On April 30th, BrightRoll founder and CEO Tod Sacertodi took the stage at the BrightRoll Video Summit (BRVS) to an audience of more than 700 brand marketers, agencies, publishers, and ad tech influencers, where he highlighted his commitment to building “a programmatic future” by addressing key industry issues and outlining his plans to overcome them.
He discussed three major areas of programmatic video advertising – which he sees not just as challenges, but opportunities – for the industry to focus on in order to “create this programmatic future that we’re all envisioning”. He also emphasised the importance of the quality of first-party data in delivering value for advertisers and intermediaries.
1. Capitalising on mobile
“Mobile growth is impacting all of our businesses in very material ways,” said Sacerdoti. “And there are some significant improvements and changes that need to happen for us to capitalise on this growth.”
“Everybody knows that mobile is going to be a $100bn+ business, but when we look at the data within the programmatic video category, we see a similar story with a slight twist to it,” he added.
Sacerdoti spoke about the overabundance of supply, which he says is driven by two fundamental factors: measurement and standardisation.
BrightRoll is taking steps to address the measurement issue with the availability of a new suite of solutions, announced at BRVS, designed to help advertisers maximise the impact of their mobile video advertising efforts across screens and devices. This includes: offering access to Nielsen Digital Ad Ratings within the BrightRoll DSP, MRAID Video Addendum offering deeper insight into in-app mobile ad units, and the availability of Yahoo App Publishing inventory to in-app advertisers.
“Mobile has always been an important area of focus for us, and we are doubling-down on our efforts to give advertisers the ability to measure performance across the breadth of devices to better better understand their target audiences and effectively spend marketing dollars,” said Sacerdoti.
2. Tackling ad fraud, collectively
“Ad fraud is probably the most important industry problem and we need to make progress in the next few months,” said Sacerdoti.
According to a recent study by the ANA and WhiteOps, bot risk to advertisers in 2015 is $6.3bn. “That’s a pretty big number, and something that everyone should be focused on addressing,” he said.
“The way in which we approach this problem is similar to how we’ve approached problems historically,” he continued. “Platforms can’t be the referee and the player. We need to work with trusted third-parties to verify what we’re delivering.”
His comments tied in with another announcement on a new deal between BrightRoll and third-party data and measurement company, DoubleVerify, to effectively target quality traffic, minimise fraud and increase the overall performance of video ad campaigns.
“We need to address this problem on our platform first,” said Sacerdoti. “The logic being that you should clean up your own house before being critical of other people’s houses.”
The study also revealed that the average amount of non-human traffic in the video category is 23%. Over the last few months, BrightRoll has made significant improvements in cleaning up its own marketplace, reducing non-human traffic to roughly 5 percent across all tested vendors – five times lower than the industry average. Sacerdoti called for other companies to follow suit.
“Ad fraud is one of these issues that cannot be solved by one company, it’s everyone in the industry that needs to come together and clean up the digital supply chain,” he said.
3. The importance of first-party data
Before leaving the stage, Sacerdoti gave a fascinating example that illustrates the client benefits of DSPs (demand-side platform) incorporating high quality demographic data into their systems.
“There are really three large owners of demographic data in the US – Google, Facebook and Yahoo,” he said. “But only one company has this demographic data embedded within its DSP and that’s Yahoo.”
This is the first time such comprehensive demographic data has been built into a DSP and Sacerdoti described it as a game changer in the targeting of audiences across all programmatic supply, adding that BrightRoll was seeing phenomenal results.
“We have an annual deal with a very large retailer and they are primarily focused on buying cost-per-point media in digital video,” he explained. “With all the techniques we have created and all the KPIs we have around performance of a video campaign, we were in the mid-50% range in terms of in-target efficiency. However, now that we have layered on top first-party data segments from Yahoo, we’re over 80% in-target for the campaign.”
“If you think about this from a price-per-point perspective,” he continued, “higher in-target figures change the economics of the business. You can actually save money as a client, or generate margin as an intermediary.”
“It’s early days in programmatic, it’s even earlier days in programmatic video. I personally couldn’t be more excited and more engaged in helping realise the potential of this category,” Sacerdoti concluded.
Originally posted What’s New in Publishing 18 May 2015