How Will Video Fit in to Your Strategy Next Year? Here’s What The Smartest People in MarTech Had To Say About Using Video As A Tool

‘How We Measure Viewability Will Change’

Dave Gullo – Co-Founder and CTO, VideoAmp: Existing viewability metrics are a reaction to an industry that got too cozy with low quality and often fraudulent traffic sources. In the next two years, more Video will be bought directly, using automation and data. This changes the dynamic of how the industry should measure viewability – if you are getting guaranteed fill from verified sources, other metrics should matter more.

On target audience as a notion is also changing rapidly. The digital and OTT markets should not just move to a GRP-style buy, it doesn’t serve advertisers or media owners well at all. If the goal of a campaign is to reach SUV buyers, there are much better targeting methods than Adults 25-54. We firmly believe in the rise of advanced currencies: taking first party data and/or verified offline data and use that as your audience proxy. How many of those people did you reach at a 1:1 level? What were the business outcomes that those people delivered?

‘Header Bidding Has Been A Gamechanger’

Dvir Doron – Chief Marketing Officer, Cedato: Video advertising continues to evolve, in part due to its increasing popularity. The advent of header bidding particularly has been a game changer for our industry in the way it levels the playing field for publishers. When applied to video, header bidding makes it possible for publishers to monetize more efficiently than ever before.

Some have dismissed it as a ‘publisher hack’ but I see header bidding becoming an industry standard over time. It offers transparency and evens the playing field for everyone.

Read More: Nielsen Launches New Performance Testing Solution For Mobile Video

‘Video Has Relied On Vanity Metrics For Too Long’

Thomas Madsen-Mygdal – Co-founder and CEO, TwentyThree: Second to in-person conversations, video is the strongest communication method we have. The main trend we’re seeing and driving is video integration being a core element of a company’s marketing stack. We’re seeing a trend in harnessing and supporting all the employees working and communicating with video.
Just as they do with all other communication elements. Video has long been a second level citizen of the marketing stack, relying on vanity metrics like views. With video marketing platforms, we’re seeing the change that is necessary to properly measure and analyze video content.

‘The Trojan Horse Of Digital Marketing’

Steve Ellis – Founder and CEO, WHOSAY: It’s essential to have a long-term strategy where you take your video content and ads and target the kinds of customers your business is trying to reach today. Video allows you to retain and monitor which of those customers interact with your content the deepest, and then over time you will be able to turn them into paying customers by retargeting the most engaged with offers and calls to action. Video content is the trojan horse of digital marketing.

‘Your Creative Has To Be On Steroids’

Jessica Hawthorne-Castro – CEO and Chairman, Hawthorne: Touchpoints with consumers are becoming more and more specific and customized. That’s the natural progression and it’s not new. With that customization, every other piece of the engagement puzzle feels the impact of a tenfold increase as well. So that means your creative becomes more specific and targeted to the consumers, which means an increased investment in creative and resources as well. You can’t just create one campaign for the entire brand. You must create multiple creative and digital elements for a specific type of person customized for how they want to interact with the brand. Your creative has to be on steroids and you have to have multiple versions and iterations of it.

From a marketing perspective, everyone is working harder because the consumer is demanding that they work harder. Consumers aren’t as interested in a brand as they used to be. A recent article in Ad Age about the “millennial dilemma” basically said millennials don’t care about your brand. That’s true. It is the “Me” generation so that’s how you have to go about it. It does mean more of an investment either from the agency or the brand side, and it may mean smaller margins for people who were used to making more, but you can’t fight it. That’s the way the world is going, and it’s why you have to think a little bit smarter and incorporate things like advanced analytics for targeting and automation to get some economies of scale in terms of the investment.

One thing with analytics is that very smart teams of data scientists are working hard at constantly improving it, but at the end of the day the next big iteration will be artificial intelligence (AI). An automated analytics program that “learns” and naturally becomes smarter and smarter will be the next big shift for data analytics. We’re not quite there yet, and there are a lot of conversations among some of the top scientists in the world about the meaning of AI to humans right now. It’s important that we set the ground rules now so we’re not acting out a real-life Terminator movie in the future. So, AI is not here yet, but it’s certainly on the horizon.

Recommended Read: Meet the Jetsons: Are We As Close to Achieving Control Over AI As We Thought?