All I want for Christmas: data to ‘buy better’

Anne de Kerckhove, managing director, EMEA, Videology takes a look at some key trends that will impact online video advertising in 2014 – from the merging of TV and online to the rise of programmatic.

2014 is going to be an incredible year for video advertising. This year, the UK online advertising industry broke records, reaching a value of more than £3 billion, while the online population grew to an average 41.4 million people per month. That’s a lot of eyeballs watching online video!

So as video advertising comes of age, and advertiser expectations around targeting, customer impact, ROI and measurability develop, how can we expect the industry to mature in the New Year?

The TV and online video blend

Convergence is now a reality – and evolving consumer behaviour is at the heart of these innovations, from smarter tablets and connected TVs, to games consoles that double-up as fully-fledged home entertainment hubs.

Viewers today are using multiple devices simultaneously to augment their TV experiences, expecting their devices to work seamlessly with each other. For this reason, media buyers in 2014 will increasingly look to plan across all media in an integrated way, strategically funnelling customers through those channels, taking advantage of changing viewer habits and consumption.

As consumer appetite for video content across multiple devices grows, advertisers are showing mounting confidence in online video as an advertising medium, with TV budgets increasingly shifting, to PC, tablets and mobile. It’s a shift we can expect to accelerate into the New Year, with eMarketer predicting a rise in digital video ad spend from £244 million this year, to £378 million by the end of 2014.

Audience measurement and verification across all screens has been key to making the ‘digital shift’ a reality and is something towards which our industry has made great strides this year. New measurement standards, such as comScore vCE and Nielsen OCR are starting to change the way video advertising is traded, allowing buyers to pay only for ads served to their target audience, across both TV and digital. With audience verification appearing more frequently on media plans in the US, it’s safe to predict we’ll also see this increase on this side of the pond.

Programmatic strategies

Programmatic is going to be the real game-changer in 2014 as current misconceptions are dispelled through education and planners increasingly incorporates it into their media strategies.

Analyst firm IHS has predicted that the European market will be worth €626.5 million by 2017, while we at Videology are seeing up to 50 per cent of video ad impressions in the UK are already being bought programmatically.

‘Programmatic’ will take on a broader definition as media companies increasingly recognise that it doesn’t begin and end with real-time bidding (RTB), which is after all just one commercial buying model applied to programmatic trading.

Programmatic will come to be better understood as “smart buying” made possible by data-driven automation, combined with deep marketing expertise – made more effective through blended buying strategies to optimise results for all forms of buying and inventory.

We’ll increasingly see programmatic encompass both real-time exchanges, and long-term buys to guarantee premium inventory months in advance, providing advertisers with both long- and short-term access to the right inventory, at the right price.

For publishers, it means greater control of inventory and yield management, leading to insight and long term planning, providing the ability to sell space in advance, and at a good price, as well as managing RTB buys in real time. As such, we can expect to see greater collaboration between the demand and supply side as they work together to achieve shared end goals.

Contextual targeting

If 2013 was the year that audience verification stepped into the spotlight, we have to ask ourselves, what will we, the industry, be focusing on as we move into the New Year? One word: context.

Key to securing quality in the digital space is, not only securing the right audience, but equally, it’s about securing the context in which premium advertising is placed. An environment that complements look and feel of an ad, but more crucially the content, is vital in making campaigns more relevant and therefore more valuable.

The emergence of sophisticated targeting tools will mean that advertisers are able to purchase environments that complement and correspond to their ad messages, ensuring they’re appearing in the relevant page, player, and positioning.

In 2014 it will be important for the industry to introduce stronger ways of protecting brands by enabling them to have far greater involvement in the purchase of media. By adding smarter contextual targeting tools to the mix, it creates greater transparency within the industry. Providing reassurances around shifting TV budgets to digital can only be a good thing.

There’s no doubt 2014 will be an exciting year for everyone involved in the online advertising industry, both on the buy and sell side. Just how integrated we’ll see campaigns becoming will be interesting to watch, but the one thing we know for certain is that reliable data will become even more integral to any campaign, whatever the combination of screens.

Only through smart analysis of data and intelligent application can advertisers work to ‘buy better’ to deliver stronger, smarter campaigns in the New Year.