Wurl lights up Advertising Week 2024

At #AWNewYork24, we connected with top marketers, ad pros, and tech gurus to chat about the future of CTV. If you were there, you probably saw our huge billboard in Times Square — it was hard to miss!

The week was packed with expert discussions, cool tech displays, and even a food truck offering themed snacks!

Read on to find out our highlights from Advertising Week!

Key discussions on CTV advertising

One key panel, “Igniting Intent and Action Along the Consumer Journey,” focused on the crucial mid-funnel marketing strategies. Ron Gutman, CEO of Wurl, and experts from Premion, Audience Xpress and Swoop talked about how using multiple screens can help increase viewer interest and engagement, which is essential for successful advertising.

Key takeaways:

1. Understand the importance of the mid-funnel: Brand engagement, consideration, and intent are critical drivers in the customer journey, leading to final outcomes.
2. Discover the power of multiscreen TV in driving consideration: Multiscreen TV has significant impact on delivering mid-funnel metrics and driving consumer action.
3. Learn how to build and measure engagement: With so much attention paid to the top and bottom of the funnel, there is still room to improve mid-funnel strategies and measurement. Marketers need to effectively build and measure ad engagement, consideration, and intent – an area where multiscreen TV strategies can help.

Another interesting session was “Emotions, Contextual, and Beyond,” where Carly Ehrlich from Wurl explored how targeting viewers’ emotions can make ads more effective. This discussion revealed how new technology in CTV can help ads resonate more with viewers by matching the emotional tone of the ads to the programs they watch.

Key Takeaways:

• Innovative contextual targeting on CTV: Advanced technologies are reshaping contextual targeting on connected TV, allowing brands to more effectively reach audiences at scale.
• Role of emotions in advertising strategies: Emotion-based targeting is enhancing ad effectiveness, as aligning ad content with viewers’ emotional states can significantly boost engagement and campaign results.
• Advancing emotional data use: Utilizing emotional data in CTV advertising shows great promise, including the potential for growth and the role of AI in refining these strategies for more personalized advertising experiences.

A glimpse into the future of AI and advertising

During a special Q&A session called “The New Age of CTV Advertising,” Ron Gutman and Matt Scheckner, the Chairman of Advertising Week, discussed how recent tech developments, especially in artificial intelligence, are making TV ads smarter and more targeted.

Ron Gutman shared the story of how Wurl began, detailing how Wurl has become a global leader in the CTV space since its founding in 2017. Recognizing early the shift towards streaming, Wurl pioneered Free Ad-Supported Television (FAST) channels on Samsung TVs. This innovation opened doors for a flood of streaming TV channels, a domain previously dominated by services like Netflix for on-demand content.

Over the past few years, Wurl has drastically reduced the cost and complexity of launching TV channels, enabling content creators to easily distribute their channels over streaming platforms. This move democratized the creation of TV channels, allowing traditional TV publishers to gain access to streaming audiences, ultimately supporting the swift expansion from a single channel to a network of over 4,500 channels distributed globally. Today, Wurl manages this massive inventory of streaming content, reaching millions of viewers monthly in the United States alone, and connects to almost every smart TV platform.

Having helped publishers find their audiences in streaming, Ron discussed how Wurl is now focused on helping the industry better monetize that opportunity by delivering ad experiences that take advantage of all the data streaming has to offer. Ron highlighted the dual nature of CTV — combining traditional TV’s broad reach with digital’s precise targeting capabilities, using unskippable 30-second ads to maximize viewer attention. He also emphasized the evolution of advertising on CTV, focusing on developing interactive ad formats that integrate seamlessly with viewers’ remote controls, enhancing engagement without disrupting the viewing experience.

Fun times in Times Square

Outside the conference building, Wurl made its presence felt across New York with a big billboard on the NASDAQ in Times Square. This was a great way to catch the eye of many people — and show what Wurl is all about. We’re passionate about appearing on the biggest screen in the home, so we found the biggest screen we could to show everyone why bigger is sometimes better.

Good food and illuminating chats

We also brought a bit of fun with a food truck that served New York subs, sprinkling in some local flavor with our CTV offering. This was a big hit, offering a relaxed way for attendees to learn more about Wurl’s secret sauce — sandwiching your ads between the content that makes your creatives shine.

Looking ahead

Thank you to everyone who joined us at #AWNewYork24. Your engagement and curiosity help drive the industry forward. We look forward to continuing these conversations and exploring new possibilities in CTV at next year’s event. Until then, keep watching as the best of CTV (and Wurl!) is yet to come.