Tim Castree is managing director, North America at Videology
If your toilet breaks or your sink starts leaking, who do you call? An auto mechanic or a plumber? Does it matter? They both fix broken things, right?
Obviously, you call a plumber. Why? Because cars are very different than toilets or sinks, and you want someone with an expertise in the work you need done.
So, when you’re ready to launch a video (TV-included) advertising campaign, does it matter what kind of technology vendor you work with? It’s all just advertising, right?
To answer the question, let’s take a look at some of the big differences between video and display.
Supply: How much you got?
Display advertising has a never-ending amount of supply. Just think about how many websites exist today, each filled with display ads. If more are needed, more are created. And the majority of these ads are served through exchanges, which don’t consider the context or quality of the content on which the ad is served.
While TV and digital video are different, both have a constrained amount of supply available.
On TV, there are only so many hours in a day, and only so much commercial programming allotted during those time slots. Additionally, the number of available TV impressions is declining as viewership migrates across screens.
For digital video, there’s a very limited amount of premium content available. There may be tons of short-form, user generated content on platforms like YouTube, but TV-quality video is scarce due to how expensive it is to make it. Even with the growth in full-episode players and longer-form digital content, advertisers still have to fight, and pay a premium, to have their creative shown next to these pieces.
And while the overall number of digital video impressions is growing due to increased viewing, other factors are actually constricting the video market. These include the increase in bots or non-human traffic, stricter viewability standards, and hyper-targeting based on greater availability of data.
Goals: What you trying to do?
Display works well for advertisers focused on direct response or other online actions, through pay-per-response models. Since campaigns are measured by digital metrics—the number of impressions delivered and the percentage of clicks produced—a campaign can be deemed successful simply by achieving high reach and low cost.
TV and video advertising is meant to accomplish brand metrics like awareness, consideration and offline sales.
When you see the Apple logo, does it incite a thought beyond ‘smartphone maker’? When did you choose to become a Pepsi or Coke person? For either question, the answer likely manifested before you were ever in the market to buy an Apple product or choose your own soda.
The reason is simple—there’s a connection between consumers and the companies they love, which only brand building can elicit. And nothing builds that connection more than the combination of sight, sound and motion.
Winning: To bid or to know?
Display advertising is built on a real-time-bidding auction model, meaning the highest bid for an ad wins. TV and digital video are bought in an upfront fashion, meaning price and reach are guaranteed in advance of a campaign running.
The auction model comes with two challenges. First, an advertiser isn’t guaranteed a cost per impression, regardless of how many impressions are going to be bought. This means no price breaks for big spenders. Second, there’s no guarantee that a certain number of impressions will be delivered in an allotted time period. This means, there’s no guarantee on how many people will see a ‘black Friday’ ad before the sale is over.
A negotiated model offers a guarantee on reach and frequency, which makes a difference when considering supply chain management and time-constrained product offers.
A mechanic? Really?
Mechanics have undeniable skills. But those skills are simply not the ones needed to fix a plumbing problem.
Display solutions are great at bidding, serving and driving auction win rates, but they can’t forecast, allocate inventory and demand holistically or manage reservations—all solutions that are essential to video’s constrained market.
Video is not a cheap reach play. It’s something else entirely. And when the right programmatic technology is used to bring greater data, insights, targeting and measurement to quality video and TV supply, the results are incredibly powerful.
To put it simply, you need a different engine.
Don’t hire a display-focused technology to handle your TV and video ad spend. Hire a video specialist.
