Prabhvir Sahmey

Senior Director - Samsung Ads

Preparing for connected TVs - the opportunity for advertisers

Of the 200 million households in India that have a TV set, 22 million are Smart TVs.

For advertisers, this is a really exciting proposition which means brands can marry the big screen, the high-quality experience of TV ads with the accuracy of targeting and measurability seen already in digital.

The growth of CTV adoption in India is a clear indication that brands need to take advantage of CTV advertising, and those brands that are willing to invest and learn about this growing media will reap the rewards by being forward-thinking and ahead of the trend.

Such brands include our own clients, like Tata Motors, who were able to achieve incremental reach for their recent Tata EV launch campaign with CTV advertising. The CTV campaign reached 73% of our Total Samsung Universe, amounting to 650,000 households, compared to just 19% who were reached by the linear campaign alone on Samsung TVs.

We also recently partnered with Kantar to produce brand uplift study on CTV, and it was found that the Samsung Ads CTV campaign achieved:

Clients who are willing to test and learn will reap the benefits CTV can offer. Premium services such as Samsung TV Plus offer a curated and brand-safe environment for advertisers - an exciting proposition for video advertisers looking for more premium inventory.

Key to unlocking further growth for the CTV industry will also be access to audience insights, which we are able to provide through our proprietary automatic content recognition (ACR) technology.

This tech enables glass-level content recognition, producing highly accurate, privacy compliant, content viewership insights from our ACR-enabled Smart TVs in India. It recognises what is being consumed, and can identify between streaming services or linear TV. It’s important because we can use it to target against interests (for example, sports viewers) for CTV advertising, to personalize the experience for the TV viewer, and crucially it can tell us whether an ad campaign has reached a TV set before. This means we can truly measure campaign reach and even target unreached TV sets that are relevant for the campaign.

There are millions of Samsung CTVs installed in Indian households and they will become a fantastic source of audience data. What this means is that we can collaborate with advertisers to position content and brands within the organic TV viewing experience, based on data-driven insights. Planning against real behaviors will enable advertisers to achieve better cost-effectiveness and manage fragmentation across CTV.

The Indian CTV market is still young but forward-thinking brands are already proving willing to invest and learn about this growing media. There is much to understand as viewer habits change and their media consumption diversifies. Interpreting what this kind of behaviour means and devising appropriate strategies will be an exciting challenge for all players and Samsung Ads is excited to be leading this evolution of the media landscape.