Video data remains undervalued and untapped by advertisers compared to display and search, according to James Grant, UK sales manager for video ad serving platform Vindico.
Speaking at Specific Media’s The Value of Video event earlier today, Grant said the overload of data available in display and search advertising is preventing video data from being leveraged to its full potential.
“Advertisers are overloaded with data in search and display, both more mature than video, so the challenge is more around how best to analyse the available data,” he said. “Video on the other hand, is being totally undervalued because advertisers are focusing all their attention on display and search data.”
Advertisers, namely media buyers, are not drilling into the more granular data around video ad viewing, including view-through rates, with the result that they are not optimising their video campaigns to the maximum potential, according to Grant.
He called for advertisers to change their mindsets and pay more attention to ad serving and stop opting for free ad-serving packages offered by many publishers. “[Advertisers] need to stop treating ad serving as a commodity,” he said. “If you don’t have the data or haven’t looked at the data how can you extract the value from it?”
Advertisers that opt for free ad serving offered by publishers need to think about what they are inadvertently giving away in terms of data insight. If leveraged fully, video data can open up opportunities around frequency serving, according to Grant. This would mean that an advertiser could still run multiple ads across a particular channel, but that it would serve different ad creatives in each slot, to ensure the viewer does not get frustrated with seeing repeat ads.
If advertisers don’t recognise the need to closely monitor their video data, the control will remain with the publishers, said Grant. “Don’t be afraid of data, know how to use it,” he said.
Grant was previously head of video product sales and strategy at Microsoft, where he helped launch MSN’s video-on-demand player.
