Kick back and grab a snack for the first edition of Inside the tvRoom. Raw, unscripted conversations with CTV-obsessed members of the tvRoom Slack community. From expertise to pop-culture, these are the cuts you won’t want to miss.
Introducing Bridget Hall, M&C Saatchi Performance’s Group Account Director focused on digital and CTV advertising initiatives. Bridget has been with M&C Saatchi Performance for nearly 8 years and is their in-house expert on CTV advertising.
In this chat, Bridget dives into the media landscape's evolution, how M&C Saatchi Performance has evolved to meet the needs of their clients, and her take on CTV as a performance channel.
The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Sandra Parker, Sales Director & Head of Leisure at tvScientific:
How long have you been at M&C Saatchi Performance? Have you been there a while?
Bridget Hall, Group Account Director at M&C Saatchi Performance:
I have. I've been at M&C seven years, coming up on eight. So yeah, one of the OGs.
Sandra Parker:
I was going to say that's like 50 years in any other agency or any other sector.
Ryan Gutierrez, Community Manager at tvRoom:
What's kept you? Just out of curiosity. What are a few words that come to mind that's kept you for so long in one place?
Bridget Hall:
It's evolved so much at M&C Saatchi Performance since I started here, so I think having fresh challenges each year is really invigorating. But when I started seven years ago, it was M&C Saatchi Mobile and then we rebranded to M&C Saatchi Performance. Along the way, I've just been able to work on really interesting brands [in industries] like entertainment, streaming, music — and this combination of the ad industry changing all the time, and then these brands also experimenting with their business model, and to me each year there's still something new that I'm learning, so it's helped me stay and build my skill set.
Sandra Parker:
That's awesome.
Ryan Gutierrez:
I'm going to fade into the background on this, Sandra, and let you all continue on. I'd love to follow the journey.
Sandra Parker:
No, I think that's a valid question. I think it's been like — Ryan, you probably wouldn't know this because I don't think you've ever worked at agencies — but it's always been a thing where people are like, “Oh, you want more money, you need to jump. You want this, you need to jump.” And that's always been what I've heard. So when agencies can figure out how to get people to stay long-term, I think it speaks to how well they treat their employees, which is definitely a good thing. And I can't say that all major holding companies can say that either, and we can leave it at that.
Ryan Gutierrez:
I've never been on the agency side, because I come from the influencer marketing space.
Sandra Parker:
So I don't want to take up all of your time. So let's definitely dive into CTV and your thoughts on CTV. So you've been at M&C Saatchi Performance seven, almost eight years. So in the time that you've been there, how have you seen brands utilizing CTV change over that time? Have you seen large shifts? Have you seen more adoption, or less adoption, in your time there?
Bridget Hall:
Yes, so the context has definitely changed. The level of CTV conversations and getting more clients on board with testing really evolved in the last three to four years. But there's still a lot of clients that we work with who are focused on something down the funnel. That could be ROAS, installs, sales — really different per client, but there's a lot of accountability to drive results. What I've observed was that in the past, advertisers knew about CTV or clients were aware of it, but they had just kind of parked it to the side as this is something that big CPG brands or a company with a large budget might invest in CTV for branding. And their mindset was really focused on acquisition channels. It could be search or display. Over time, what's really changed is more of the performance. Brands we work with — [like] gaming apps, streaming, e-commerce — they’re reaching out and are more interested in testing CTV and we're able to educate clients. This really shouldn’t be pigeonholed as just branding. You can use it for full funnel strategies and we can change the way we target users, or what the algorithm is optimizing towards. And then that helps us fit CTV to be custom to your needs and to your KPIs.
Sandra Parker:
That's great. I feel like you've kind of answered this, but one of the main questions that we had was why CTV is important to you. I would say you kind of just answered it. It's good to have a media mix and be like where the people are, but is there anything else you would like to add there as to why it's important or why you'd want brands to consider it?
Bridget Hall:
Sure. I mean, I think of it through the lens of my own personal life and just consumers out there. It's hard to ignore CTV at this point because it's pretty integrated as a behavior. Most of us are streaming some sort of content and a lot of people across different age generations look to streaming for sports or entertainment, just a way to take a break. So because it enables you to tap into a large audience and most people, there's all these headlines from Adweek about this continued cord cutting trend. So to me it's very obvious that it matters, but it still begs the question of how you can make the strategy fit for your particular industry, or maybe you have price sensitive CPA goals and things like that. So that's when clients come to us with questions. They're trying to understand, what can I actually track? How do I drive success here?
