Simon Stone, commercial director, The Web TV Enterprise

The online video industry made an essential development last week as Nielsen and the UK Online Measurement Company (UKOM) announced that brands can now use an online video metric to compare web viewing with TV (nma 19 May 2011).

Allowing advertisers to target TV buying audiences on the web is an extremely positive step for the industry. As advertising spend extends into online video, there’s a definite need for a universal metric, especially as more TV ad budgets shift into this space.

This year has seen a major breakthrough in the ad serving and reporting of online video campaigns through VAST and VPAID standards. This has given greater transparency and enabled reporting on video engagement metrics, such as completion rates, rather than using standard display metrics of impressions and clicks.

As more brands move into online video, the industry will continue to grow, and developments such as this latest one will become more advanced. The next logical step is a unified buying metric to allow brands to compare web viewing with their TV campaigns.