At Sales Funnel Professor, we get a lot of requests for our CRO expertise, and that work often begins with a common set of top-of-funnel sources: PPC (Google ads), SEO, ABM, Organic Social, etc. and now there’s a new widely available source (within connected TV) via Hulu Ad Manager.
And if you’ve read our blog, you already know that we love to early adopt and work with emerging tech, especially if it can help our clients.
And if you’re already working with us, you know we love a David vs Goliath story (we don’t work for Goliath).
So this has been coming for a while, but now even small companies without venture capital dollars can advertise on television, and that’s pretty exciting!
So read on to learn how to run ads on Hulu.
Before we get into the ins and outs of Hulu Ad Manager, please note that prominent “BETA” label in the logo. This is a new product and we’ll talk about what that means in terms of utilization, but as a funnel builder, you can also infer certain opportunities in that regard.
What Is Hulu Ad Manager?
If you’ve managed or purchased digital advertising, you probably have some degree of awareness that two of the largest companies on earth achieved their market via self-administered ad management platforms: Google and Meta.
So if you’re familiar with those interfaces, you’ll find Hulu Ad Manager very easy to use, especially compared to Facebook’s tool, which has become a convoluted mess.
And keep in mind that while Hulu Ad Manager is a BETA product, Hulu is part of Disney, so this isn’t a startup-driven product that has problems with organizational maturity and capitalization.
What Can You Do with Hulu Ad Manager?
Much like other ads engines, the basic workflow to run ads on Hulu is to create a campaign and then the model follows the other ads engines that came to life in the early 2000s.
In the platform, the goal is to put your video-based ads in front of the right people as they watch their favorite content within Hulu. Understand that your viewers are likelier to be in Hulu’s lowest subscription tiers that contain ads, with a few exceptions.
Like other ads engines, you get controls to help you target the right people. The options more like Facebook in terms of being demographically oriented.
Understand also that the broadest segment you can reach through Hulu are tech-savvy enough to subscribe to non-traditional cable, BUT are not currently willing to pay the extra $10/month to eliminate most ads.
Read into that what you will.
A Hulu Ad Manager Campaign Contains:
The Creative
Hulu is a video ads platform. You can run video ads within Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn as well, but those are often hosted in YouTube or within those predominantly social platforms.
Since Hulu’s ads are often running on a full size TV. To run ads on Hulu, they have to look and sound good in 4k on a wide screen, so the video quality threshold is much higher.
You need 10mbs for video and 48khz audio.
Your video length is a standard commercial: 30 seconds.
The same standard advertising issues from other platforms apply here. If your ad doesn’t make it clear what you sell, how it solves a problem, or who it is for, or what steps need to be taken to purchase, you won’t get the results you need. Our sales funnel audits will help you resolve these issues if needed.
The Targeting
Hulu has great data on where their subscribers live from a permanent address perspective (their billing data) and also where they are physically when watching (via IP address), so targeting by location is very straightforward.
Like other internet-delivered products, Hulu’s viewer apps are also specific to different device types. So every video has to work on what Hulu calls the “Living Room” platform, but you can also include or exclude viewers using Mobile phones or computers.
And then you have interesting demographic information to choose from…Much more like Facebook than Google.
Similarly to Facebook, you have lots of affinity options, but you can’t necessarily zero in on intent or the subset of interested people who also happen to be in the right part of the sales cycle the way you can with Google Ads.
As you read through the demographic options, you’ll definitely find them interesting and more valuable for certain types of business over others. CMOs of B2C products will probably be more excited than B2B heads of growth, especially given the audience is not paying for the higher tier to get rid of ads in the first place.
The demographic settings look promising for credit union marketing in particular or the retail side of bank marketing.
The Budget
Like other ads platforms, you get to set a budget.
Whereas Google, Facebook/Meta, and LinkedIn orient their budgeting at daily levels, Hulu requires a minimum overall budget of $500US.
So if you’re just testing the waters with Hulu Ad Manager, you just need to spread out your budget until you arrive and the same typical “experiment budget” you use elsewhere. If you’re on a small business budget, they allow you to get to a $10/day spend, for example, but you’ll have to run your Hulu ads longer.
What Kind of Reporting Is Available in Hulu Ad Manager?
Hulu Ad Manager only offers essentially one report with two levels of detail.
They call it a “Campaign Report” and you choose to download it in either “Campaign Summary” format or “Detailed Data Report.”
Interestingly, you either download a ZIP file or you get reports emailed to you. There are not trend lines and all the in-app analytics that would you would expect as in other platforms. Perhaps they’re around the corner?
What About Conversions?
If you’re accustomed to digital marketing in other systems, you often use an ad engine to drive someone to your website where they take an action, and behind the scenes, you pass data back to the ads engine that tells it whether or not the person did what you wanted (submitted a form, for example).
With Hulu Ad Manager, there is no concept of conversions at present. So for small companies without Masters of Marketing Research level stats people around, you need to be really cognizant of asking your clients how they heard about you.
If your ad drives at a website with a form, put “How Did You Hear About Us?” as a field and Hulu as an option.
You can also use a QR code with hyperlink that includes a UTM for tracking.
If your ad drives at a phone call, be sure your team is trained to ask how a prospect heard about you. They should be doing that anyway.
What About Support?
Google Ads is probably at its all-time low point for support. Unless you have an enterprise level budget, Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn outsource support of their ads platforms to contractors overseas, who then subcontract to freelancers.
It is very common for these freelancers to not be able to understand your question. If they are attempting to give you “strategy,” it’s driven from a sales script, not anything actually relevant to your business.
Hulu Ad Manager support was actually quite pleasant in comparison. In our testing, we submitted a video that the in-app verification flagged as acceptable quality but their review team found lacking. They contacted us in coherent, polite English and returned correspondence. They do appear to manually review every video, which does take a bit longer than would be ideal.
When we pointed out that we were past our go-live date, they acknowledged the urgency in their response.
What Are Our Overall Impressions of Hulu Ad Manager?
Overall, we found running ads on Hulu very positive.
The user interface is well-organized and unlike Facebook and Google, not jammed up with features of little utility. It feels very clean and the steps required to get your campaign live are clear.
Hopefully, the delay when a video ad goes to manual review will be eliminated eventually. Go-live is very slow compared to other engines where you can be “live” within 24 hours, although Google Ads now spends days “Learning” before actually serving your ads at present.
Some workflows need help. The process for getting the “approved” video swapped for the rejected video was not clear within the app and required more support correspondence, which thankfully was returned within minutes.
The app sends emails to tell you things that you would expect to be told within the platform itself.
It will be interesting to see if they add a conversion feature. Obviously, they don’t want to drive people away from watching their shows, but perhaps a “Email This Offer” button or something similar is around the corner.
At present, you can show a QR code and put UTM code on it to identify Hulu as your top of funnel source.
Stay tuned to our blog when we come back post campaign conclusion with our results.
