Oath Drives Insights into both the Consumer and the Advertiser

Better data-driven audience research is enabling deeper insights into consumer motivations, behaviors and actions for brands. 

A good example is what Oath is accomplishing through its premium video content and experiences, creating better understanding of the trends driving video consumption and growth across new formats. This valuable information can then be used to drive a brand’s strategy. “We know that successful brands grow by anticipating the needs of consumers in a constantly changing marketplace”, noted Maya Abinakad, Senior Marketing Manager, Oath. “The market landscape is evolving at a pace unlike anything we’ve seen before,” she added, “especially in the areas of AR, VR and 360, for example.”

As marketers try to keep up, the question on the minds of many industry leaders is: Do you have your finger on the pulse of the consumer? Are your current investments in an under-appreciated consumer technology well placed for future success or destined for a flop? Brands need to understand consumer expectations and the threshold for advertising or risk wasting valuable dollars and development time. Parsing the opportunities and pitfalls is the direction that AOL Video research is taking with their latest State of Video Industry online study in partnership with InsightsNow.

Abinakad believes that the best research uncovers the human motivations that drive consumer behavior, maybe even revealing results that upend the established order. “When you don’t question established order, it can lead to short-term results,” she stated. “Company leaders may believe and invest in something that may not be of great interest to consumers. This research is pivotal to keeping up (and ahead of) quickly changing consumer trends to maximize business opportunities and plan for the future,” she added.

The study focused on consumers age 16+ and B2B constituents, including industry buyers (agencies and brands) and sellers (publishers, ad networks and ad tech providers). The results revealed macro trends in the video ecosystem and where attitudes between consumers and companies merged and diverged. But Oath’s main purpose in this study is to deeply understand how and why consumers are engaging with video online and the importance of acting on insights as part of one’s video strategies, especially given how quickly the industry is evolving.

Here are the major takeaways:

      1.       Digital video investments show no signs of slowing down. B2B trends indicate greater spending on video which is increasing exponentially. 83% of buyers are expecting to increase their video spending this year.  

      2.       Dollars are coming out of television. This investment is coming out of Broadcast/Cable TV budgets and into predominantly desktop (72%) and mobile video (71%) platforms.

      3.       Social (50%) and quality creative (46%) are driving video’s growth.

      4.       But 44% of advertisers say measurement is still a big challenge, a +14% increase from last year.

      5.       Consumers want VR, 360 video and AR, especially younger consumers. Across all age groups, consumers are drawn to live videos as advertisers are increasingly investing in 360 Video.

      6.       Mobile video is driving much of digital video’s growth as 67% of all consumers watch videos on their phones everyday with 74% watching live video.   

      7.       Offering greater competition to linear networks, news, music and sports content dominate live video consumption.

      8.       VR is poised to become as common as mobile video among consumers for all types of programming such as movies, virtual tourism, science and shopping. But hardware constraints are currently seen as a barrier to fuller roll-out.

      9.       Consumers expect video advertising but the “right” length of the ad is important and it varies. Of course, who doesn’t prefer shorter ads, but the findings here indicate that expectations vary according to the length of the ad. The longer the video, the longer the expected ad. But the ad must be relevant and with some control still maintained by the viewer such as skipping and fast forward.

     10.   Programmatic spending will continue to rise, but both buyers and sellers are concerned about system integration and the ability to access premium inventory.

     11.   Branded video spend has reached its peak. Although branded video is still a revenue driver, the spend is slightly declining because of measurement challenges and cost.

Oath’s collection of more than global media and technology brands ranges from AOL and Yahoo to  HuffPost and TechCrunch. Their redoubled focus is on delivering content and ads across mobile platforms so research necessarily plays a big role in this effort. Understanding the accelerating trends in media and placing efforts in those trends are essential for their future success as well as their advertisers. 

