Extreme Reach Report Suggests that the Gap Negatively Impacts Advertisers, Agencies and Publishers

Extreme Reach, a leading cloud technology platform for TV and video ad workflow, released a comprehensive new report illuminating just how cumbersome and inefficient it is for ad ops teams to find and prepare creative assets for video campaigns.

Over half of respondents say their digital video campaigns start late due to asset issues arising from disconnected hand-offs.

At the time of this announcement, Melinda McLaughlin, CMO of Extreme Reach, said, “We’ve come so far in leveraging data and technology in media for precision targeting. However, in the race to that advancement, a system was never established for how the creative assets would be sourced and prepared for digital video activation. In the absence of a system to handle this complexity, we collectively find ourselves in a mess that serves no side well and most importantly, is affecting campaign success.”

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Most Common Issues in Media Buying: Video Quality Degradation and Missed Ad Calls

According to the latest Extreme Reach report, 93% of ad ops professionals on the front lines of activation cite issues with sourcing and preparing assets, underscoring how vital it is that the industry address this issue. The most common issues cited were late starts, formatting errors, video quality degradation and missed ad calls.

Extreme Reach commissioned Advertiser Perceptions, a leading market research firm, to quantify the current state of sourcing and preparing creative assets for video. Despite Herculean efforts by skilled teams, nearly 60% of those closest to campaign activation reported that mistakes are likely to happen because the process is manual and there’s a mounting matrix of specifications required by all the destinations and devices on the media plan.

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The study further revealed that these issues are driving mid-to-high levels of job dissatisfaction inside the ranks of activation teams, 85% of whom cite improvement in this area as important to increase their job satisfaction.

When asked to identify the pain points in the campaign activation process, survey respondents pointed to–

• not enough lead time
• the scavenger hunt required to track down all the creative assets
• the dizzying array of specs/formats required by all of the various partners/publishers on the media plan

Video Adtech Industry Should Reinvent the Media Buying Process from Scratch

As a whole, this study underscores that while media can be bought and sold in mere fractions of a second, the creative part of the equation—the workflow to source and prepare assets themselves—is sluggish and cumbersome and must be brought up to speed with innovations in media planning and media buying before things get even more complex ahead.

In fact, 70% of survey respondents say the industry should reinvent the process from scratch, leaning on technology to transform the asset workflow.

When asked–

“Would a service that allows the media agency, creative agency, and client to share and access creative assets from a central, permissions-based cloud location be helpful?”

88%, said yes.

The Extreme Reach platform integrates TV and video ad delivery, and the company works with virtually every advertiser, agency and end destination in some way today. As such, Extreme Reach is uniquely qualified to see the extent of the rapidly growing disconnect between the creative asset and media fulfillment process and the resulting impact of broken workflow on campaign success.

Methodology

The Advertiser Perceptions online survey was fielded from September 25 – October 12, 2017, achieving a representative sample size of 150 qualified respondents. To supplement the quantitative survey, Advertiser Perceptions completed three qualitative one-on-one interviews with mid- to high-level agency ad operations professionals. The survey sample was curated from the agency contacts in The Advertiser Perceptions Media Decision Maker Database and third-party databases as needed.

To qualify for the survey, respondents had to meet all the following criteria:

• Digital video decision-makers
• Involved in cross-media advertising
• Involved in campaign implementation and optimization
• $1M+ past 12-month digital ad spend
• Job titles that are responsible for digital video campaign execution