Effective Online Video Advertising
Our friends at ScanScout recently paid us a visit at our headquarters in Seattle to show us the updated integration between their ad solution and our Player Development Kit (PDK) 4 via a simple plug-in. It was great to get their perspective on how to build a successful ad-revenue business for professionally produced online video.
One thing that became clear during our conversation is that there is no magic bullet. A number of factors have to come together for you to get the most out of your online video advertising plan. Cash and content are the two kings, and you clearly need to drive traffic to your site and create a sticky user experience in order to succeed., But specific to advertising, here are the four big factors:
1. Ad avails: the amount of inventory you have to sell to advertisers
2. Ad Fill rate: the percentage of ad avails filled by actual, paid advertising
3. Ad format mix: the combination of interstitials (pre-roll, mid-roll, etc.), overlays (lower-third, bugs, etc.), and companion banners (static, rich media, etc.) that is right for your site
4. Ad targeting: two types a. Contextual targeting: leveraging metadata about your content to select and serve ads that are contextually relevant, and/or, b. Behavioral targeting: using information that you know about your general audience (or individuals) to select and serve up ads (targeting ads to specific audience members)
In this post, we’ll just focus on the first three and how they relate to each other, as comparing the two types of ad targeting is an interesting topic by itself.
Ad avails
Lets start with ad avails, which are the intersection between fill rate and format mix. Aside from adding more ad slots, you can also add more ad formats (i.e., variations of interstitial and overlay) to the mix, which would, of course, increase your ad avails. Keep in mind the other rather obvious result which is that your fill rate will initially drop until you sell the new inventory. Each publisher must strike a delicate balance to not alienate their audience with too frequent or too repetitious an ad pattern, but, in general, having more ad inventory to sell is a good problem to have if you subscribe to an ad-supported business model.
Fill rate
Fill rate directly affects a publisher’s effective CPM (eCPM), which is ad earnings divided by streams multiplied by 1000, or basically, the revenue earned per one thousand streams. If your fill rate is low – if you’re not populating those ad spaces – then your video isn’t working as hard as it could. thePlatform has a number of fantastic ad network partners like ScanScout that can help you fill those ad spots, and we also have several ad technology partners like LiveRail and adap.tv that can help you manage multiple ad sources.
Ad format mix
Publishers understandably want to know which formats garner the best responses from viewers. Pre-, mid-, or post-roll? Overlays or companions? Once again, there’s no fancy magic bullet. Use a mix, and see which formats drive click-thru rate. Experimentation is allowed., and, as ScanScout explained to us, there are other ways that an ad can engage your audience, such as directly asking for demographic information or the answer to a product question. If your content is short-form and pre-rolls are your only ad format, then you can literally double your ad avails simply by adding a lower-third overlay to the mix.
So what is effective?
There’s a new Google and MediaVest “neuromarketing” study that does attempt to evaluate ad effectiveness based on viewers’ brainwave activity, eye-tracking, and skin response. If you’ve wondered about the efficacy of overlay ads in terms of audience engagement, it’s worth a read. And even more recently, Will Richmond wrote about MTV Networks’ recent study on the same subject in this article.
The path to the greatest ad revenue is multifaceted. We encourage you to review all relevant data and options available to you to make the best decision for your online video business. And we encourage publishers to work with their advertisers to develop a mix of ad creatives and formats that generates the best audience response.
On our web site you can get more information about how our partners’ ad solutions are integrated with thePlatform’s Player Development Kit and how they can help publishers generate greater ad revenue. For an explanation of how thePlatform integrates advertising technologies, read our Advertising White Paper.
Comments