New Partnership Seeks to Address CTV Advertising Gaps

Let’s hear it for the lower funnel: that could be the rallying cry of QSR and financial-services clients this fourth quarter. Amid possible economic softening, the lower funnel is a tried and true performance-marketing path for all kinds of KPI’s from engagement to sales. To more effectively measure sales outcomes from lower-funnel marketing, Attain, a permissioned-commerce data platform (consumers opt-in to data collection and tracking) that powers real-time purchase measurement and outcome signals for brands, has entered into a partnership with Camelot Strategic Marketing & Media.

Attain’s panel of more than 5 million consumers share over a half a billion transactions transparently in exchange for financial tools, services, and rewards. Powered by financial-service apps, retail-loyalty account linking, receipt capture, and survey results, Attain provides deep insights into how, what, when, and where consumers spend their money.

“Attain connects ad impressions to verified transactions against our panel to show advertising effectiveness,” said Brian Mandelbaum, CEO of Attain. “We provide measurement services to brands to prove out metrics such as conversions, return on ad spend, and incrementality.”

Using the Attain platform, Camelot’s clients will be able to more to effectively measure lower-funnel sales outcomes tied to premium OLV and streaming video ad buys, and it can do so in real time.

Attain’s clients include Whole Foods, McDonalds and Carl’s Jr, while Camelot works with Carl’s Jr and Turbo Tax, among others, and has CTV agreements with Hulu, Paramount, Peacock, Roku, Tubi, and Netflix.

The partnership will provide solutions especially for CTV advertising. One of the biggest challenges in this channel is the fragmentation across numerous devices, platforms, and services.

Gathering and unifying data across multiple touchpoints is a major challenge. The path from viewing an ad to making a purchase becomes convoluted. The absence of industry-wide standardization for measuring CTV advertising does not make things any easier. Advertisers can’t effectively compare a campaign’s performance across different platforms and channels.

Mandelbaum compared CTV’s ad challenges to those seen in the retail-media space: CTV platforms are siloed, and no one measures anything the same way and described Camelot as an innovator in providing CTV solutions for its brands. “The two companies seek to unify and simplify the fragmented CTV measurement process for brands,” Mandelbaum said. “Now, they’ll be able to tie a CTV impression directly to their client’s most valuable metric–a sale.”

CTV is a measurement-starved space, he continued. Attain offers a persistent, cookieless ID and the ability to link a campaign to a sale using a first-party identifier. Because this methodology does not rely on cookies and works across all platforms, it solves for fragmentation. “We use sales attribution and incrementality as outcome metrics, a standard and widely accepted form of campaign measurement,” Mandelbaum said.

As with all digital advertising, CTV is no exception when it comes to ad fraud. Bots and fake CTV devices “can simulate viewership tricking advertisers into paying for non-existent or unviewed ad placements,” according to findings from DoubleVerify released in May. The report said that “bot fraud on CTV surged 69 percent in 2022 compared with the year prior.”

Mandelbaum said Attain has guardrails in place, citing the built-in protection in sales attribution and first-party data. “Those fake impressions aren’t going to go on to make sales,” he said. “This will actually help weed out the suspicious channels that aren’t driving lower-funnel performance.”

Launched in beta in July, the Attain platform will enable Camelot to access first-party commerce data sets.