A Newcomer's Guide to Multichannel Advertising
As anyone in digital marketing and advertising will tell you, it’s a multichannel game these days. But for those just starting out in this industry, the experience is more likely to be a monochannel one.
Maybe you specialise in search; maybe social; maybe something else. So, what’s all the other stuff? What do people mean when they talk about contextual? Is retail media just adverts in supermarkets? What is CTV exactly? Alright, wait, so what’s
linear TV then?
Anyway, here’s a nuts-and-bolts channel guide for those wandering into the business with big, blinking eyes and hoping one day to master it all –– complete with conversation starters to get you networking!
If you're looking for more jargon explanations, check out our Adtech Glossary.
CTV
CTV, aka Connected TV, is the term we use to describe the ecosystem of smart/connected screens that access content on the web and via online streaming services. Just as on-demand viewing is booming, so is advertisers’ enthusiasm to reach its audiences. Connected TV appeals to brands as it combines the reach and scale of TV with the targeting and measurement potential of digital advertising, and it has a reputation for greater engagement than traditional TV advertising.
While streaming services such as Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime and others are the CTV services most people think of, they are not the only ones, as CTV also includes free ad-supported services (including Freevee, Pluto TV and Samsung TV Plus) as well as opportunities via niche apps, live sports and gaming platforms. Linear TV, as your granny will tell you, is TV delivered via satellite or cable where you basically just have to watch what’s on. I
know.
Conversation starter:
“I can easily picture CTV spend reaching £3bn by 2028.”
Retail media
Retail Media is all about the emergence of retailers as media networks in their own right. That means they - particularly supermarkets such as Sainsbury’s, Walmart and others, but many other chains too - can offer brands the opportunity to reach audiences in stores and through their e-commerce properties, while also leveraging rich transactional data to target audiences online, via personalised, omnichannel campaigns.
In a time when traditional, third-party-cookie-based targeting methods are widely regarded to be intrusive, retail media gives brands direct access to engaged, often opted-in consumers, including loyalty programme participants. And unlike most advertising, it also offers advertisers the ability to “close the loop” - to track and analyse the entire customer journey, from ad exposure to purchase.
Conversation starter:
“All media will have become retail media by 2030.”
Partnership marketing
Back in the day, brands often worked with affiliates - online publishers who worked hard to generate traffic or sales for you, in return for a commission. Time went by and other organised ‘partnerships’ began to flourish - with creators, customers who refer their friends, publishers who create commerce content, mobile and B2B partners and others. Collectively, they became known as ‘the partnership economy’. What typically unites these partners is that they offer opportunities for brands to talk to audiences in a way that bypasses traditional advertising, and hopefully harnesses the trust and credibility that an influencer, or a well-regarded publisher, or even another brand, has built with their followers.
Conversation starter:
“Traditional advertising is dead.
Strategic brand partnerships are the new paradigm.”
Email marketing
The use of email to promote products or services. This might include newsletters, promotional and transactional emails, and while it may sound old-fashioned, it really isn’t. In the post-cookie age, email is regarded as a significant unique identifier for an individual, giving the email address a renewed significance for practitioners of targeted marketing.
Conversation starter:
“As a channel, email marketing is powerful because advertising in the inbox works.”
Contextual advertising
A means of targeting advertising based on the context in which the ad appears, without the use of any data the advertiser holds on the individual. Today’s contextual targeting is based on AI-driven understanding of signals including text, image, audio and video, and while it continues to build in sophistication and uptake, it is undeniably already one of the leading means of cookieless targeting.
Conversation starter:
“What I hear is that we’re seeing more and more agencies kicking the tyres of contextual.”
Social media
You know what social media is: online platforms on which users can share and create content and connect with each other, and brands attempt to get in on the act too, with a wide range of results. Social media runs through the marketing of every brand at some level. Some have the wit to jump on trends, memes and communities; others use creators to achieve a similar effect. Then there’s video content on platforms such as TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts and others, and targeted campaigns within the broader ‘walled gardens’ of Meta, Amazon and Google, guided by rich user data of a kind not easily found elsewhere since third-party cookies went out of fashion. Some suggest such platforms have lost a little of their charm since their partisan role in the crowning of the current US President.
Conversation starter:
“Facebook remains the biggest social network, followed by YouTube, WhatsApp and Instagram, but did you know six of the Top 15 are Chinese?”
Search
A collective term for forms of advertising and marketing built around search engines, particularly SEO and PPC. Search engine optimisation (SEO), also known as organic search, is the practice of improving a website’s visibility in search engines. By using relevant keywords, correctly configuring the technical aspects of the site, optimising the user experience and building good-quality links to other websites, SEO can improve the volume and quality of traffic the site receives.
Conversation starter:
“Google is expected to fall below a 50% share of the US search advertising market in 2025, under pressure from challengers including Amazon and TikTok (though Google still has 91% of the overall search volume).”
Programmatic and curation
Programmatic advertising is the automated process of buying and selling digital media using technology and algorithmic tools. This involves a real-time auction conducted between a DSP (representing the advertiser) and an SSP (representing the media owner) that takes place when a user visits a website and concludes, within fractions of a second, with the winning ad served on the page. The majority of advertising is now bought and sold programmatically - partly because the majority of advertising is digital, but also because channels such as digital out-of-home (DOOH), CTV, mobile, video and linear television have picked up the habit.
While highly efficient, programmatic advertising isn’t perfect, and grapples with issues such as ad fraud, brand safety and huge amounts of mysterious lost spend - leading to the development of services such as supply-side curation, which packages safe, accurate supply chain data and inventory from the open web.
Conversation starter:
“Supply-side curation allows publisher inventory to perform better within the confines
of the open auction and in custom deals, all without the need for cookies.
At least that’s what I take from it.”
Digital out-of-home
Outdoor advertising, as it was once known. Not just billboards, but urban panels, bus shelters, screens on buses, trains and tube escalators, and networks in bars, shops, petrol stations, gyms and so on. And while out-of-home in its original form was the preserve of the man with big sheets of paper and a bucket of paste, these days DOOH is dynamic and often programmatically targeted - a sub-medium known as prDOOH. You’re right, we need a better name for that.
Conversation starter:
“PrDOOH has reached an inflection point where we can finally discuss it with
the same data sophistication as other digital channels.”
In-game advertising
Picture a racing game. Now picture a billboard beside the track, with an advert for a real brand on it: that’s in-game advertising - or one face of it, at least. There are approximately 3.32 billion active video game players in the world, across mobile and console games, and of course it would be good to reach them with ads, but to do so without making them cross is a tricky business. In-game advertising (IGA) most often involves integrating advertisements into video games - as banners, video ads, even product placement. The point is to reach players in a non-disruptive way, generally to build brand awareness.
