Overview
To get your best results on Connected TV (CTV), a comprehensive creative strategy is essential. Yes, what your commercials look like is important, but to guarantee consumer engagement and drive business, you need to be thinking about more than aesthetics.
Key Considerations
Design: Are you leveraging the below best practices in your design and ensuring your brand's voice is prominent in the creative?
Your creative content should narrate an emotionally engaging story tailored to your specific audience while maintaining your brand's distinct voice.
Alignment: Align your creative strategy, target audience, and conversion point.
If your creative strategy doesn’t take your other campaign goals into consideration, it’s not done yet.
Specificity: Are you producing creative variations that will influence your specific audience profiles to take action?
Create audience-specific messaging and variation. Savvy MNTN advertisers leverage a range of shots, voiceovers, CTAs, and end cards to build a body of creative variations that can serve a range of audiences while maintaining consistent brand voice and identity.
📘 Example: Variation in Calls to Action (CTA)
Shop Online: geared towards Prospecting Campaigns to drive new users to the site.
Shop Now: geared towards Retargeting Campaigns to push users down the conversion funnel.
Shelf Life: Are you regularly refreshing your creatives to avoid ad fatigue?
Refresh creatives periodically. This doesn’t mean you have to reinvent the wheel—changing your CTA or the end card on your ad are both surprisingly effective ways to freshen things up. We recommend refreshing evergreen creatives every 2-3 months and 10-20 days for seasonal creatives.
Test and Iterate: Are you producing new creative to see what resonates with your audience?
Proactively assess your creative's performance at the end of your typical sales cycle, evaluating visit rates, conversion rates, cost per acquisition (CPA) targets, and return on ad spend (ROAS) to inform iterations. You can use the Sales Cycle metric on the Campaign Dashboard to determine when to assess your creatives. The Sales Cycle is defined as the time between the initial site visit and Conversion.
Creative Recommendations
When creating effective video ads for your MNTN campaign, adhering to best practices is key to ensuring your message resonates with your target audience.
MNTN’s Creative Recommendations evaluates your uploaded creative and identifies opportunities to apply creative best practices for better performance. Skip the guesswork on post-production edits — get a detailed list after upload.
MNTN’s recommendations are fully aligned with your growth goals. On MNTN, ads following best practices deliver:
41% Lower Average Cost Per Visit (CPV)
112.6% Higher Average Conversion Rate (CR)
48% Higher Average Visit Rate (VR)
How It Works:
Upon upload, MNTN's Creative Recommendations AI scans your video ad and detects missing key elements.
Recommendations appear directly in the creative preview—you can choose to apply them or launch as-is.
These insights are fully optional, giving you full control over your creative strategy.
Recommendations are automatically generated, with full control to apply them or launch as-is, and are always visible in your creative preview.
Creative Elements Evaluated:
Creative Best Practice | Recommendation |
URL Presence | Add URL
Keep your website URL visible so viewers know where to go next — add it to the bottom corner of your TV ad for better performance |
Voiceover Usage | Add Voiceover
Voiceover helps your audience connect with your message — add it to your commercial for better performance. |
End Card Call to Action | Add Call to Action
End your TV ad with a clear call to action and website URL for 3-5 seconds to maximize performance. |
QR Code Presence | Consider Your Reporting
QR codes only capture part of your TV ad’s impact. For a complete picture of your CTV campaign performance, use your MNTN reporting. |
Phone Number Usage | Replace Phone Number
MNTN can't track phone calls from TV campaigns! To maximize measurable traffic, replace your phone number with your website URL. |
📝 Note: MNTN's Creative Recommendations AI do not apply to Multi-Touch creatives. Instead, review our Multi-Touch Best Practices below.
TV Ad Best Practices
Even if you don’t use Creative Recommendations, following these best practices will help your CTV ads perform at their best.
Topic | Description |
Consistent Logo & Visit URL Visibility
| Your logo and site URL should be displayed prominently throughout the video ad.
You want viewers to take action by typing in your site's URL or visiting your site organically, as we know this leads to better performance metrics (Cost Per Visit (CPV), Conversion Rate (CR), etc.).
By keeping these elements continuously visible, you not only promote brand recognition but also enhance the likelihood that viewers will remember to take action after viewing your ad. |
Use a Strong Voiceover | A well-crafted voiceover can be the difference between your message being heard and your ad being tuned out. It's crucial during commercial breaks when viewers might not actively look at your ad.
A clear, engaging voiceover ensures your message is heard and resonates with your audience, leaving a lasting impression. |
Include a Call to Action (CTA)
| Because viewers can’t click to visit your site, include a visual or audio call to action at the end of your ad.
A CTA motivates the viewer to take action through messages of urgency or direction.
A call to action (CTA) is best utilized on the creative's end card.
Call to Action Examples:
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Aligned Messaging | Align your creative strategy, target audience, and conversion point. If your creative strategy doesn’t take your other campaign goals into consideration, it’s not done yet.
This is also true if leveraging MNTN Multi-Touch. Ensure the messaging is consistent across the video and its linked Multi-Touch group. |
What to Avoid
Topic | Description |
QR Codes | Though MNTN can accept QR codes within CTV ads, it is not something MNTN considers a best practice or recommendation.
We do not recommend running with QR codes for the following reasons:
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Phone Numbers | Though your team can include a phone number in your ad, it is not recommended by the MNTN team. Reasons being:
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Multi-Touch Ad Best Practices
If choosing to run with MNTN Multi-Touch, ensure your creatives meet the following best practices.
Topic | Description |
Logo | Ensure your logo is present on each ad size uploaded.
This, coupled with the TV ad best practices, promotes brand recognition. |
Consistent Call to Action (CTA) and Messaging | Keep the call to action (CTA) and messaging consistent with its associated CTV asset.
When the same message is conveyed across the user's advertising experience, it reinforces the intended message and increases the likelihood of it resonating with your targeted audience. |
Video | Add a portion of your TV ad to your multi-touch ad via the video element in our AdBuilder.
Users retain 95% of a message when they see it in a video, compared to just 10% when they read it. |
Leverage Product Carousels | If offering more than 10 products or services on your site, leverage the MNTN Ad Builder's Product Carousel offering.
Product carousels can effectively showcase multiple products, enhance user engagement, provide a seamless browsing experience, and create cross-selling opportunities, all within the limited ad space.
If your team wants to leverage dynamic media in your multi-touch ads, you must build your multi-touch ads out within MNTN's Ad Builder. |
6 Ad Sizes | If uploading static multi-touch ads, we recommend the following ad sizes for every multi-touch group:
This ensures your campaign can access a wide range of popular inventory, enabling our technology to effectively target your top-performing audiences in the spaces where they consume content. |
Seasonal Creatives
Small creative variations go a long way when supporting seasonal and promotional pushes.
Topic | Description |
Design | Make small adjustments to evergreen creative to fall in line with that holiday season.
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Specificity | Create alternate end cards and calls to action that speak to seasonal promotions.
Leverage variations in voiceover to further highlight the timely promotions. |
Shelf Life | Keep holiday-specific creative in-market for 10-20 days to create urgency and combat ad fatigue.
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Multi-Touch | Ensure your multi-touch creative is adjusted to fit your team's latest holiday TV commercials: messaging, call to action (CTA), promos, design, etc.
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