Since their mission is to “build brands that people love,” noted Abinakad, “And, marketers are focused on delivering the highest consumer experience possible, then having and offering relevant, insightful research results will help Oath reach that goal. All of our products and services are designed to allow brands to build their brands, and allow agencies to do the same for client brands.”  

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

Know Your Ad Server. Interview with Brian DeFrancesco

Brian DeFrancesco, co-founder of LKQD has deep experience in ad-tech space building and deploying large-scale ad servers. His latest venture, LKQD, is a self-service video ad-serving platform that works across programmatic, direct, and non-direct demand mediation and optimization.    

“Ad servers have evolved from being closed stack systems that provide basic operational support to open platforms that enable companies to work with vendors of their choice for ad targeting, verification, and programmatic initiatives,” DeFrancesco explained, “The role of an ad server is becoming increasingly important as it defines a company's capabilities to secure and execute ad buys in today’s complex ad tech ecosystem.”

Charlene Weisler: There are several ad-serving companies in the media ecosystem. What distinguishes LKQD?

Brian DeFrancesco: First, there were many legacy ad servers built and architected to run on Flash.  Back in 2014, we knew the future for video advertising would be mobile and HTML5, and no one was taking the mobile video advertising space seriously.  Second, we wanted to release a VPAID (Video Player Ad Serving Interface Definition) compatible solution for mobile.  We had watched the industry transition from VAST to VPAID in desktop due to the advantages of measurement and security offered by VPAID.  We build a VPAID solution from day one for mobile and have offered a VPAID compatible ad player with built in viewability detection since 2014.  We are seeing the early moving agencies adapt mobile and HTML5 VPAID at scale.  We think this will continue to be a large growth area during Q4 2016 and looking forward into 2017.

Charlene Weisler:  What is seamless video advertising?

Brian DeFrancesco: Seamless video advertising is about offering the customer everything they need to run their full business on our platform.  We offer a single self-service platform for mobile apps, connected TV, desktop and mobile web.  We have a customizable ad player, pre-built ad formats, a best-in-class mediation layer that uses a technology to automatically optimize itself based on up to the minute reporting data, paired with creative hosting, 3rd party integrations with Moat, WhiteOps, Krux, and Oracle.  Seamless video advertising is about building technology solutions to address the problems that publishers and advertisers face in the market so that they can stop worrying about technology challenges and focus on their business. We’ve recently taken this one step further with the introduction of LKQD Fusion.

Charlene Weisler:  What is LKQD Fusion?

Brian DeFrancesco: LKQD FUSION provides real-time communication and functionality 'bridges' between Flash and HTML5 video ads. This enables desktop Publishers to support video ads from all Advertisers regardless if they have transitioned to HTML5 or still utilize Flash.  LKQD FUSION partners can maximize their revenue by delivering both Flash and HTML5 video ads on all inventory while also becoming fully prepared for the inevitable end of Flash being pushed by every major browser on the market.  The technology is not focused on content recognition per se, but rather on providing publishers with a simple single solution so they do not need to worry about the codebase of the content, and can focus on running their business.  We rolled out the product publicly in July and have seen incredible traction in desktop since public launch.  LKQD FUSION publishers now have a future-proof solution for desktop to complement LKQD's already best in class solutions for mobile video, making us a platform of choice for over 200 publishers globally.

Charlene Weisler: What types of data do you collect and what metrics do you use?

Brian DeFrancesco: We use both in-house and third party metrics for measuring video ad performance, ROI, and brand safety.  These include: completion rate, click thru rate, viewability, audibility, true domain or app where ad display, human vs. non-human traffic, and many others.

Charlene Weisler: Where do you see the ad serving space five years from now?

Brian DeFrancesco: I believe open platforms will play a vital role in the future of ad tech, especially for Publishers.  Ad servers will provide the core ad delivery infrastructure (uptime, scale, real-time reporting, data management, third party integrations) that will enable companies to build their own business models on top of.  Ultimately, it’s about providing the tools for success and letting Publishers build their own strategy unique to their properties and their audience.