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