So what has happened to video? We have a huge amount of inventory across the web but advertisers are hardly falling over themselves to take advantage of the unique online format. There are many reasons from the buy side, most significantly:
- Confusion over who should buy? Is it the digital team or the TV team;
- TV buyers unwilling to commit significant budget due a lack of accepted metrics between TV & Online.
But as a publishing industry we have to accept our share of the blame. Most importantly we don’t make it easy for agencies or advertisers to buy across our platform. Here are some of my top issues, from an operational perspective, that I believe are inhibiting the growth of video revenue and ultimately short changing publishers.
The industry long suffers form a lack of consensus around how long, what size and what format video ads should be. In order for an advertiser to buy efficiently and at scale, we have to implement the IAB’s VAST and VPAID standards immediately. Publishers and the IAB have been so slow to agree, but now they have in fact been agreed to, we need a better push for widespread acceptance.
Once uniform standards are applied I expect significant innovation and growth in the sector from both an advertiser and a technology perspective.
The current status quo with little or no uniformity on the creative specs has meant that third party serving has become practically impossible to implement. Without third party serving, growth of video advertising has been stifled and major digital advertising players will not invest without the control and reporting metrics that this allows.
Some have tried, like Eyeblaster, but given each publisher’s own specific requirements the efficiency is removed. We are still in a situation where the vaguely amusing but expensive confusion around asset delivery can still occur: the creative agency promises an asset will arrive in 30 mins. When half an hour passes and the publisher, who’s expecting it to arrive by email, still has an empty inbox, a quick call establishes that there’s a courier in reception with the asset on digi beta!
New formats are also significantly distracting publishers. How do overlays and inSkins fit into the inventory mix and are they best used with or without pre-roll? These are but two of dozens of options and nobody wants to do expensive and time consuming integration work to be left with the “Betamax” of the video ad world and stump up more dev costs, hoping to get it right next time.
Previously, the major players have been able to move the market to get standards accepted, but it must be said that Google’s experiment with overlays, and to a lesser extent pre-rolls, seems to be proving less than successful. Pre-rolls are still the creative currency of choice – it’s easier to unlock some of the TV budget and there is not the classic new format catch 22:
- A new format can’t gain major agency backing without publisher volume;
- A new format can’t generate publisher volume without major agency backing.
Once we have standards we can expect that networks will also begin to take part. There will no longer be the necessity for video and display only networks. Adding networks will add volume to the market and improve the sell-though and revenue generation for publishers, whilst giving agencies easy access to much larger inventory pools.
One important piece is still lacking and needs agreement: frequency capping of pre-rolls. There are few things more irritating than watching the same 15 second ad on every 30 second content clip viewed on a site. Publishers need to be aware and mindful of seriously upsetting users and ultimately driving them away. The IAB needs to set some standards here that are based on extensive research. There is the usual balance to be struck between commercialization and user experience, currently this balance is heavily in favor of commercialization at the expense of the user.
When all is said and done, once the IAB’s VAST standards are widely implemented we can expect the boom of video pre-roll advertising, but until that point, it will continue to limp along. When we have a developed pre-roll market then the time will be right to start to experiment with alternative formats to maximize the video real estate. Up until now, we’ve been trying to run before we can walk.