Sandra Parker:
Got it. When you're having those conversations with your clients around those sensitive areas like industry specific or CPA goals, what's most important to convey to them as far as CTV goes? How do you approach those conversations?
Bridget Hall:
I think there's some positives lately in the CTV space and the different relationships that we've built, whether it's with tvScientific or other vendors. I found that there's more data and technology that has now made CTV easier to test for people who are realistically like, “Hey, I'm used to running on Apple search and display campaigns where it's clickable and you could drive someone right to the app store.” So I think once you explain the CTV environment — that you can have attribution in place and use IP addresses and certain data points to actually tell a story of after someone was exposed to the CTV ad. For example, did they visit the website? Did they go check out? How much did they purchase? Once people get more comfortable with what is possible in the environment and measurement space, I think it opens the conversation more.
Also, reducing the barrier to entry is important. We try to always look for vendors where there’s not a massive test budget required initially, and we can get the knowledge and learnings before we ramp things up. I never was on the linear traditional TV buying side. My first job out of college was in digital, but I think that's a really exciting emergence. Because there's new technology with CTV, you can get creative with the messaging and also apply some of these items from your digital marketing toolkit to optimizing CTV, which is exciting.
Sandra Parker:
That makes sense and that's very true. I feel like the flexibility of having small test budgets to prove that it would work would probably ease a lot of the concerns for your clients — and for your team, too, because you're the ones who ultimately are making these recommendations, so you want it to work as well.
Bridget Hall:
Yeah, I can understand how if you had come from this perception of TV buying in the past, where you commit upfront and then you get a wrap up. That doesn't always translate well to performance teams that are interested in CTV because it's a high addressable audience. But they're like, “We actually need more check-ins and we need to be able to assess the conversion data and change things.” It could be changing the targeting, or experimenting with the creative. So that's always a criteria when I'm looking for setting up my first CTV test. Or, if you have four or five different vendors, I check questions like: what can we see in real time? How do you approach optimizations? So I think flexibility is important.
Sandra Parker:
That makes sense. You mentioned when you're thinking about the evolving landscape, you think about yourself and your own viewing habits. So I wanted to ask you, how are you streaming TV right now? What is your favorite way to watch TV, if you don't have a cable box in your living room?
Bridget Hall:
Yeah, that's a good question.
Sandra Parker:
Are you watching Hulu? Do you watch YouTube TV? How are you watching TV? Or do you not really watch TV? And that's also an okay answer.
Bridget Hall:
No, I am definitely watching content. It's one of those things where you have to stay in the loop. Everybody's got a favorite show. I'm at the office today and people are chatting about Love Is Blind. And so I'm not particularly loyal to one app, which I think also reflects the market. I use Amazon Prime and Netflix. I also just took out a free trial on Paramount Plus to get a specific show. But I would say I'm usually looking for something like TV shows to binge watch on the weekends, particularly if it's a rainy weekend in New York. Gosh, the latest show that I've been into… There's a few.
Sandra Parker:
Yeah, I want to hear your favorite shows too.
Bridget Hall:
Well, my good friend posts their top 10 and I trust their taste. Lately there's one called Bosch, really good action. Another one that was really fun is Love Is Blind. We had a friend who was actually on the show. And so I'm not usually into reality TV and I think the premise of the show is ridiculous, but in one session, you could watch four or five episodes and be like, “Wow, I’ve totally gotten sucked into these people's lives.”
Sandra Parker:
I agree. That show really does suck you into certain people's lives and then you start following them. And it is actually so interesting. The last season — I forget the girls' names— they started a podcast because they ended up becoming best friends, and they talked about how [being on the show] changed their life because they've quit their jobs and now they focus on social media. I am invested in some of these people's new careers. I think one of them used to be a financial advisor and now she's a social media influencer because of Love is Blind.
Bridget Hall:
Interesting. Yeah, the show catapults their following, and then opens doors I suppose.
Sandra Parker:
It's so interesting and I agree. I feel like it's probably our generation in general. We’re not streaming service agnostic. We spread it out pretty far. We've got YouTube TV and Hulu and Disney and HBO and Peacock and we probably have more and I just don't know it. We have literally everything under the sun because we don't know what we want to watch. We'll cancel one and then resubscribe to another one. We canceled Showtime after a show aired — and then I don't know if we have Showtime anymore. But I completely agree with you. We do the same thing, me and my husband. We watch a show and then cancel it, and then move on to the next and just circle through. And now that we have kids, we're looking for educational children's shows, so that's a whole other thing.
