Online video platform BrightRoll recently held its Canadian Video Summit in Toronto, the first of what it hopes will be an annual event. Marketing caught up with BrightRoll founder and CEO Tod Sacerdoti to talk about the evolution of digital video and programmatic buying.
I’ve heard the terms “ad network” and “ad platform” used interchangeably. What’s the difference, and which is BrightRoll?
This is the simple question I ask if I’m ever trying to figure it out: are other companies building their businesses on your technology platform? If they are, you’re not an ad network. Ad networks don’t sell technology and they don’t have an open platform for other ad networks to use.
We do sell media — we think it’s an important part of accelerating the growth of the category. I guess that’s part of the confusion. But I think of an ad network as a relatively limited historical business model, and also a lack of technology. It’s not a good way of describing the BrightRoll platform.
Integral Ad Science says impression fraud is a really big problem for in-banner video ads, compared to other digital media. What have you done to deal with fraud?
We are doing everything possible to provide buyers with the tools to avoid buying low-quality traffic. I think the reality is it’s a never-ending technology problem. Every time we create an innovation, inventory suppliers come up with innovations on the other side. So we just have to give buyers as many tools as possible to help them understand what they’re buying.
Viewability will help, but it is not a silver bullet. I think that, as there has been in other categories, there is going to be massive over-reliance on one agreed-upon metric in the business. Viewability optimization is like completion rate optimization: lots of low-quality traffic has high completion rates, but people aren’t actually watching it. Well, there’s also low-quality traffic that is in-view, too.
My general advice is find a brand signal that is not in the ad unit. If you have a measure of performance that has nothing to do with the delivery of the ad, you’ll know whether the ad placements are working for you. That could be conversion into a loyalty program, or offline sales or actual changes in brand recall or purchase intent or brand lift.
BrightRoll was one of the founding members of the Open Video View standard to promote viewability in digital video. Why are you committed to that?
Viewability, as we just talked about, was kind of a hot-button item and we were seeing vendors in the ecosystem use proprietary viewability solutions as a differentiator in market. We and the other OpenVV players believe that if everyone is claiming their video standard is better than everyone else’s, it really does a disservice to the industry. It’s a problem for everybody. So by agreeing on a standard and all contributing code to it, we removed the ability to use viewability as a sales tool against other vendors, and focused everyone’s attention on the broader issue of inventory quality.
Almost everybody has complied in the end — there was a lot of resistance in the beginning, but I think people quickly realized that it was better to not make it the differentiator.
What has BrightRoll done to prepare for the shift to mobile?
We think we’re actually more differentiated in mobile than online, but the problem is that the numbers don’t prove that yet, because measurement doesn’t exist in mobile for audience delivery of video. But a third of the inventory on the BrightRoll platform is mobile, and it will be 50% within the next 12 months.
Speaking of mobile measurement, is ComScore’s new Canadian mobile panel something you’re interested in?
I have been seriously underwhelmed by the mobile solutions of the measurement companies to date. As a large spender, we have done everything in our power to encourage those two organizations [ComScore and Nielsen] to work on it. Until I see a product live in market, and not just a sales pitch, I’m going to be skeptical of the measurement companies in mobile.
I think ComScore has a real, fundamental problem, which is: panel-based solutions don’t work for demographics. Nielsen OCR [Online Campaign Ratings] has Facebook, and Facebook has incredible mobile penetration. What is vCE [ComScore validated Campaign Essentials] going to do in mobile? That’s the real open question.
In digital display, buyers have opted to buy from multiple exchanges and networks to get the scale they want, whereas you’re aiming for a model where everybody comes to you for video. Since video is still new, do you have an opportunity to shift the market?
I would disagree with the premise. I think the trend in display is for people to adopt one or a very few buying platforms to aggregate the inventory sources that they buy from. Three or four years ago in digital display, most media buyers would buy from at least 10, and in many cases 20 or 30 properties. Today, most media buyers are buying on an up-front basis from a very limited number of very large properties, and usually are working with one or a couple DSPs.
If I were to use a display analogy, the companies that we believe have the long-term winds at their back are Google AdEx and AppNexus, which are the two companies that are trying to build unified platforms for buyers and sellers. The ecosystem is so complex that the integration of all parts in a single platform is somewhat inevitable. We’re trying to do that for video.
Watch Tod Sacerdoti’s opening speech from this year’s BrightRoll Summit
