From TV to OTT: Redefining brand advertising with AI and personalisation

The advertising landscape is transforming as brands are moving away from traditional TV to embrace the precision of OTT platforms. While linear TV once dominated, AI-driven insights transform how advertisers reach audiences, making campaigns more targeted and data-driven.

With viewers increasingly favouring streaming services like Netflix, Amazon Prime, and JioHotstar, brands are relocating budgets to capitalise on OTT’s interactive and measurable advantages. As AI reshapes advertising strategies, the future of brand communication is undeniably shifting towards streaming platforms.

The transition

For decades, traditional TV advertising presided over the advertising landscape, allowing brands to buy advertising slots during prime-time shows to reach a wider audience base. This method would permit advertisers to create messages and target a vast population.

However, this type of advertising was beset with numerous issues, especially regarding targeting the right audience. In most situations, advertisers had limited insights into audience engagement with their ads, mostly relying on broad demographic estimations and assumptions. Hence, the degree of precision in audience targeting was low, making it hard for brands to maximise their reach while maintaining authenticity.

The OTT platforms, including Netflix, JioHotstar (earlier Disney+ Hotstar), Amazon Prime, etc, have completely altered the landscape, removing conventional TV from an advertising perspective. OTT platforms allow on-demand streaming of content over the internet. While they represent an ongoing shift in how viewers consume content, they also offer brands opportunities to deliver personalised brand messaging to their diverse audience.

Connected TV (CTV) leaps over OTT because today's viewers can watch content on smart TVs and even streaming sticks such as Amazon Fire Stick, Apple Fire TV Stick, and Google Chromecast. Thus, they allow advertisers to leverage OTT targeting while delivering premium experiences on the big screen. CTV leverages targeted aspects of OTT with the broad-scale appeal of traditional television. CTV offers a unique opportunity for brands to deliver more engaging and relevant ads.

The game-changers

OTT and CTV have drastically altered the advertising business. They offer precision-targeting on parameters such as age, location, or interests, determining how personal and appealing an ad may possibly be. Flexible pricing models (CPM, CPC, CPV) allow better cost control, while real-time data analytics allow campaigns to be optimised almost immediately, potentially improving engagement, conversion rates, and overall campaign efficiency.

It is the best of both worlds—targeted, data-driven, and cost-efficient opportunities for advertising. For cord-cutting and streaming consumers, OTT and CTV have become the new mainstream force in advertising that recasts how brands will connect with their clientele.

AI and personalisation

The OTT revolution would change if platforms seamlessly understood what modern consumers seek and curated content specifically for each user. Have you ever wondered how everything works? Here is how it goes: OTT platforms leverage a data-driven approach backed by AI-powered personalisation to deliver content tailored according to individual preferences.

Artificial intelligence relies on consumer data, digging through past interactions to infer or predict customer behaviour. The AI-powered strategies deliver highly relevant content based on the needs and interests of any particular user. By harnessing behavioural and real-time client data, a company may engage in highly contextualised and meaningful communication, ensuring that users receive recommendations and content only relevant to them.

In the competitive realm, this ability offers brands a better advantage by providing a much more relevant customer experience. The extensive list of recommendations that leading OTT platforms suggest for movies and TV shows demonstrates the personalised experience delivered by AI. The AI models comprehend all the data they accumulate and get better at recommending things over time. They tailor recommendations based on viewers’ viewing habits and preferences.

The OTT hurdles

While OTT offers numerous advantages, it also presents several obstacles that brands need to overcome. The first obstacle that brands face is overcoming an overly fragmented OTT ecosystem. The proliferation of OTT providers, each with its own targeting and measurement tools, makes it challenging for brands to develop a coherent and consistent ad strategy. To accomplish this, marketers should be prepared to rely on cross-platform advertising tools and data integration solutions that enable them to run campaigns across many platforms and synthesize insights from various data sources into actionable suggestions.

Another major challenge is ad fatigue. OTT viewers often skip advertisements, while many brands find it hard to hold audience interest, especially with ad-free subscription options. Brands should develop engaging, interactive, and non-intrusive ads that provide value to their audiences without disturbing the viewing experience.

The road ahead

As data and AI continue to evolve, the line separating OTT and traditional TV advertising will continue to fade away. There is already a hybrid model where companies employ both OTT and traditional TV to reach different audience segments. Traditional TV is used by brands to raise mass awareness during prime time, while they use OTT to target narrow demographic niches in their content.
Advertising is facing a huge transformation, with OTT and CTV platforms leading the charge.

As audiences increasingly shift to streaming platforms, brands are shifting their approach to take advantage of the precision, personalisation, and cost-effectiveness of these platforms. With OTT advertising continuing to take the limelight and traditional TV advertising on the decline, brands will need to excel in targeted messaging—via the right platforms, at the right time, and to the right audiences—to stay relevant and competitive.

The era of advertising is largely dependent on data analytics and AI, allowing brands to innovate personalised, engaging, and measurable experiences with their advertisements. AI and data-led personalisation enable advertisers to deliver highly relevant and engaging content, thereby building higher customer satisfaction and better campaign performance. The future of advertising may witness a convergence of data, AI, and precision strategies that will redefine how brands connect with consumers through both, OTT and traditional platforms.

— Mrityunjay Kumar, co-founder, Mashrise.