Compared to the giant media market on our southern border, Canada provides a comparatively strong video ad environment, according to Google’s Global State of Play report.
The report, released Thursday, primarily touts the viewability of Google’s video platform, YouTube, as having an 93% average viewability on its video products around the world. That’s up from a reported 91% in 2015. (The report looks at data from Google’s DoubleClick Bid Manager and DoubleClick for Publishers products from Q4 of 2014 to Q4 of 2015.)
The report contrasts this with viewability across the “rest of the web” region by region. Canada’s non-YouTube video viewability charted at 72%. That’s a decidedly middle-of-the-pack score (the highest was 81% from Netherlands, Turkey and Thailand, and the lowest was Italy at 58%), but Canada measured much higher than the 62% rate for the U.S.
“We have fewer content providers, and they’re generally more premium,” said Thierry Bazay, the head of agency partnerships and media platforms at Google Canada. “In the U.S., there’s this mass scale to video, and there’s a ton of video content that’s being put out there by long-tail publishers. We don’t necessarily have that in Canada.”
With more content providers achieving premium status in Canada, there has also been significant growth in premium services, such as private marketplaces.
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“They are relying more on those reservation-type video deals through programmatic pipes than ever before,” said Bazay. “As the marketplace tries to find efficiency through automation, those are the best techniques currently in Canada for those publishers to monetize their inventory.”
Programmatic is becoming the norm, according to Bazay, as a response to consumer trends. According to a study by Activate, in partnership with The Wall Street Journal, the average American increased their video consumption from 165 hours per month in 2012 to 177 hours in 2015. During that time, digital viewership rose 24%, while traditional TV viewership dropped 2.8%.
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“What we’re seeing with Canada is advertisers no longer thinking of programmatic as an inventory source as much as it is a means of buying,” he said. “People have shifted from thinking of it as a channel to thinking of it as a methodology. It’s just part of how we buy now.”
The Global State of Play study also found that 85 of the Ad Age Top 100 have turned to programmatic video on DoubleClick Bid Manager, while programmatic video revenue for TV and media companies increased more than 550% in 2015. Since it became available in September of 2014, programmatic buying on YouTube has grown over 55% each month.
“I think one of the key takeaways is the shift that we’re seeing in consumer behaviour, that multi-screen video adoption from audiences. But we’re seeing the shift in video investment sort of lagging a little bit from the advertiser perspective from a programmatic standpoint,” said Bazay.
“Canada has great opportunity in the video space, specifically on certain cross-device video,” he said. “Advertisers really need to take a look at whether they’re currently engaging in that model, and if they’re not, to really ask themselves why not and how soon?”
