Four keys to exceeding your goals with programmatic video

Digital video is a massive and growing opportunity. One hundred million U.S. internet users watch online video every day, and online video now accounts for half of all mobile traffic.

The opportunity for advertisers to leverage digital video is a massive one as a result.

With video, brands have the power to evoke emotions, share experiences and build meaningful connections with their audiences.

And with the automation that programmatic brings, brands can scale video like never before.

Automation both streamlines and amplifies the creation, delivery, effectiveness, and measurement of digital media campaigns.

Here are four essential tips for brands that are adopting advertising automation to help better execute their digital video campaigns.

1.Rework your strategy to acknowledge new capabilities

The old way: Legacy television targeting is “mass” by necessity: it’s a holdover from a time of few programming options, when household data and panel-based surveys were the best tools advertisers had at their disposal.

But video is narrowcast, personal and intimate, and digital affords advertisers unprecedented targeting levers.

The new way: By pairing a large universe of video viewers with the targeting and optimization capabilities of programmatic, brands can achieve scale across their target audiences with digital video.

This enables them to increase their effectiveness, significantly decrease waste, and invest more time and budget in effective strategy to create that lean-in emotional engagement that sight, sound and motion perpetuates.

Be value-minded: In tandem, brands should also prioritize quality ad inventory that delivers effective results, which will often come at premium prices.

Remember: you get what you pay for, and a $5 CPM for video is almost surely not premium.

But with the optimization and measurement capabilities of automation, brands can ensure the premium prices they pay for the best placements and audiences are worth significantly more than their weight in results.

ID:30579209
ID:30579209

2.Power your direct relationships

As automation steps in to handle many of the workflow, brands, agencies, and publishers will be left with significantly more time to talk to each other about the two aspects of video advertising that need the most love in the current era: creative execution and digital strategy.

Several innovations make it easier for advertisers to create and deepen these types of relationships.

  • Private marketplaces let buyers and sellers achieve control and transparency, and use the infrastructure to develop direct relationships with sellers.In a nutshell, private marketplaces are a great discovery tool (particularly when brands use data from RTB buys to sniff out potential publisher relationships) and are a glide path to deeper relationships with publishers.
  • Guaranteed orders can replace the manual and antiquated insertion order process that can involve more than two dozen steps to complete for the publishers that brands already have relationships with.In both scenarios, the time saved can free brands to develop more consultative relationships with supply partners, who can recommend the right video products and publishers to match their campaign objectives, desired audiences, and available creative assets.

3. Use automation to access the breadth of video advertising options. 

There isn’t a one-size-fits-all model for video advertising. With so many flavors of it at brands’ disposal, there are options for almost every scenario, including:

  • Standard pre-roll video that capture attention before video content
  • More immersive expandable units for desktop
  • Native videos that take on the form of surrounding content
  • Mobile video that uses location-based targeting to prompts for in-store purchases, or simply takes geographical context into account for targeting purposes

And as more publishers adopt video ad units that don’t require video content in order to run, brands will be able to decouple their video advertising offerings from the availability of video content to pair it with.

4.Invest in creative

Automation lets brands be more effective and efficient with video advertising, but to what end?

  • Better storytelling. Ultimately, brands should let automation enable them to be better storytellers. That means sharing relatable stories as opposed to more transactional messages or calls-to-action.
  • Better creative. It also entails taking advantage of automated targeting to customize creative to specific audiences and platforms.Creative that will run in a rich media placement should look different from a simple pre-roll; creative that stands alone might differ from creative that runs adjacent to other video content; and certainly mobile video should account for the context in which users consume content on mobile devices by being concise and, potentially, silent.

With so many options, platforms, and targeting options to choose from, we’re entering an era of unprecedented storytelling capabilities for brands.

But brands will only be able to put storytelling and context first if they invest in a comprehensive digital video automation strategy and stack. It’ll pay dividends for their ability to create meaningful relationships with consumers.

Subscribe to get your daily business insights

Whitepapers

US Mobile Streaming Behavior
Whitepaper | Mobile

US Mobile Streaming Behavior

5y

US Mobile Streaming Behavior

Streaming has become a staple of US media-viewing habits. Streaming video, however, still comes with a variety of pesky frustrations that viewers are ...

View resource
Winning the Data Game: Digital Analytics Tactics for Media Groups
Whitepaper | Analyzing Customer Data

Winning the Data Game: Digital Analytics Tactics for Media Groups

5y

Winning the Data Game: Digital Analytics Tactics f...

Data is the lifeblood of so many companies today. You need more of it, all of which at higher quality, and all the meanwhile being compliant with data...

View resource
Learning to win the talent war: how digital marketing can develop its people
Whitepaper | Digital Marketing

Learning to win the talent war: how digital marketing can develop its peopl...

2y

Learning to win the talent war: how digital market...

This report documents the findings of a Fireside chat held by ClickZ in the first quarter of 2022. It provides expert insight on how companies can ret...

View resource
Engagement To Empowerment - Winning in Today's Experience Economy
Report | Digital Transformation

Engagement To Empowerment - Winning in Today's Experience Economy

1m

Engagement To Empowerment - Winning in Today's Exp...

Customers decide fast, influenced by only 2.5 touchpoints – globally! Make sure your brand shines in those critical moments. Read More...

View resource