What 3 brands learned from their experiments with YouTube CTV

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It’s no secret that we’re in the midst of a digital video boom, as alternatives to traditional TV grow at an unprecedented rate. According to a Nielsen TV and streaming report from September 2022, YouTube is the leader in terms of viewing time.
Additionally, viewers watch an average of more than 700 million hours of YouTube content on TV devices every day, according to a report prepared by the platform earlier this year.



An analog TV with two knobs and an antenna has a red cambodia phone number material growth arrow overlaid across the front. A stat reads: Viewers watch a daily average of over 700 million hours of YouTube content on TV devices.

This level of engagement influences audience perception of ads. In a new study, Google found that viewers agree that YouTube ads displayed on the TV screen are more relevant (59%) than ads shown on traditional TV or other streaming apps.
Connected TV (CTV) offers advertisers a powerful creative space to reach highly engaged viewers by streaming their favorite content to their living room screen.

To better understand the opportunity for advertisers, these 3 brands conducted experiments to test how effective connected TV could be for their audiences. Here are the questions they set out to answer.


Does CTV generate results?

On behalf of its Ruffles brand, Frito-Lay North America used CTV to reach some of its core audiences, including young families, snack-tasting seekers, millennials, and urbanites. The marketing team wanted to understand how increasing CTV viewing time contributed to its brand and sales goals.

In 2021, Ruffles ran an A/B test with half of the media budget delivered across typical devices and the other half with a higher allocation to CTV. It then compared delivery performance.

The result? “The increased delivery to augmented CTV cells exceeded our expectations and benchmarks for view-through rates, ad recall, and sales lift,” said Amanda Corral, senior director of paid media strategy at Frito-Lay North America. “And we did it without sacrificing CPM or reach. We were thrilled to make a strong impact while maintaining efficiency and driving higher ROI.”


Can proven creative and audience strategies scale and adapt to CTV?

L'Oréal USA has built its brand on a commitment to being consumer-centric. Across all of its brands, that's meant embracing cross-functional creativity.

It’s also meant constantly honing media and audience strategies, which evolve as brands’ clients do. Over the past few years, L’Oréal USA has followed its clients’ lead and increased its investment in YouTube.

The company honed a tried-and-true approach to creative and reach, and wanted to see how that approach would translate to CTV. So in the summer of 2021, when it was time to embrace higher-format media that drives demand, L’Oréal USA increased its investment in YouTube by 102% year-over-year. “What was interesting was that we saw audience behavior patterns around ad-supported streaming and a boom in CTV that we knew wasn’t going away,” said Shenan Reed, SVP and Head of Media at L’Oréal USA.

The company conducted a meta-analysis of nearly 30 NCS sales lift studies and found that its YouTube activity drove an average 6% sales lift across its campaigns. The company also saw a 6-to-1 return on ad spend on YouTube CTV displays.
Not only did this prove that L'Oréal USA's creative and audience strategies can scale to CTV, but it also made it clear that the majority of the impact was coming from new consumers. This point is important because, coming out of the pandemic, the team knew the company needed to appeal to the next generation of consumers and first-time buyers.

"Our consumer is still in the living room, but they're seeing a wider variety of content, more personal, more current. You can either tune that behavior out or you can choose to show up. And we choose the latter," Reed said.

CTV, does it work for action campaigns?

DocuSign was initially wary of CTV, as users can’t click and convert on the TV screen. However, the brand put those reservations aside and decided to experiment using this channel to increase reach and brand awareness. The company understood the importance of reaching its users wherever they were, including their connected TVs.

“Before this test, we didn’t know there was such a large audience on CTV that we weren’t reaching through other video ads,” said Andy Tack, senior director of marketing at DocuSign.

By running a dedicated CTV ad campaign alongside a traditional cross-device campaign, DocuSign was able to isolate and quantify the impact of connected TV on its campaigns. The marketing team found that CTV ads drove a 33% relative lift in ad recall. Additionally, despite concerns about barriers to action, DocuSign saw a 126% relative lift in conversion from its test sign-ups.

“We can now clearly see the value that CTV has in our campaigns,” says Tack. “Whether we want to increase brand awareness and recall or improve consideration and purchase intent, CTV is a key part of our approach.”

There is no blueprint for a perfect CTV advertising strategy. Whether planning media on behalf of a consumer goods company, reaching new cosmetics shoppers or taking a risk on a new channel, brands of all kinds are showing what can be done. The one thing they have in common is that their efforts were rewarded.