Steer Your TV Campaign Like a Trader: the CPM Simulator and Multi-Strategy Bidding

When you buy connected-TV inventory programmatically, the max CPM you bid is not just a price — it decides which households you can buy at all. On the TV4 private marketplace, every auction carries a price floor, and the floors move: audience-enriched auctions (high-earning homeowners, in-market decoration audiences) floor higher than the base deal. Bid low and you're not "getting a bargain" — you're locked out of the premium end of the pool entirely.

We learned this the empirical way, running live flights through Cogny's TV campaigns. Today we're shipping what we learned as product: multi-strategy bidding and a CPM delivery simulator built into every live campaign card.

What the data showed

Our reference flight (a furniture retailer's campaign in southern Sweden) runs two bid strategies side by side: a general tier on TV4's first-party geo deal, and a premium tier targeting a home-decoration audience at a higher CPM.

The funnel data surprised us: the premium strategy — bidding higher — hit "bid below floor" twice as often as the general one (655 vs 316 discarded bids in a day). That's not a bug. Audience-enriched inventory carries floors roughly 1.35× the base deal, so the higher bid was unlocking auctions the general tier never even qualified for. Raising a CPM doesn't just win more of the same inventory; it progressively opens the premium end of the market.

That's exactly the kind of trade-off a person can't eyeball from a bid number — so we built the simulator.

The delivery simulator

Every live TV campaign's card now includes a per-strategy view:

• One slider per bid strategy. The general tier, premium audience tiers, and RON lanes each have their own Max CPM, their own effective price floor, and their own on/off switch.
• A live curve per strategy showing simulated impressions/day as a function of that strategy's own CPM, with the others held at their current settings. The cliffs are real: when one strategy's CPM passes another's, the overlapping audience segment changes hands in the platform's internal auction.
• Budget tiles that answer the question that actually matters: at these bids, how many impressions per day, at what daily spend, and does the remaining budget fit in the remaining flight days? If it doesn't, the simulator tells you which levers exist — raise a CPM, allow more airings per household, or extend the flight.
• "What you simulate is what you apply." The sliders aren't a toy next to the real controls — they are the controls. Apply sends the values you're looking at, and the automated bidder honors each strategy's cap separately. Changes reach the ad platform within ~15 minutes.

The model behind it is calibrated on our live TV4 flights: the observed win-rate curve against effective floors, the bid-shading behavior of the exchange (you pay roughly 0.74× your max), audience-data fees, frequency caps, and the household ceiling — TV4 counts one impression per estimated viewer, so a spot served to a family of three registers three impressions. It's a planning envelope, not a promise, and we recalibrate it after every flight.

Multi-strategy: cherry-pick the audiences worth paying up for

Multi-strategy bidding is also how segment targeting works on Cogny TV campaigns now. Instead of one campaign-wide bid, you can run:

• a general tier sweeping the whole geo at a base CPM,
• a premium tier bidding, say, 40% higher on a high-value audience segment (with its per-impression data fee priced into the simulator's spend math),
• optional RON lanes on cheaper national deals fenced by your own geography.

Cogny's delivery monitor watches every strategy separately: each one ladders up against its own price floor when it's starving, respects its own CPM cap, and can be paused or activated on its own — a premium tier is never clamped down to the general tier's cap.

Where this fits

TV campaigns are part of Cogny Cloud. Create a campaign, prepay the budget, and Cogny handles the DSP mechanics — launch, creative transcoding to broadcaster spec, bid laddering, and now per-strategy steering with a simulator that shows you the market before you move a single kronor of bid.

If you've ever wanted to trade TV inventory the way a search marketer trades keywords — segment by segment, price by price, with a model instead of a hunch — this is it.