Digital Trading: Q&A with Adeline Queroix Gabay, head of audience on demand at VivaKi

How do you work with LiveRail and what value do they provide?

LiveRail is the platform that we connect to in France in order to distribute our video ads on at scale across premium publishers, including Dailymotion, VideoPrime (premium news and magazines websites), and Groupe Cerise in France. They helped build a powerful ad exchange for Dailymotion, with very granular and video specific data that we are able to use.

LiveRail also supports private deals which gives us the ability to work on more sophisticated solutions for our clients including pricing, formats, and data.

What are the most important considerations or steps for brands looking to get involved in video programmatic? Why should they?

Programmatic provides tremendous value for brand advertisers such as real-time optimisation capabilities, greater control and flexibility of inventory and of course better targeting capabilities that can fuel creative, including leveraging your first party data sets (CRM, prospect engagement levels, website activity, etc.). Universal frequency capping also enables you to control reach and frequency across your entire media plan.

Programmatic is not a channel. It is a new way to buy media, smarter and more efficiently. So the question is not really should brands invest, but rather, how. This means asking important questions such as who is my target audience (vs. traditional media target audience); is there any data or business insights I can leverage to make my buys more efficient (exclusive retailers for my product, impact of weather on business, customers from my database that I want to exclude, customers I want to reengage with my brand); what are the messages that are relevant for different audiences?; where am I happy to display my advertising (all inventory, only premium?); where will I drive people to next?; do I have an optimised site for mobile for people who will see my ad on a tablet or smartphone?; how do I measure performance and what do I want to track and optimise on?

This is not more complicated than what you used to buy before as long as you work with the right partners. In the end, it really just gives you more opportunities.

Can you speak to major challenges you’re working to address right now? (Audience guarantees, viewability, cross-device measurement?)

Ad fraud, viewability, and brand safety have always been important concerns for us. The difference now is that we have stronger tools for both verification and measurement that allow us to optimise in real-time on these KPIs, such as the capability to predict whether an impression will be in view before we buy it.

We are also currently looking at the video GRP from Mediametrie that is based on viewabiity and the targeting measure from Nielsen OCR.

As video consumption on tablet devices increases, cross device measurement becomes a significant challenge in a fragmented world where cookies and iDFAs don’t talk to each other.

When it comes to creative, engagement with social sharing buttons and call to actions are paramount. In an addressable media world, data should empower the creative by allowing you to create scenarios and provide useful and relevant content for your target audience. Consumers expect personalized, superior ad experiences and being able to deliver those through accurate targeting is key. Context is also important for highlighting your brand message and making sure it’s relevant, which is where contextual targeting programmatic can deliver.

What industry trends are you keeping an eye on right now and why?

We are interested in the expansion of programmatic into all other digital media. VivaKi was the first to launch programmatic on IPTV in France last March and we see Digital OOH and radio as the next channels.

Companies like Facebook are providing big opportunities for marketers to leverage data to help them reach their target audience with relevant ads. They’re also helping solve the cross-device measurement issue and to bridge digital ad efforts with the offline world.

The development of enterprise DMPs is also driving the growth of programmatic adoption among our biggest advertisers. .

Do you have a success story within RTB Video that you can share with us?

There are so many it’s hard to choose. Our first AOD Sync campaign for Coca-Cola saw us sync digital ads in real-time with live events from the Football World Cup. Customised messages delivered an increase in attention and engagement (+4 per cent completion, +22 per cent CTR).

A campaign we ran for TF1, a French TV channel, showed the instant reach and impact you can have with programmatic video. We achieved 3.3 million targeted contacts (instream and takeovers) in four days for the launch of a new sitcom.

Finally, for an FMCG (fast moving consumer goods) brand, programmatic video combined with TV has led to an increase of four points in offline sales vs. TV only (Kantar WorldPanel).

Are you seeing cross media and platform convergence in media buying? For example, are people buying mobile and desktop together or separately? Are TV and video buying finally coming together?

For mobile, there are really two types of campaigns - mobile only and increasingly, multi-device campaigns.

In our media agencies, online video is now managed alongside TV buying. Our media planning tools, based on a cross media (TV + online) panel from Mediametrie, enable us to calculate reach and frequency across screens.

As far as impact and awareness are concerned, there is still a lot to do. VivaKi Advance has published some very interesting research [Vivaki sending link to research] on all video screens and formats that will help the market understand what is the best mix beyond reach considerations.

We will certainly get there if we stop thinking in terms of substitution of TV but rather how TV with digital can increase attention and engagement.