When YouTube launched in 2005, it presented a slew of new possibilities for how individuals consumed their video content.
Now, almost a decade later, the digital videos found on YouTube and elsewhere are commonplace – but marketers and advertisers are still working on the best strategies for presenting ads to consumers consuming video content.
Video advertising company BrightRoll Inc. has pulled together a list of what it believes is in store for marketers and advertisers in 2014.
1) This year, 60 per cent of all digital video ads will be bought programmatically.
Based on data from a Magna Global report, BrightRoll is banking on a greater adoption of programmatic ad buying, when advertisers bid for specific slots of time to show ads that appear just before a viewer begins watching a video.
It says it expects traditional TV advertisers to begin investing in programmatic ad buying for their digital video content, “bringing us closer to closing the gap between the digital and TV worlds.”
BrightRoll is also counting on advertisers who have already converted to programmatic ad buying, betting on them to spend more of their budget on and to use it to expand onto the screens of consumers’ mobile devices.
2) Programmatic ad buying leaves the fringes and goes premium.
While there has been some talk this past year of large publishers adopting programmatic upfronts, this may be the year we finally see it take off, BrightRoll says.
In September 2013, advertisers and marketers everywhere took notice when AOL said it was going to make its guaranteed inventory available through automated platforms – for example, advertisers who signed with AOL would be able to negotiate using preferred rates for space on popular sites like the Huffington Post and Tech Crunch.
This marks a change in how people view programmatic inventory – not just as cheap digital content, but to be as just as valuable as other kinds of inventory. That may push some ad tech companies – especially the ones that can’t bring enough high quality inventory – to turn to mergers and acquisitions to stay in the space, BrightRoll noted.
3) Advertisers will take more advantage of real-time data and more sophisticated measurement tools to narrow the gap between TV and digital video.
As in many other industries, advertisers are going to make better use of their data to figure out what their audiences are watching.
BrightRoll foresees this as the year that advertisers plan for their audiences in real time, measuring and reporting on their results. It also predicts this will be the year the industry chooses a common standard to measure how “viewable” a video is, and while this may not be fully determined on mobile, it’ll also make strides towards determining viewability on mobile devices as well.
And for video platforms that aren’t providing measurement and reporting services, they need to start now or risk falling behind, BrightRoll says.