CTV Is Ready for ABM, And It’s High Time You Use It

For a long time, CTV was a channel that everyone in B2B found “interesting,” but couldn’t make work for ABM. Times are changing, and the spoils are going to those who move early.

Regarding an unfulfilled promise

In our heart of hearts, every marketer knows that TV screens remain the cream of the crop when it comes to ads. You get a big format, literally, high attention, sight, sound, motion, etc. Then CTV came along and did us one better: it allowed us to individually target audience members. The potential was tremendous.

Unfortunately, it never worked the way ABM needed it to, and that (just as unfortunately) was at a time when companies were finally getting serious about their ABM tactics.

In a nutshell, the problem is that ABM is about accounts, but CTV buying has historically been about individuals. Were you to upload an account list, the delivery skewed heavily toward the largest companies, those with more employees, more households, and more devices. They’d soak up impressions, while the “long tail” of your list would largely stay untouched. You’d end up “running ABM” but really only reaching a fraction of your target accounts, again and again. 

Reader, that’s not ABM.

Additionally, CTV was, and still is, expensive, and it couldn’t provide the optimization levers available in digital channels. The combination of high costs and poor account coverage made it impossible to make the math work, meaning that most ABM teams stuck with channels where they could guarantee precision: paid social, display, retargeting, lead forms, etc.

Useful channels, granted, but very bottom-of-funnel. Which is where ABM kept its head (and essentially only had its head) for too long.

What’s changed now? In the simplest of terms, we’ve found a way to control CTV delivery at the company level.

Making up for lost time

What’s simple conceptually is often hard to pull off practically. To make CTV behave like an actual ABM channel, the solution couldn’t come from one provider alone.

My company, Chalice AI, built our solution into Bombora's B2beacon™, which is a campaign measurement solution from Bombora designed specifically for B2B. For account-based marketing, Chalice's technology allocates ad reach across the account list to ensure reach to the entire list. That pairs with addressable B2B audiences Bombora builds and deploys in CTV (and any other key channel), with measurement for reach and engagement of the campaign at the account and buying group level.

Unsurprisingly, when you expand account reach, you drive performance; even if conversion rates are slightly lower in the long tail, the volume more than makes up for it. If you’re reaching 20 percent of your accounts and converting 20 percent of them, that’s fine… maybe. But imagine reaching the other 80 percent and converting there, too.

We have a B2beacon™ case study with AppFolio, which saw a 27% increase in account penetration and a 25% increase in account saturation, while CPMs dropped by more than 25%. Getting those real-world numbers does a lot for a channel that marketers traditionally think of as being unmeasurable or just brand-focused, in an abstract sort of way.

We’ve seen similar success with Lenovo. They care about enterprise accounts, but they also care about mid-market and smaller companies. Well-managed CTV becomes a way to show up across that entire universe, instead of concentrating spend on a handful of logos.

In total, twelve Fortune 100 companies are currently leveraging B2beacon™. In this environment, it’s hard to overstate the significance of CTV delivering against ABM goals.

CTV as part of ABM’s evolution

Stepping back from the metrics alone, I like to think of this as a growing signal that ABM doesn’t just have to live at the bottom of your funnel. For a long time, ABM has been synonymous with demand capture, leads, clicks, forms, and similar metrics. While that work is important, ABM’s real superpower is shaping how buying committees experience a brand over time.

CTV allows ABM to move upstream. Better yet, it lets you reach people outside work contexts, and your ads show up in moments that are emotional, relaxed, and memorable.

We ran our own ABM CTV campaign during the holidays, and found that we reached people while they were watching Lifetime movies; note, not researching vendors or thinking about ad tech. It meant our brand broke out of the enterprise bubble and connected in a moment that was earnest and intimate. Fittingly, our ads featured a group of misbehaved dogs vis-à-vis one well-trained one to talk about getting your AI algorithms under control.

Point being, not only can ABM use CTV to flex its muscles, priming buying committees that aren’t yet in-market, but it also gives marketers an opportunity to run B2B content that's creative, fun, and experimental. CTV gives B2B the permission to stop pretending its audience isn’t people.

What’s interesting is that this channel also gives control back to advertisers. Normally, new ad products concentrate power with platforms, which decide how delivery works and how targeting behaves. With CTV, advertisers get to decide how evenly their account lists are reached. Combined with the above, that creates an immense opportunity for B2B-focused agencies and teams who really understand ABM and how to deploy it.

And by that, I mean you, reader. CTV is the new channel for you to conquer, right now.

Better get started. Either dive in on your own or with a trusted partner like The Imaginarium to run your CTV for you.