Bridget Hall:
You're like, “Add it to the list of subscriptions.”
I recently read Tubi’s trends report, and one of the stats that jumped out was that, on average, people spend more than $100 a month on streaming services — more than they pay for gas. And at first I was like, “Wow, when you add it together, that's alarming.” But I think I would fall into that group. It'll be interesting to see in different economic times. People are cutting and trying to see where they can save money. One of our clients is an AVOD service, working on the monetization of users. And so we think that's going to be really big. People still want that entertainment, but they're willing to opt into AVOD apps and willing to sit through commercials as long as they can get really good movies and content. So it should amplify that.
Sandra Parker:
It's true, like Hulu and Peacock, I think we have commercials, but we really like the app, so we just keep it. It's true. It makes sense. And I like that you mentioned that trends report. It's so interesting. To be fair, YouTube TV alone is $75 or $80 a month, so some of them are a little bit more pricey, but you pay for it because of the ease of use, et cetera. And also on that note, the success team and my team in particular, one of the things we tend to do when we launch new campaigns is casting a wide net because we don't know what shows people are watching and where we're going to find that audience and then refining from there. And it is always changing. If we have a long standing partner, we could have run Hulu, for instance, last year and it could have not worked. But if Hulu has a new show out or something that's relevant to that audience now, we'll find that it's working now. So it's like we have to be constantly optimizing and trying to find the performant inventory just because of that key point — that people are not loyal and they're constantly changing services depending on what they're watching. It’s interesting.
Bridget Hall:
It is. From crafting a media plan from the client's view, there's been questions that pop up, like “why not just invest in Roku?” or the different nuances between going direct versus programmatic. And what I have found as one of the advantages of the programmatic side is casting a wide net and putting in this criteria. For instance, we're trying to reach X audience or the behavior of a person who might be jumping across different shows and apps. So the element of programmatic is finding the right user no matter what environment or app they're on, versus going to a walled garden like Roku — which can still be impactful, but then you're tackling this audience particularly.
Sandra Parker:
Yea, and I think there's something to be said about using Roku direct or YouTube direct. Obviously they work, and it works really well based on the strategy your client wants to achieve.
So you mentioned the Tubi trends report. How else do you stay on top of the evolving landscape, whether it's CTV or everything? Are you reading the trades? How are you doing that and what are you reading?
Bridget Hall:
Sure. I think it's a combination of reading these interesting reports that are coming out from Roku, Tubi, or even the tvScientific blog. I shop around for good articles or videos to help me stay on top of any new betas coming out. There's also been a lot of M&A in the industry, so Walmart and Vizio partnership. So I think it's a combination of reading the trades and connecting with other advertisers and marketers. The M&C Saatchi Performance team just went to MAU, and before that MAU session, we had a huddle and talked about trends in the industry. So I got to learn a lot about CTV from other M&C Saatchi Performance peers who have run it and tested it for different clients. I think that's a way to stay on top of fast moving trends. There's always a new vendor or something cool coming out, like shoppable CTV ads or interactive ads — things that are ahead of the curve and are not the bulk of what we're buying, but creates ideas and brainstorms ways to help solve brand needs.
Bridget Hall:
We have 4 or 5 folks who go every year. And what I thought was cool was the team doing fireside chats so that, whether it's a salesperson or a head of a different department was going to MAU, they had spoken about CTV, while others were talking about attribution and data analytics. So I think talking to people and actually sharing your stories. It’salmost like a live case study. That's how it worked out. It helps a lot to accelerate your learnings.
Ryan Gutierrez:
Yeah, in the spirit of time, I wanted to ask, this is actually pretty unique, I feel like it’s interesting listening to both perspectives – tvScientific and Agency. Do you have any questions you'd like to ask Sandra that's maybe more tvScientific-focused or CTV questioning?
Bridget Hall:
Sure. Yeah. For M&C Saatchi Performance, there's some clients that have a larger aptitude for testing, whereas others are a bit set in their way and looking at CPMs as high on CTV. So when you address challenges for the performance side, what trends are you seeing that help get more of that budget for testing? That's one question and I'll pause there.
Sandra Parker:
Sorry, I don't fully understand. What trends are we seeing as far as testing goes?
Bridget Hall:
If you are working with performance brands and there's apprehensions on the cost of CTV, or they just aren't sold on the fact that it works as well as traditional digital channels, how do you pitch that to these performance marketers?
