Consumer video habits have changed forever and marketers’ video advertising objectives and strategies are changing along with them. But what about the ad planning and buying system? Is it changing to keep up with this rapidly evolving landscape?
Content sponsored by Videology
That was one of the key themes in a new study from Videology, Rogers Market Research and Marketing magazine. The report, “Consumers Lead Marketers on Path to Cross-Screen Convergence,” surveyed more than 1,000 Canadian consumers and 104 marketers about the rapidly changing world of video advertising.
The research confirmed the lines between traditional and web-based video are blurring. Consumers want to watch whatever they want, whenever they want and wherever they want, moving across screens and channels seamlessly.
In that new world, it makes little sense for advertisers and their agencies to have different planning and buying teams targeting consumers each time they jump from linear to digital and back again.
The solution is a converged buying and planning model—combining the digital and linear teams—to reflect the new consumer video reality. A single team, empowered by modern technology, would bring efficiency and effectiveness to the video planning and buying process, meaning advertisers make better use of their video media budgets.
The research showed marketers see big changes coming, as holistic planning and buying will become the new norm.
Among the key findings:
•40% of marketers want to have the ability to buy audiences across screens;
•85% believe planning for online video and linear TV will merge; and
•52% predict agencies will merge existing linear and online teams.
Wally Oakes, president of leading advertising platform Mediaocean and a panellist at Videology’s recent panel discussion in Toronto, explained how the Canadian planning and buying industry is changing for the better and where it still has to make improvements.
Are there signs of the Canadian video planning and buying model adapting for the modern reality of consumer video habits?
The main marketer objective in video planning and buying today is efficiency and to that end we are starting to see agencies creating video buyer groups for long form content—combining linear and digital. But the challenge comes back to measurement from a planning/buying perspective. We still lack one single data measurement system that supports a converged buying system today, though both Nielsen and ComScore have introduced strategies independently. Neither are as solid as the legacy systems yet, but are good enough that we are starting to see some deals are being done using them.
What about the compatibility of the well-established TV buying system and the relatively new digital system?
There will be a very efficient way for buyers to get all the information they need both for linear and digital video, and eventually it’ll be on one screen. We are converging information from the linear stack with the digital stack, that is coming.
But the underlying execution might have to be run through the respective technology stacks to make it happen, because the systems for linear TV is completely different than that for digital.
When you think about the infrastructure that has been built up, the massive huge systems that a TV broadcaster has to manage their processes—log files, manage inventory and breaks, the different servers to manage commercial creative—and there are equally different types of things in the digital world.
Those systems are not going to go away but companies like ourselves and Videology are building bridges so they can work together to enable a converged buying process.
How does Canada compare to the U.S. in terms of merging digital and linear buying?
In the U.S., it’s become an accepted business practice within network buying that up to 10% of their audience commitment can now be delivered digitally. In essence that means the digital video is getting the same CPM that linear is, while in Canada we are hearing that the large traditional linear TV providers are struggling to get the same CPMs on their digital side. Another America-specific development is digital publishers converting impression-based data into linear currency to actually complete the transaction within the existing linear workflow; it’s more efficient and we’ve seen $10s of millions transacted that way in the past couple of years.
The research revealed that marketers see changes to the buying system as a win-win for advertisers and media companies. How can that be?
I think marketers believe they’ll get more information and be able to better measure effectiveness of digital relative to linear TV. It’s about demonstrating effectiveness. And I think that is encouraging because they are saying they are willing to pay more if media demonstrates the value in terms of advertiser objectives.
It’s consistent with what we’ve been hearing from senior agency folks about the linear side, if they were provided more granular information on a more timely basis about who’s watching what and when, they’d be willing to increase budgets.
