Did anyone actually see my ad?: Drum Digital Trading Awards sponsor TubeMogul MD Nick Reid on ad viewability
The Drum is gearing up to launch its first ever Digital Trading Awards, designed to reward transparency and efficiency in the increasingly complex digital ad ecosystem. Here sponsor TubeMogul's managing director Nick Reid kicks off the first in an ongoing series of articles to be published on The Drum, which highlight the importance of online accountability.
Nick Reid
It is a simple question, but as many digital marketers are discovering, getting to an answer is often complicated.
It’s happened to almost everyone. You go to a blog then suddenly, you hear loud audio. You desperately scan the page to mute whatever is making the noise, scrolling down to find an embedded video player, auto-playing a video you did not intend to watch, often with a pre-roll ad in front of it.
This type of video placement is more common than most marketers think, yet rarely disclosed. Sometimes marketers knowingly purchase 'autoplay pre-roll', but unfortunately in many cases, they are pitched “premium pre-roll” only to end up with their ad as the source of those mysterious loud noises, or what is better known in this instance as 'fake pre-roll.'
Why tell this story? Because we believe that marketers deserve, at a minimum, to know everything they’d know if they were running a TV campaign – such as exactly what content an ad appears against, and genuine, verifiable data on audience reach, which Nielsen is making possible through its Online Campaign Ratings. If we are to grow brand investment in online video, it’s fundamentally our responsibility as an industry to make sure that this happens every time.
Earlier this year we launched our open-source viewability solution OpenVV, in partnership with 4 digital media and technology companies. We are proud to say this consortium has now grown to include 20 partners. OpenVV is a simple solution for video viewability that measures the percentage of the video ad viewed and the amount of time the ad is in view. The system has been successfully tested across hundreds of millions of video ad impressions and thousands of publisher sites.
Programmatic video has come a long way in terms of being able to deliver on the requirements of brand advertisers. Executing a programmatic branding campaign today is a fast, effective, accountable and transparent way of reaching an audience. In an effort to further increase the value of RTB for brand advertisers, TubeMogul developed BrandSights, a survey tool built directly into the Platform that allows advertisers to gauge the true impact of their campaign by measuring key brand metrics like lift, awareness, purchase intent and favourability.
As a video advertising platform that puts brands and agencies in control, TubeMogul looks to make the media buying process more simple, effective and accountable from beginning to end. To this end, we launched BrandPoint last year, the world’s first self-serve GRP planning and buying tool for digital video. Marketers can see always-on Nielsen OCR data within TubeMogul to view accuracy as a campaign proceeds. We are verified by an independent standard and like it that way.
In 2014, we will be supporting The Drum by backing the inaugural Digital Trading Awards and thoroughly look forward to rewarding those individuals and companies who are working towards making media a more accountable place to work and succeed in.
The Drum is launching the Digital Trading Awards to reward clarity, transparency and client service when it comes to digital advertising. Find out more at digitaltradingawards.com