little bit more draft for budget and need to see more quick impact. Yeah, answer the question on if CTV is like a worthwhile strategy, because I feel like that's kind of what we're wrapping up here a little bit with. You have to consider for yourself, are you in a strong enough position as a marketing leader to drive a program like this, know the metrics will be fuzzy there. It is not performance marketing.
It is not direct response. It is brand CTVs. These are brand awareness plays just like YouTube preroll, right? You're not going to get the immediate dopamine hit of a demo request with UTM attribution.
That's not what this plays. So you're not in a position to explain that to your executive team and have them buy into that. You're not going to get this program started. You might as well just kill it immediately.
I think the other thing and Kyle, you know, what you all did at Jasper was was basically the perfect sample. It's like, is your messaging clear and does it resonate? Have you validated it with your customers and your market before you want to invest in creating assets to do CTV with? Do you have a measurement approach in place that can prove its value?
And is your brand in a strong enough place to invest in the right creative assets? And then do you have the creative wherewithal to create an asset that's worthy of CTV? I think like that is that's something you're going to have to either look at an external party to do or if you have the internal design and creative team to do it. But you want to make sure that you are absolutely putting your best foot forward, creating an asset that is going to stand the test of time that people are going to see over and over and over again.
That's not going to feel stale. That is going to be consistent. And that you're not going to maybe see yourself. Think about it.
If you saw that ad a hundred times, would you get sick of it? Would you say that's not still not clear to me, even after the hundredth time? Those are the sort of gut check questions to ask yourself on CTV and with running it. I think a lot of people over-produce an under-deliver, so you have to make sure the message in the ad absolutely lands on the website.
And there's clarity between the two. I think that's a huge disconnect when you get the creative mindset running and the justice flowing, but there's a disconnect to actual user experience when they come to the website when they do have that brand recall and they want to check in. So definitely make sure the narrative is complete across there. Or if you make big updates, you have to recheck your ad.
So it doesn't have a 12-month runway of suddenly your brand or your narrative on your website is pivoted completely or you're starting to introduce new things. I think it's just keep that in mind as well as that you're threading between both of them. Awesome. Then I have two tactical performance points.
I'll give that one and then I'll give it back to you, Em, and to wrap up here is I think when you're thinking about CTV or like a new channel and it comes to measurement and metrics, you should always be asking the question compared to what? So I think with CTV, the metrics are fuzzy. So when we're looking at things like dwell time in LinkedIn, compared to what? Like what does that mean to me?
I think you need to be asked that question a lot, especially when you're doing these new places, new programs. And number two, I would ask the question of, you know, what are you willing to sacrifice the game? I think with CTV, like on LinkedIn, I can gain getting my CTV ad in front of a firm account to the audience. I'm really like confident, comfortable with.
But when I look at other things like the placement list and the data that's available to that, that's like really fuzzy and murky. I don't know what to make sense of. I'm on a Roku TV versus the Weather Channel app, right? You just got to ask that question from performance.
Like, you know, what am I going to sacrifice the game? So I think as you get started, those are two will help you when you get tactical. I love it. Just kind of open it up if there's like a few people listening here, if anybody has any questions, feel free to come on.
But from kind of me walking away from this, it seems like an obvious strategy or an obvious play to introduce into your strategy. If you're planning now for 2026 or thinking about different media channels is like understanding your creative, understanding what we're trying to come with, the message we're trying to convey to the audience, but also the willingness to have that and see here their buy-in. So start now, start having those conversations about what the potential signals would be, how you'd start to measure it, how you'd report out on it, and try to be that internal champion. Because I think that gives you the opportunity to kick this off in January or let's say you are starting to do a budget the top of the year, so Kyle, really appreciate you joining to Matt, Aaron, always incredible conversations with everyone here.
But any last thoughts on CTV or anything that they should be out into your blog? Kyle, I actually have a check question for you to ask. Given what you've done with CTV ads so far with Jasper, if you had to choose between running video view ads on LinkedIn or CTV ads on LinkedIn for the cost reach, etc, etc, knowing that you do not get a lot of click throughs on videos for the most part, what would you choose with a similar asset? Yeah, I'm actually pretty firm on saying I would do CTV over in feed for the cost efficiency and just what I'm seeing in terms of performance.
I do have Salesforce leads being pulled through as a conversion action and I'm seeing plenty of those in the campaigns, also seeing a lot of you through demo requests. So it's not just, hey, they're seeing our ad, it's the last thing they're interacting with, and then they're going to our website and requesting a demo within the next, next period of time. They're also becoming leads, like in our platform, whether they already had been like a lead in our system. I'm seeing opportunities, I'm seeing seeing pipeline being attributed to this because of pulling in CRM data and the cost efficiency is incredibly strong.
We are, I have run the same CTV video assets in feed and they do just as well from like an efficiency standpoint and engagement, but the CPM difference is huge. Like we're talking again, around $40 versus hundreds to get in feed and all of the things considered with conversion rates, yeah, I'm going to take $40 over $200 any day. I am lucky that Jasper's creative team gave me such great assets to work with. I know maybe not every marketing team has that team to work with, but yeah, if you're able to create the assets for CTV that work on CTV that have that cohesive clear message, I pick CTV 99 times out of 100.
Perfect. Great close. I guess another question I'm going to ask offline, but maybe we have a minute here. You start to optimize creative.
How do you start to optimize creative though, or how do you think about that? If you are creating these ads, they do take a lot of time. What are you, are you just, is it a gut reaction of like dwell time or you're just making assumptions? What do you think about?
I think so when all that has to do with what you see in platform, I think so much more with the two with your product marketing and with your customer research and your market research. There's going to be performance in platform and even the conversion data will be so largely, there'll be so much parity there. Overall, like such a little difference and so insignificant in my opinion that I think you're really looking outside of the ad platform to optimize the creative. Yeah, I think talking with product marketing, even looking at on-site performance, like if you have a product and people are viewing different product pages, what are the product pages that are leading to the highest number of demo requests from that particular page?
And that's something that can dictate, oh, we have a better conversion rate and higher volume off of this part of our product. Cool, let's make a product focused ad for people who've been on our website and make that as our next asset. Get feedback from the sales team of what are the conversations they're having with prospects. What are those prospects looking for?
What's appealing? Get that feedback and use that as potential next steps. Yeah, no, it may make the time to sense. I think that's the challenge is sometimes we overthink.
We think too deeply about what it is and sometimes you just got to use some of the data to point that right direction and just have iterations that constantly refine and make it better. All right, well, I think with that, let's wrap it. An awesome hour again. Thank you, everyone that joined everyone that's listening.
Next month, we're actually Megan and Gianna from Champion are going to do a brand demand expand event, virtual events. Excuse me, so we're excited for that. But anyone listening to this will be on YouTube soon if you're listening live. And if not, thank you all.
But Matt, Aaron, Kyle, thanks again. We'll talk to you guys soon. Oh, thank you. Thanks, everyone.