Hulu Isn’t the Only Player: How Smart Advertisers Maximize Results Across All CTV Platforms
Major Connected TV (CTV) platforms like Hulu may have the spotlight in the CTV space, but it’s important to recognize not just the overall scale of available CTV inventory but also why a fluid budget is what lends to real efficiencies. As advertisers pivot from traditional TV to digital streaming, platforms such as Hulu Ads offer solid targeting options, expansive reach, and advanced analytics. While Hulu is a well-known choice for advertisers, it is far from the only option available. Savvy marketers who want to maximize their results understand the value of diversifying their CTV strategy across multiple platforms.
Here’s the key questions we’ll tackle:
- What are the potential pitfalls of limiting campaigns to a single platform like Hulu?
- How can spreading your campaigns across a range of CTV platforms enhance your strategy?
- How can I have a fluid budget across CTV platforms and how does that result in significantly improved results?
The Drawbacks of Platform-Specific Campaigns
Many advertisers are drawn to Hulu because of its popularity, its premium nature, and the perception that it’s a safe bet for reaching the right audience. However, focusing exclusively on one platform like Hulu comes with limitations, especially when your advertising goals involve scale, diversity of audience, and cost efficiency.
One of the key drawbacks of platform-specific campaigns is the lack of flexibility in terms of targeting different audience segments. While Hulu offers robust targeting features, it is limited to its own user base. In a media environment where consumers split their viewing time across several platforms, from Amazon Prime and Roku to Sling TV and Peacock, limiting your ads to Hulu could mean missing out on large sections of your potential audience.
Another challenge comes from competition within Hulu’s own advertising ecosystem. As more brands flock to the platform, ad space becomes more competitive and expensive. This often leads to inflated CPMs for high-demand viewer segments, further impacting the effectiveness of your campaigns.
Additionally, relying on a single platform means being at the mercy of its internal algorithms and policies. If Hulu makes changes to its ad serving or increases its pricing structures, advertisers are forced to adapt without having other outlets in their media mix. This rigidity can be problematic, particularly during high-demand periods such as major holidays or political campaign seasons when costs tend to spike.
While Hulu may be a highly attractive platform for advertisers, limiting your campaigns to just one CTV network can reduce your ability to maximize reach and efficiency.
Maximizing Your Reach Across Multiple CTV Platforms
To optimize your CTV strategy, it’s important to recognize that consumers engage with streaming content across various platforms. People watching Hulu are also commonly targetable on platforms like YouTube TV, Roku, Sling TV, or Amazon Fire TV. This multi-platform behavior presents an enormous opportunity for advertisers to extend their reach beyond just one streaming service.
When you diversify your CTV advertising efforts across multiple platforms, you can more effectively tap into different user demographics, and even more economical price points for reaching those audiences. For example, while Hulu may have a generally younger audience, platforms like Roku might appeal to older viewers, and Amazon Fire TV may attract a more tech-savvy, e-commerce-driven audience. You can self-serve advertise on multiple platforms yourself, and by spreading your campaigns you ensure your brand message reaches people across different age groups, income levels, and viewing preferences.
Spreading campaigns across multiple CTV platforms often results in more efficient ad spend. Instead of competing for a limited number of impressions on one platform, advertisers can distribute their budget across different environments, achieving lower CPMs and reducing competition. A diversified strategy mitigates risks and maximizes returns, making it easier to scale your advertising efforts.
That being said, Levy Online does this differently.
Levy Online Makes Your Budget Work Better
Levy Online has direct inventory access to numerous Connected TV and OTT platforms and networks. We leverage their inventory, combined with our advanced targeting capabilities, comprehensive analytics, dynamic budget management, and tailored advertising solutions. As your go-to CTV and OTT service provider, we will help your business save money, generate demand, target the audience you want, and lead to overall business growth.
- Single Platform Budgets (Avoid This!): If you go with individual CTV providers (such as Hulu Ads or Paramount Ads) your budget will be siloed for those platforms specifically. This makes your budget rigid, inflexible and inefficient.
- Performance Based Budgeting: When Levy Online builds your CTV strategy, your budget will be fluid and allocated to different CTV networks and channels based on performance. We place ads on their inventory just the same, but we don’t commit budget to individual platforms at all.
- Fluid Budget : We assign budgets to strategies across CTV inventories, and various CTV networks must compete to receive this budget!
Why Budget Fluidity is Key to Better Results
A key factor in successfully advertising across multiple CTV platforms is budget fluidity. Budget fluidity is the practice of optimizing your spend by allocating resources to platforms where performance is highest and adjusting when necessary to maintain healthy results. A more effective marketer is agile and ready to shift budget allocations in real-time based on performance metrics and platform dynamics.
At Levy Online, unless you have a very specific purpose to advertising only on one CTV/OTT inventory, we exclusively build strategies with budget fluidity in mind. What’s that mean?
If you work with individual CTV ad platforms like Hulu Ads, Paramount Ads or any of the other various ads managers, each of them will have their own budget. They will also have their own setup, their own creative, their own tracking – they’re totally separate advertising tools. This is not what Levy Online does. Levy Online has a flexible budget approach which allows us to continuously evaluate the effectiveness of each CTV platform in real-time. Ad impressions serve out of one budget pool, but only when the target person or household is reachable at an efficient cost, regardless of the inventory! This means you can invest more heavily in high-performing and efficient platforms while scaling back on those that are underperforming.
Hulu may be a super-premium CPM, but if their users convert at a low CPA, then Hulu as earned more budget! Likewise Pluto TV or Discovery+ may be cheaper inventory but if it converts infrequently it may receive less budget.
Let’s say, for example, that your ad campaigns on Hulu are generating strong engagement, but after analyzing performance across Sling, Discovery and Roku, we find that these platforms are delivering a higher volume of conversions at a lower cost. By having a flexible budget shared across these platforms, we can reallocate spend to those platforms in real-time, ensuring your campaign remains cost-effective and results-driven.
Fluid budgeting also helps marketers navigate seasonal trends or industry fluctuations. For instance, during key shopping seasons or political seasons, certain platforms may perform better as users engage with specific types of content (such as holiday movies or shopping-related programming). By moving your budget fluidly between platforms, we capitalize on these short-term trends without missing out on critical opportunities.
In today’s digital landscape, rigid, siloed ad budgets can stifle your marketing efforts. Instead, advertisers should adopt a flexible, data-driven approach that prioritizes budget fluidity for maximizing returns. In a nutshell, Levy Online’s budget fluidity allows you to take advantage of more affordable, opportunistic buys as they arise, optimizing your overall media spend. We simply make your budget work better.
Conclusion: A Multi-Platform Approach Leads to Success
In the competitive world of CTV advertising, it’s easy to focus your attention on a major player, like Hulu. While Hulu is a powerful platform, limiting your advertising strategy to just one platform can result in missed opportunities, higher costs, and reduced effectiveness.
By diversifying your campaigns across multiple CTV platforms, you not only extend your reach but also tap into various audience demographics and leverage different platform strengths. A multi-platform strategy offers greater flexibility, lower competition, and increased visibility.
Additionally, the key to maximizing your results lies in maintaining budget fluidity. Advertisers who adopt a flexible approach, like those managed by Levy Online, can continuously reallocate budget toward the platforms delivering the highest returns. This results in more efficient campaigns and better outcomes.
Smart advertisers understand that to truly capitalize on the power of connected TV advertising, marketers should embrace a diversified, flexible, and data-driven approach across multiple platforms. By doing so, they can maximize their brand’s visibility, engagement, and results.