This year, we’re bringing in the end of the year with a series: 12 Days ‘til New Years. We’ll continue our tradition of highlighting the most notable brands and spending across ad tech platforms, consumer media, and B2B industries.
In the spirit of celebrating the innovation, perseverance, and flexibility of advertisers in 2020, we continue our countdown to New Years by highlighting four brands buying OTT ad space programmatically.
4 Programmatic OTT Buyers in 2020
Programmatic OTT has been a big hit this year for brands seeking to maximize impact while facing decreased budgets. The rise in streaming during the pandemic made OTT the ideal avenue to reach a wide audience, and programmatic ensured the right audience was recieving the most relevant message.
The four brands below braved a relatively new ad space by shifting their ad spend to programmatic OTT in 2020,
Everlywell
Everlywell is an at-home medical test service, making it an understandably important business in a year where public places—especially doctors offices—were avoided whenever possible.
The company invested a significant 63% of its annual spend in OTT. Their campaigns do not include linear TV, and instead focus exclusively on the digital space. Everlywell invested in display, video, podcasting, and OTT, making them trailblazers across multiple digital channels.
NerdWallet
Nerdwallet, a financial website offering tools and advice to manage debt, showed up previously on our list of 9 Top OTT Buyers. They’ve made themselves a go-to resource for many Americans looking to improve their financial situation this year.
This year, Nerdwallet invested $9.43 million in linear television and $11.9 million into digital campaigns. Their digital spend covered display, native, online video, podcasting, and OTT. Their spending decisions are markedly different from Everlywell’s, as they spread out their advertising across multiple spaces.
Ancestry
Ancestry.com is a genealogy website that aids users in tracking and recording their ancestry. The site has 3 million paying subscribers and was recently acquired by private equity and investment firm Blackstone.
In 2020, Ancestry placed 74% of their annual spend in linear television. But they also distributed ad dollars across multiple OTT channels. Their OTT campaigns span 50% of MediaRadar’s tracked channels, and are focused on NBC News, TNT, and CNN. This large portion of ad spend going towards multiple video channels is likely caused by their wide audience.
GoodRx
GoodRx is a pharmacy website that spoke to two strong consumer demands in 2020: affordability and online ordering. Allowing customers to compare prices—and avoid COVID exposure by staying home—made them highly appealing to many consumers.
The company spent across TV, print, and digital formats this year, but placed 6% of their annual budget in OTT. Though OTT is a new ad space for GoodRx, they have invested more into OTT options than print, which only makes up 2.9% of their annual spend.
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