Connected Television (CTV) is one of the fastest growing advertising channels, and marketers everywhere are eager to get in on the action. CTV advertising refers to the ads seen when watching television through the internet instead of traditional cable or satellite. It includes streaming platforms like Hulu, Peacock or Pluto TV, and devices like Roku, Amazon Fire TV or smart TVs. It’s clear that the channel is driving real, measurable results—CTV ads are delivering 10x more conversions, or desired consumer actions, than traditional TV, while using just 60% of the spend typically allocated to cable ads.
To drive even stronger engagement and performance, marketers are maximizing CTV’s value by pairing creative with matching moments and themes through contextual targeting, leveraging innovations like scene-level analysis to ensure relevance at every moment.
Targeting Journey on CTV, Thus Far
CTV advertising has long outgrown the old playbook of one-size-fits-all audience targeting. Traditional audience targeting focuses on who the viewer is, utilizing demographics like age, gender or household income to create a complete picture. Contextual targeting, on the other hand, focuses on what video the viewer is watching, aligning ads with the content on screen.
A fundamental layer of contextual targeting is video-level insights. These take a piece of content, like a show or movie, and assign it a category—whether it’s a content category like “sports” or “lifestyle,” an emotion-based signal such as “happy,” “sad” or “fearful,” or a sentiment category like “positive” or “negative.” Video-level insights have transformed how brands connect with audiences. Now, there’s an even greater opportunity: aligning messaging within the specific moments that make up a story.
Consider The Office. In one moment, Dwight discovers his stapler has been encased in Jell-O by Jim: a classic slapstick gag. In another, Angela is grief-stricken, devastated by the death of her beloved cat, Sprinkles. Both belong to the same comedy show, but the mood in each is entirely different. For advertisers, treating them as the same moment misses the nuance and risks placing an ad in the wrong place.
That’s where scene-level targeting comes in.
Scene-Level Targeting, Explained
Scene-level targeting uses AI to break longform content into individual moments, tagging each with contextual themes and emotional tones. This allows advertisers to expand the reach of their contextual strategy to a variety of genres in one piece of content.
Instead of only targeting cooking shows, for example, advertisers can use scene-level targeting to also reach specific scenes in movies or series where characters are cooking. For example, a spice brand could run ads during a Food Network cooking program, as well as during a scene in a drama show when the lead characters prepare a meal together. This targeted approach lets advertisers move beyond endemic categories to align their messages with the storylines unfolding on screen.
Context Helps Advertisers Crack the Code on CTV
Driving and proving performance in CTV has been a longstanding challenge for advertisers. Unlike other digital advertising formats like mobile or social, CTV faces two major barriers: strict privacy regulations like the Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA), and the fact that a smart TV is often a shared device. This means advertisers can’t easily rely on personal identifiers or device-level targeting to deliver relevant ads.
The solution lies in what’s on the screen, and that’s where scene-level analysis changes the game. By breaking video into individual moments, advertisers can match campaigns to the exact beat unfolding in real time. It’s the same kind of relevance that makes Instagram ads feel timely and natural, now applied to television.
It also adds more ways to ensure brand suitability by aligning with tonal shifts inside longform content. Scene-level analysis complements video-level targeting by adding another level of precision, ensuring messaging aligns with what’s happening on screen.
A Smarter Path for Advertisers
CTV is already the fastest-growing digital channel, but fragmentation and lack of transparency continue to challenge advertisers. Scene-level contextual intelligence helps solve that equation. It offers scale with precision, giving advertisers confidence that their creative is reaching the right audiences at the right moments. The result is a win-win: advertisers maximize outcomes, and viewers see ads that complement—not clash with—the content they’re watching.