Sandra Parker:
Yeah, that makes sense. So there's a couple of things there. The nice thing about our platform is that we have all of the order IDs and we also have the full user path from impression — first impression to last impression. We can see if they visit the website, if they're looking at products, and when they officially check out. So we have every single user's journey that we can report back on to see how CTV is impacting their overall user journey. And then on top of that, we have additional tools that we use to measure things like we can report on website lift as well. So how is the TV commercial running via tvScientific lifting your website traffic? And we can report on that constantly. So that's also a nice tool. If they're not happy with the prices of CTV inventory —which is definitely a valid concern that some of these CPMs are very high — the thing about the CPMs is we're ideally backing into some type of cost per purchase goal or CPI goal. And so my goal is always to find the pockets of performant inventory. So, if we see that we can get performance from a $20 CPM and we're hitting the cost per purchase goals or the CPI goals, then great, we're going to focus on that inventory. I have no reason to want to buy the more expensive inventory if it's not working.
Sandra Parker:
If we're only buying Max and Discovery and Hulu and Peacock's most expensive inventory, then we're definitely not going to hit the goals. So we do like to have a mix. I think that those are all valid concerns and it's just really about showing whether or not we can hit the goals. To be honest with you, if I see that we're not hitting the goal and that we're getting farther away every day, we're not going to keep spending. We're going to have a conversation with you about whether or not it makes sense to stop running the campaign. We want to be partners and we want to create long standing relationships. And if it's not working for one specific initiative, I'd rather have an open and honest conversation about that than get another thousand dollars out of this. That does not matter to me personally, and it doesn't matter to the company and what we stand for. Honestly, there's apprehension with everything. CTV and TV as a performance channel is somewhat new. So I think it's very fair to not be fully sold on something that you've never run before.
Bridget Hall:
That builds a lot of trust when you are willing and able to say, “Look, we're not going to throttle the budget. We're going to test into this.” And then based on your results, ramp up where it makes sense.
Well, the other thing I was going to ask: what type of clients are you working most? And are you seeing success for a particular business model or industry, or is it truly diverse? We pull audience insights all the time for a new business pitch, whether a gaming app just came up, or e-commerce brand selling jewelry. And we're like, “Okay, your audience who's purchasing your product also tends to be spending over indexing time on X, Y, Z streaming platforms.” So it is a clear fit. But I'm curious, since you guys have the actual conversion data and that experience across different verticals — would you say it's better for one versus the other?
Sandra Parker:
It's not a fit for a lot of HIPAA compliant brands. It is not a fit if we cannot pixel your website. And it's not that we can't run an awareness campaign, because we definitely can run awareness campaigns. It's just not our bread and butter. You know what I mean? So if you can aggregate your awareness campaigns on another platform, then I would highly encourage you to do that.
On the other hand, we've found a really sweet spot with gaming clients. Gaming clients work so well on our platform. We also have a ton of e-commerce clients as well, from Brilliant Earth, Charles and Colvard, Crocs, to dog food companies, women's clothing… There's lots of different e-commerce clients. We also have a lot of leisure clients as well, like leisure, entertainment, and technology too.
It really runs the gamut. And it's not that CTV isn't a fit, it's more just like we need to see what your goals are and then we could tell you if it's a fit or not. Let's say, for instance, a gaming client has a goal that's a 30 cent install. We're probably not going to work because we're not a rewarded platform. Since this is TV, we're not going to be able to hit 30 cents install. Even a dollar install sometimes is not doable. And the same thing with e-commerce. For example, we do a lot of business with mattress companies, and that sales cycle is very long because you don't just wake up one day and buy a thousand dollar mattress. If their CPA goal is a hundred bucks on a thousand dollar mattress, it can take a little bit of time to get to that goal.
It can just be a little bit more difficult. It's just about level setting on goals and seeing what's possible, versus the actual product itself. You know what I mean?
But there's other things that really aren't a fit. We've had some where it's like pool accessories or expensive outdoor furniture — I'm talking thousands of dollars per lounge chair. And I'm like, “No.” The people who are buying this probably aren't watching TV at all because it’s probably an assistant who's buying this stuff anyway, so there's slight nuances. But I think the main takeaway is it's about understanding what the goal is and then figuring out what tactics we're going to use to actually hit those goals. But anyway, I don't want to keep you from your internal meeting and I really appreciate that you stayed late.
Bridget Hall:
Of course. This was nice.
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