DIGITAL MEDIA / CONNECTED TV / OTT
Connected TV / OTT.
Reach audiences watching streaming television.
Connected TV and OTT planning and buying with a defined audience, geographic footprint and delivery plan.
CLIENTS WE’VE WORKED WITH
Experience across markets and industries.
View more we’ve worked with
TIER’S PLANNING VIEW
When this earns a place in the plan.
Connected TV earns consideration when sight, sound and repeated exposure can build recognition across a defined market. The difficult buying problem is reaching useful households without paying repeatedly to reach the same ones through overlapping suppliers.
Use CTV for market entry, brand preference, retail consideration and services with a longer decision cycle. It can complement broadcast or extend a video plan. It is a poor fit for a budget too thin to support a credible audience, creative and evaluation period, especially when the only acceptable result is an immediate click.
EXECUTION THAT MATTERS
Best practices before and during the buy.
Define the screen and inventory before accepting the label.
Ask which apps, publishers, devices and buying routes are included. Specify whether the plan requires television-screen delivery or permits other OTT environments. Review reseller paths, inventory authorization and reporting access. “Premium CTV” is a sales description until the inventory requirements are documented.
Plan overlap and frequency.
Coordinate broadcast and streaming suppliers around the market and intended audience. Identify where frequency controls operate and where they cannot deduplicate households across partners. A campaign-level cap in one platform is not necessarily a cap on total exposure.
Reconcile delivery with a separate impact question.
Inspect app/device reporting, available completion data and geographic delivery. IAB Tech Lab’s CTV guide addresses server-side insertion, tracking, inventory authorization and fraud controls. A recorded complete play is not proof of individual attention or incremental sales; evaluate business response and test lift where feasible.
INDUSTRY FALLACIES
Claims worth challenging.
“CTV is fraud-proof because it is television.”
CTV buying still has an ad-tech supply chain and technical verification challenges. Screen size does not remove seller, delivery or invalid-traffic risk.
“A 95% completion rate proves effectiveness.”
Playback completion describes delivery under the measurement definition. It does not tell you who watched, what they remembered or whether a sale depended on the ad.
“Household targeting means person-level precision.”
Household matching and audience estimates have assumptions. Co-viewing, device identity and supplier overlap complicate claims about unique people.
CATEGORY-SPECIFIC APPLICATION
The tactic changes with the business.
Retail and furniture
Build consideration across the real trading area. Show products and the brand early enough to be understood, then coordinate search and store information for the customer who investigates later. Review promotions, stock and store-level outcomes alongside delivery.
Healthcare and financial services
Use clear service or product explanations with approved claims. Household reach can build familiarity, but it should not be represented as sensitive individual diagnosis or financial-status targeting. Choose permitted audiences and appropriate aggregate evaluation.
Multi-market home services
Allocate around actual service coverage and market opportunity. Distinguish a market-building video campaign from an emergency lead-capture campaign. Compare outcome changes with capacity, seasonality and concurrent activity before assigning credit.
YOUR DATA / BETTER BUYING DECISIONS
Put customer insight to work.
Use approved household analysis to plan reach and inspect available matching; household associations cannot identify who watched or prove additional sales. TIER plans and coordinates CRM analysis, address hygiene and approved appends with the client’s existing providers. Separate observed first-party records, licensed appended attributes and modeled audience inferences. Agree on provenance, freshness, permitted use, match coverage and fees before buying. Use eligible data to support allocation, appropriate customer exclusions and outcome analysis. For activation, purchased or appended contact identifiers are not automatically eligible for Google Customer Match; its policy requires information collected in a first-party context. Sensitive-category and platform restrictions still apply.
QUESTIONS BEFORE COMMITTING BUDGET
What a buyer should ask.
- Which publishers, apps and devices can receive this buy?
- What does the seller mean by premium, targeted and completed?
- How much duplication can we measure or control across suppliers?
- What is the impact question beyond counting delivered plays?
PRIMARY REFERENCES
The mechanics behind the guidance.
References for platform rules and measurement definitions. The planning recommendations and category examples are TIER’s judgments, to be adapted to the client’s brief.
Sources reviewed October 7, 2026.
LET’S TALK MEDIA
What are you trying to achieve?
Tell us about your business, the markets you serve, and what your advertising needs to accomplish. We will discuss where TIER can help with planning, buying, and campaign management.