Michael Seiman is CEO and Chairman of Digital Remedy, a NYC-based media buying platform. The platforms and teams help brands manage campaigns across a range of digital channels, including OTT and CTV. I’ve known Michael for many years; in fact, our offices used to be in the same building in Rockville Center, New York.
I wanted to catch up with Michael to discuss his agency’s evolution from a direct response ad network to where it is today and the lessons he’s learned along the way. We then delve into the current state of CTV as an ad-supported channel and the role that Digital Remedy plays in terms of providing marketers both executional functionality and comprehensive attribution models for this and other digital channels.
Many marketers have yet to embrace CTV and video advertising generally, and we trade notes on why some may be hesitant to do so, including confusion over how much to invest in video ad inventory. As Michael observes, part of the problem is that many marketers believe there are only two creative tiers in play: inexpensive base-level creative (such as that often used in direct response OTT advertising) and very expensive creative such as that seen on traditional linear TV. “I think it is a problem that the industry does face that there’s only those two: the high and the low, and there really does need to be something in the middle that looks more like something on the high end.”
Michael and I discuss industries that are currently embracing advertising in the CTV and OTT space and chat about situations where a brand’s messaging may be holding back its campaign performance. We then pivot to a discussion of the value that attribution modeling brings to marketers seeking to understand the behavior of particular audience segments and therefore be able to optimize ad campaigns for them.
Michael is optimistic about the future of CTV/OTT advertising, even if a serious recession manifests itself in 2023. “What’s really interesting is that nobody understands yet that the CTV/OTT space actually is ripe for performance. It actually works — we do see core ROI coming for those clients in CTV/OTT… we have marketers who are literally driving real profits from buying CTV/OTT after we optimize those campaigns and we get it to a place where they are actually converting, actually winning, and actually seeing incremental lift to their bottom line.”
