Inside AdRoll’s CTV Strategy: George Castrissiades on AI, Identity, and Omnichannel Impact

1. How has the adoption of CTV advertising influenced your organization’s ability to reach high-intent audiences across multiple channels? 

CTV is generally trending in ways that benefit AdRoll immensely. You have the big media companies shifting toward hybrid ad-supported models that are really attractive to consumers, which is bringing in lots of new audiences. There was an 8% jump this year in traditionally subscription-focused consumers watching at least one ad-supported outlet. It’s not just the young, budget-conscious people anymore, and that gives us more reach, especially amongst audiences that appeal to B2B advertisers. 

2. How do you ensure seamless integration of CTV campaigns with other digital marketing efforts to create a cohesive customer journey? 

We really like to think of CTV as analogous to practicing before a big game or other kind of “in the moment” event. CTV prepares the consumer for an easier decision-making process that is more likely to happen away from the TV screen. For that reason, we have cross-channel capabilities as core to our offering. For example, you can target your CRM lists with CTV ads, then run display ads to those CTV ad viewers. Bringing all channels into a single campaign view makes it easy to track holistic performance while still allowing advertisers to pivot, isolate screens, and pinpoint what’s working.

3. What challenges have you encountered in implementing AI-driven CTV advertising solutions, and how have they been addressed? 

We have a tremendously powerful AI bidder, BidIQ, which works for any impression on any screen. It helps us proactively optimize price without sacrificing performance. For display, it optimizes for performance proactively on engagements like clicks and conversion probability, which is much harder to do with CTV. A big focus for us this year is identifying more actionable key performance indicators for CTV that make sense when training an “intelligent” bidder. 

Another area we’re thinking carefully about is creative generation and optimization. Many of our customers are finding the cost of ad creation to be a cause for hesitation when investing in a new channel. AI can help make video ad creative affordable, but it can’t be at the expense of both the brand and the user experience. Overly artificial feeling ads come across as disingenuous, so we’re thinking of these solutions as facilitators rather than outright creators.

4. What systems are used to map personal devices to households to enhance targeting precision in CTV advertising? 

We’ve found a great partner in Experian for this purpose. They’ve been doing enhanced targeting for a while now and underpin so many major components of CTV ads, so it’s great to leverage their technology. This is a major complement to our household identity solution, which has traditionally focused on resolving identity on the web with things like CRM lists, hashed email addresses (HEMs), and cookies.

5. What ethical guidelines govern the use of customer data in your CTV advertising strategies? 

We’ve leaned in hard on developing privacy-forward workflows for several years now and will continue to do so, even as Chrome walks back its deprecation of third-party cookies. This aligns well with the CTV ecosystem and the use of user-resettable device IDs. We still work directly with so many brands and have integrations with their customer systems, so we work with a lot of CRM data and personally identifiable information (PII). These items are pseudonymized the moment they hit our system, so we’re never holding any personal data. Keeping brands and their customers safe is one of our top priorities.

6. How is your organization preparing to adapt to the projected growth in CTV ad spending and evolving consumer viewing habits?

We feel the industry is largely acclimatizing users to mid and bottom funnel ads. You see more QR codes, more B2B/B2C ads prompting users to download a coupon or take advantage of seasonal offers. That’s good news for AdRoll, because we can build trust between brands and viewers when they understand why they’re seeing certain ads. That familiarity means delivering consistent performance, and we’ll be there with an offering that allows our customers to reach those audiences whenever they want. We’re running at full speed to deliver quality supply, the best service, comprehensive audiences and accurate targeting, alongside insightful, unbiased outcomes.