Kargo’s Eric on Redefining CTV Advertising Through Context, Commerce & Creative
May 22nd, 2025
As seen on Martech Edge
1. How is your organization adapting its media investment strategies to leverage the rapid growth and innovations in CTV advertising?
Kargo is adapting media investment strategies for its advertisers across three key pillars of innovation: context, commerce, and creative. These three pillars represent opportunities for advertisers to do more with CTV advertising than they ever did with traditional TV advertising. CTV is a medium where advertisers can use data-driven ad creation, targeting, dynamic ad serving, and interactivity to create more engaging, relevant experiences for audiences. Tapping into the context of the content around an ad, with an opportunity to sell products and measure the impact of advertising on sales, and to reinvent creative formats is not only exciting, it’s been shown to deliver higher returns for advertisers.
For context we are using scene-level targeting by analyzing streaming video content to serve ads based on specific scenes, emotions, dialogue, or on-screen elements. This has been used by brands like Merci Chocolate to run their ads strategically timed with “giving” moments within a show.
For commerce, Dynamic Product Ads (DPAs) allow advertisers to customize big-screen ads using SKU-level data, geo-targeting, and behavioral insights, producing highly personalized creative variations. Mondelez is an example of a brand that has created ads that allow a viewer to click and purchase directly from the creative. American Eagle Outfitters used CTV commerce ads to pull in different product imagery to personalize ad creative for specific target audiences.
On the creative front, high-impact ad formats—including Squeezeback, Glass and new offerings such as Mirage, Flipbook, and Tiles—maximize viewer engagement by integrating unique ad experiences seamlessly into streaming content, Smart TV interfaces, and standard ad pods.
2. How are you integrating advanced targeting techniques, like scene-level contextual targeting, into your media planning to enhance relevance and engagement?
Traditionally CTV contextual targeting has been performed at the level of an entire TV show, film, or live event. This approach only allows for targeting CTV ads in the stream based on the genre or category for the entire content. Although this is useful in specific scenarios, there are limitations due to the broadness of the method. With scene level targeting on CTV, there are more granular opportunities to drive high levels of relevance and engagement. For example imagine targeting moments for scenes in a video stream as follows: a “credit card swipe” for a card provider, a sports car driving along a scenic mountain route for a new fast car brand, or a happy scene with newborns for a baby clothing advertiser. Every scene in a show, movie, or live event, labeled by keywords, can be a powerful opportunity to reach consumers.
We are also incorporating AI to evaluate content on a much deeper level. Rather than relying only on a show description, we can understand many different aspects of the content including dialogue, what’s present in the scene, even sentiment and emotion.
3. What technologies are currently employed to facilitate dynamic product ads and real-time customization in your CTV campaigns?
Kargo has developed a video technology platform that can dynamically render thousands of variations of a high-definition high quality CTV ad based on unique attributes such as geo-location, audience segmentation, and/or product catalog items. The technology is able to extract only those specific product catalog items from large-scale product catalogs which are relevant for a user in a specific location based on proximity to a store, and then composite the visual image of that product into video content. These dynamically rendered creatives bring an optimal experience to the big screen in the living room, and so can be considered “Television Creative Optimization” or TCO, a next evolution of dynamic creative optimization. In addition to CTV, the technology extends to cross-channel experiences for the open web and social platforms, so the same consumer is reached across several touchpoints for maximum impact. For retailers, this is a game-changer, enabling highly targeted creative variations at scale that would previously have been impossible to produce.
Our Narrative product helps advertisers customize creative even if they do not have high quality video assets. Our AI-based technology uses existing content including display ads and website content to build CTV-ready campaigns that help many more advertisers tap into this channel.
4. In what ways are you streamlining the creative development process to produce high-impact CTV ads without relying on extensive pre-existing assets?
We are truly a company that combines creative and technology in everything we do. Kargo has a global team that includes more than 50 creative designers. These visual designers bring a high level of artistic talent to creating powerful brand experiences across screens. This includes work we do for unique ad formats such as Squeezeback, Commerce, and Glass ads that require different creative designs vs. traditional TV creative. As part of the designer workflow they are using generative AI tools to complement and extend their work.. With Narrative, our team uses Generative AI to create a high-definition high quality TV ad using models for audio soundtracks / voiceovers and a dynamic composite of the still images resulting in a video stream. Another example is the use of generative AI to produce full motion highly realistic video which can be composited into custom creative CTV content built out for advertisers.
5. How does Kargo’s multichannel focus help you elevate CTV performance for your advertisers?
Kargo offers measurement capabilities for CTV that mirrors what programmatic advertisers have had for years for more traditional display and video, effectively extending a depth and breadth of metric driven methodologies onto the big screen in the living room. For example, an extensive set of measurement attributes such as brand preference, purchase intent, consideration, brand awareness, brand lift, ad recall, brand favorability, attention, brand familiarity, ad memorability, store visits, and more are all available when working with CTV. This type of multichannel measurement capability allows advertisers to validate the performance benefits of context, commerce, and creative, while blending branding with performance in an integrated package.
6. How are you ensuring that your CTV advertising approaches remain adaptable to changes in consumer behavior and media consumption patterns?
Kargo is pursuing a multi-pronged strategy to ensure that its approach to CTV advertising is flexible and fluid, aligned tightly with consumer trends and behavior. First, Kargo brings art and technology together to drive results, innovating with high-impact omnichannel ad formats, delivering creative that is literally and metaphorically “out of the box”. Second, Kargo takes social assets like short form video in portrait mode, and repurposes these onto the big screen in the living room, fusing social and CTV into a new experience. Third, Kargo provides contextual targeting at the scene level which is privacy compliant respecting consumer preferences while still delivering a high degree of relevance to what the consumer is streaming. This combination of creative and context platforms honors consumer behavior trends and media consumption patterns in a new way.