• Investment Required by TV Services

Historically, this has been the main barrier to entry for advertisers who do not have large budgets, the minimum investment that traditional TV broadcasters asked to advertisers was too high to SMEs.

This model has changed due to various factors that we will analyze below, but those large budgets, which once were a barrier to advertising on TV, have disappeared in CTV.

CTV allows advertisers to appear on the home living room device without the need to undertake such high budgets. Like digital advertising, it allows access to premium content in a premium environment with much lower investments, and in many cases, even without the initial entry barrier that a minimum investment required.

• Production Cost of a Spot for Traditional TV

While digital advertising has allowed for a reduction in the cost of producing creatives and communication materials for a campaign, the production cost of a spot for traditional TV was something that increased the final cost, which, combined with the large investment budgets needed to access traditional TV, created an insurmountable barrier for many advertisers.

Creativity and the creative idea must still be the core of any communication campaign (regardless of the channel a brand uses), but current tools like AI are allowing for a reduction in the production and editing costs of TV spots.

Let’s not deceive ourselves and avoid the mistake made with traditional digital advertising. NOT EVERYTHING WORKS to launch a campaign in CTV. All major platforms, OTTs, TV services, Ad Tech, etc., have pre-established minimum quality standards to ensure optimal quality in the production of the spot.

• Ability to fine-tune communication with the Target Audience

Given the limitations of the two points mentioned above, national "non-top" advertisers felt that the targeting capabilities offered by the "King of Media” (traditional TV) didn’t always align with their needs.

There have always been territorial targeting options within a country on traditional TV, as well as age and gender segmentation linked to certain content/programs. However, these segmentations did not provide the granular targeting that SME advertisers typically seek in their strategies.

CTV allows highly granular targeting, letting advertisers set specific parameters for a campaign from the set up. Thanks to the 1st party data that TV services offering CTV inventory have, this segmentation is available to advertisers, who can even cross their own data with the ones from CTV services.

• Greater and More Varied Offer of Platforms, Channels, TV Services

In most countries, access to TV advertising was in the hands of very few players: Large National Broadcasters, Large International Broadcasters (Majors), and a few more options that controlled all the available TV advertising inventory.

Thanks to the proliferation of new platforms and different business models in recent years, access to this new TV inventory offering via CTV has notably enriched, moving from being in the hands of very few players to being controlled by those same "few players" + new players who have entered the game in this new advertising market.

• Programmatic Advertising Extended to the CTV Environment

Before CTV, there have always been local agencies/players that facilitated buying from the major TV players, but it was not always easy for an SME to understand how and under what conditions they could invest their resources in a TV campaign.

Programmatic advertising, which has been long established in the digital advertising space, has gained ground and become a valid model for the new CTV environment. This model allows any advertiser to access TV advertising inventories via a DSP or platforms that provide access to Walled Gardens.

In the US, more than 50% of CTV investment today in 2024 is being made programmatically or through automated platforms buying to these Walled Gardens.

Any SME can have direct or indirect access (through one of the numerous players specialized in advertising) to this programmatic or automated tools that bring access to buy CTV inventory.

• Long Tail advertisers relevance

This is a fact well understood by Big Tech.

One of the factors that allowed Meta to generate more than $130 billion in revenue in 2023 is having its platform open to any advertiser who wants to set up and launch a campaign by itself within Meta's environment. Globally, it is estimated that Meta has more than 10 million advertisers.

Similarly, advertisers on various search platforms (whether Google, TikTok, marketplaces, shopping platforms, etc.) are expected to surpass 13 million advertisers worldwide this year.

For this same reason, Disney is launching its own Ad Tech platform in the US through which advertisers will be able to access the inventory of all the company’s advertising properties (whether TV or digital).

Likewise, Apple has been working for the last few years on having its own Ad Tech stack.

Amazon has its own DSP and SSP, which allows advertisers to access all the potential and properties of Amazon. While this DSP is not accessible to all advertisers today, there is no doubt that Amazon will follow the same path as Google, Meta, etc., and it will soon change this model to be more open and easier to access for SMEs.