Challenge
A private university in Texas needed to increase consideration among prospective students during peak enrollment season. Traditional third-party education segments available in CTV platforms were overly broad, capturing parents, general life events, and loosely related education behaviors. The university wanted higher-quality prospective student reach that could translate to attention in CTV, without sacrificing efficiency.
Strategy
RainBarrel developed a custom audience built specifically for this advertiser and deployed it on CTV through a leading DSP. The strategy focused on:
- Real-world behaviors over inferred intent: We constructed the audience from signals like visits to competitor university campuses and other nearby institutions, filtering for patterns more indicative of active interest in college search.
- Precision over scale: Instead of generic third-party segments with hundreds of millions of users, we built a tighter, custom segment aligned with true signals of prospective student behavior.
- CTV activation via The Trade Desk: Both the RainBarrel custom audience and the third-party education audience were activated on the same CTV inventory, allowing a clean apples-to-apples comparison of performance.
Results
When comparing RainBarrel’s custom CTV audience to other third-party audiences:
- RainBarrel delivered lower CPM by double-digit percentages vs the other third-party segments.
- Completed view efficiency improved with RainBarrel, lowering cost per completed view by a significant margin.
- Viewability and attention increased, with RainBarrel delivering a higher completion rate by multiple percentage points.
Across key attention metrics, the RainBarrel audience performed better without paying a premium for scale.
Why It Matters
This case highlights how audience quality drives performance in premium CTV environments:
- Better signals beat bigger audiences: A custom audience built from real behavior delivered more efficient attention metrics than one built from generic third-party data.
- CTV demands relevance: With higher CPMs in CTV, broad targeting quickly becomes wasteful; a tighter audience with stronger intent keeps spend efficient.
- Custom audiences can unlock incremental performance: RainBarrel’s ability to tailor audiences — even around competitive POIs — gives advertisers an edge in reaching true prospects.
Conclusion
- Custom beats generic: Tailored audiences based on real-world behavior outperformed broad third-party segments on CTV.
- Precision drives efficiency: Higher attention and lower cost per impact matter more than sheer reach.
- CTV activation works: RainBarrel audiences deliver in premium environments like The Trade Desk.