Here’s What Advertisers Need To Know About Buying Video Online
I’ve written many times about the topic of inventory quality, the importance of working with credible partners and the fact that not all inventory is created equal. There continues to be a widening gap in the perception of pre-roll video quality from buyers, sellers and content owners.
Video is an interesting animal. On the web it is completely unlike traditional linear television, yet it appears to be the same. Many of the players are similar. There are content producers, syndicators, distributors and destinations where video can be viewed.
However, the differences end there. With television, advertisements generally are viewed during a commercial break nested within, or adjacent to, programming in a standardized format within the ‘box’ in your living room.
With online video, the viewing experience takes on many shapes, sizes, experiences and placements. A video advertisement on the web can appear in a banner, before a flash game, as a full page takeover, before or within an actual program (in stream) or as a standalone piece of content (think a movie trailer on YouTube).
These varying viewing experiences make it challenging for the buyer to evaluate the quality of the environment, difficult to standardize rates, and nearly impossible to determine where his ad is running.
Google Integrates Admeld Into DoubleClick AdX, Preps ‘Unified’ Publisher Solution
About four months after Google got the regulatory go-ahead for its estimated $400 million acquisition of supply platform Admeld, the search giant has unveiled the first phase of the two companies’ integration.
Over the next few weeks, Google will be rolling out AdX Connect, which represents the full immersion of Admeld’s clients to the DoubleClick Ad Exchange. Speaking at the client-only Admeld forum this morning, Neal Mohan, Google’s VP of display advertising, also said that the advertiser, buyer, and bid transparency levels in the exchange would be improved, so that they are comparable with those currently provided to Admeld publishers.
In a phone briefing with AdExchanger, Mohan described this as an important step for the two entities and for Google’s growing display business. In particular, this is the first phase of what Mohan said will be a seamless platform around display tools for publishers and advertisers. “We want to move away from a world where there’s the ad exchange and then there’s Admeld,” Mohan said. “Over time, those products are going to come together. You’ll see a seamless product that should be the best yield management tool for publishers.”
Combining SEO and CRO for Higher Conversion Rates
Many Internet marketers get caught up in arguments over the most important strategy to improve conversion rates: search engine optimization (SEO) or conversion rate optimization (CRO). They talk about them as if one must be chosen over the other when, in practice, they are anything but mutually exclusive. SEO and CRO go hand in hand and must work together for a website to be successful.
And what ultimately defines success? Conversions. Whether converting a casual browser on the SERPs to a visitor on your website through SEO or converting that visitor into a customer through CRO, it’s clear that these strategies are tightly linked. Let’s begin by defining the most basic goals of SEO and CRO. The goal of SEO is to achieve high rankings in search engines for keywords that most closely match a user’s query, and the goal of CRO is to increase the number of visitors that are converted into customers. These are obviously simplified definitions, but they demonstrate the close connection between SEO and CRO and the role each plays to improve conversion rates.
Both SEO and CRO focus on website visitors. SEO wants to find prospects based on what and where they are searching and provide them with a reason to visit a website, and CRO wants to create the best possible user experience when they arrive. To succeed in both requires an understanding of the user’s intent, which will also help determine the quality of the visitors. Qualified visitors are far more likely to be ready to make a buying decision than unqualified visitors who may only be searching for information or even be unaware of why they ended up on a particular landing page in the first place.
Read more: ClickZ
LiveRail Launches Brand Safety Alliance For Video Advertisers
SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–LiveRail, the first real-time video ad technology platform for publishers, networks and agencies, today unveiled the Video Brand Safety Alliance, a series of technology partnerships providing advertisers, agencies, publishers and networks with the highest degree of safety available for in-stream video placements.
The launch combines best-in-class offerings from Affine, comScore validated Campaign Essentials, DoubleVerify, Proximic, AdSafe Media, and TRUSTe with LiveRail’s own reporting, analytics, and video ad serving. All of the technology partners are now natively available to the more than 200 publishers, networks and agencies that utilize LiveRail’s video infrastructure technology.
The Brand Safety Alliance gives every player in the video advertising ecosystem access to a holistic view of brand safety. Agencies and networks can now offer their brand partners insight into URLs, semantic page content, and the content of the actual video accompanying ad impressions. In addition, advertisers and publishers can utilize privacy compliance solutions to incorporate privacy notice and choice into their video ads.
LiveRail customers can now take advantage of Affine’s industry-leading image-recognition software to automatically classify and tag the video in which their ads appear. With Affine’s frame-by-frame video analysis technology, advertisers now have the data needed to determine if video content aligns with campaign objectives and brand safety specifications.
DoubleVerify’s technology will provide brand safety targeting data before the advertisement is sent to the video player ensuring brands only run the highest quality environments for all video campaigns. In addition, advertisers can make use of TRUSTe privacy compliance solutions, ensuring they comply with industry self-regulation efforts and maintain consumer trust.
The new technology partners are the latest example of LiveRail’s dedication toward complete brand safety and transparency in online video. The LiveRail Safety Alliance supplements the company’s existing URL whitelisting and syndication management capabilities, ensuring video ads never appear in environments an ad buyer deems unsafe.
Read more: BusinessWire
YuMe To Debut Algorithm To Aid Video Ad Placement
Media buyers are always looking for better ways to evaluate expected campaign performance. Video ad network YuMe on Thursday is expected to debut a proprietary algorithm that aims to identify the best placement of video ads across digital properties.
Publishers such as MSN, MSNBC Digital Network, IDG Entertainment and Glam Media use YuMe’s ACE ad management platform.
The new Placement Quality Index (PQI) measures key performance metrics, including interaction rate, video completion rate, video player size and player on-page location.
A baseline PQI is calculated continuously for YuMe’s Connected Audience Network, so new campaigns can be evaluated in real-time against the average performance of the entire network.
As a marketer’s campaign progresses, the real-time PQI calculations allow YuMe to automatically adjust campaign placements in an effort to optimize performance.
With a continuously updated stream of metrics, the PQI does away with “outdated or oversimplified data,” claims YuMe CEO Jayant Kadambi.
As such, YuMe is selling brands on the promise that their campaigns will reach “the right audience and run on sites that yield the highest possible performance,” according to Kadambi.
Read more: MediaPost
Will Facebook’s Premium Ads Be a Game Changer?
The most successful brands on Facebook share a common trait – they’ve figured out a way to connect with users around a shared interest or passion. They build upon that foundation and success by creating unique and engaging content, encouraging conversations, and adding value. While “likes” can build quickly through word of mouth, they are often accelerated through the integration of the brand’s Facebook address across all key touch points and via promotions and advertising to Facebook’s more than 126 million active users in the U.S. and Canada. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that Facebook was the U.S. display advertising leader for the second straight year according to eMarketer, with $1.73 billion, followed by Google and Yahoo. But with Google nipping at its heels, Facebook is once again looking to change the game, and it starts this month with the launch of Premium Ads, its new ad format.
Facebook’s Premium Ads, announced officially at Facebook’s “fMC” confab on February 29, combines the strengths of Facebook (where connections, conversations, and community flourish) with the triad of marketing disciplines (paid, earned, and owned media so central to every leading brand’s media strategy). Premium Ads not only puts a brand’s page and relevant post in front of the right audience, but it leverages an individual’s connections, i.e., “social context” to amplify its relevance and trust. The result, according to Facebook’s internal testing, is expected to delight advertisers. Specifically, according to Facebook, Premium Ads are:
Read more: ClickZ
