Keep Your Eyes Wide Open with Online Video

Video advertising has exploded, growing 42.4% from 2014 to 2015, according to eMarketer. The market is also expected to double by 2019.

Drilling down further, programmatic video is growing even faster. With 70% year-over-year growth, video is the swiftest-growing segment in programmatic. It may not be a surprise that this expansion has attracted charlatans and fraudsters, which is why you need a reputable partner to make sure you’re getting what you’re paying for.

If anything though, the hype around online video has been understated. This is a huge opportunity for brand marketers to connect with audiences using sight, sound, motion and data. Suddenly, the monopoly that television has held over visual storytelling all of these years has been broken. The upshot is if you never considered advertising TV because of the cost, that barrier has been eliminated. So, approach the video market with enthusiasm but be sure you’re going into it with unclouded vision.

Sea change in viewing habits

The old image we have of TV in which a family gathers around the living room to passively is long gone. Think about it: Today, consumers are active participants in their content experience. They get to choose the place, time, and device every time they want to consume content.

Some 87% of consumers use a second-screen device while watching TV, according to a 2015 Accenture survey. On average, U.S. adults spend about five and a half hours watching video every day. The portion of that video viewed on digital devices keeps climbing. In 2011, it was only 21 minutes. In 2015, it was one hour, 16 minutes. Things are changing quickly.

The lure of online video

Even in 2016, demographics are still the primary metric for TV advertising. By contrast, online video lets marketers use first-, second- and third-party data to target by interest so audiences are apt to be more receptive to messages. Because they are using data to better target, marketers can invest more in the video content and messaging to make it more relevant to those consumers who have that specific interest.

A year or two ago, mobile viewing was a challenge for marketers looking to include video in their overall campaign. That’s because cross-device targeting wasn’t yet refined. If a consumer watched a video at night on her tablet, for instance, you wouldn’t necessarily know that she had also searched for your product category early that day on her desktop. Now that linkage is possible and constantly improving.

On the advertising side, we’re seeing a clear evolution. A couple of years ago, online video was primarily used for direct response. Now, we’re seeing a lot of branding ads as well.

Fraud and viewability

All of this is great news for marketers, but buyers must approach video with eyes wide open. Fraud is a real issue in the market, and it matters who you choose to partner with (and who that partner partners with, and so on) and what type of measurement, attribution and reporting you’re getting from folks who say your ads are being viewed.

It’s critical that an advertiser focuses on the metrics that matter to their business and every video campaign. As my colleague Ethan has discussed before, viewability is never the end goal but should be a consideration in the mix of what’s trying to be achieved. The industry viewability standard now is that if 50% of a video ad was visible for two seconds, it’s considered viewable. If you’re not reaching that threshold, then you shouldn’t have to pay for that impression.

Another metric to watch is the AVOC rate. AVOC stands for audibility and viewability on completion, which is some fancy jargon for saying that the audio and video played through to the end of the ad. That’s a very useful metric because if the video and audio were still playing at the end of ad, then the consumer was probably actually watching it. The problem is that different vendors will often give different ratings for such metrics. It’s not uncommon, for instance, to see a viewability rate of 70% and 30% come out of the same campaign from different third parties.

That’s why you really need a trusted partner to help sort out the metrics and make you feel comfortable with them. Online video is a great vehicle for expanding your marketing, but it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s imperative to work with those who take a holistic approach to help get the most out of this fast-growing medium.

Watch the video below for more on this topic from my colleague Ethan Lubka.

About Amobee

Founded in 2005, Amobee is an advertising platform that understands how people consume content. Our goal is to optimize outcomes for advertisers and media companies, while providing a better consumer experience. Through our platform, we help customers further their audience development, optimize their cross channel performance across all TV, connected TV, and digital media, and drive new customer growth through detailed analytics and reporting. Amobee is a wholly owned subsidiary of Tremor International, a collection of brands built to unite creativity, data and technology across the open internet.

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