[Image: GForces]
Sorry!
“[...] it is starting to dawn on marketers that the online video ad system has a few booby traps. Let’s leave aside the reality that many consumers feel bombarded by video ads and actively tune them out.”
This article has a deep dive into the pros, and mainly cons, of online video ad buying. It ought not to be fresh news to anyone who has been paying attention, but to those who haven’t they might come in for quite a shock. Interestingly, the article doesn’t even get into mobile. One presumes that’s because that is a much thornier problem than the one’s already covered here.
Some of the problems: Fraud – botnets that can generate upwards of 30 million fake video views a day. Underhand tactics – you buy premium space, but when that fills up media buyers start looking for video players in less coveted online real estate. Saturation – now, anywhere you go on the Internet, a video starts playing, aka the curse of auto-play. The resale market, through what are called ad exchanges where all control of placement is lost and where “…transactions happen in a matter of seconds, and without human intervention, thousands of times a day.”
You get the picture. Below is an extract from the article. Definitely worth a read. Or, for your consideration, you might want to peruse the leaked New York Times document posted as The Homepage is Dead, and The Social Web Has Won.
“By many estimates, more than half of online video ads are not seen, either because they are buried low on web pages or run in tiny, easily ignored video players on those pages, or run simultaneously with other ads. Vindico, an ad management platform company, deemed 57 percent of two billion video ads surveyed over two months to be “unviewable.”
“The advertiser sees a report on an Excel spreadsheet that says, ‘Yeah, these ads ran,’ ” says Matt Timothy, Vindico’s president. “But more than half of them ran without being seen by a human being.”
At first glance, this seems a surprising problem for online video advertising. In theory, a brand could say “I want to reach men in their late 20s who have bought a car in the last year.” Then they could pay for impressions — the industry’s term for an instance when a video ad rolls — that aim at those people. The promise of such efficiency helped coax $2.8 billion from marketers for video ads last year, double what was spent in 2010. That figure is a small part of all digital ad spending, and it is dwarfed by the $74.5 billion spent in 2013 on television ads. But unlike television, online video sales are growing at a double-digit pace. Spending will top $8 billion by 2016, eMarketer projects.
But getting what you think you’ve paid for in this realm is harder than it appears. To understand why, consider what happened a few months ago at a meeting at Blue Chip Marketing, an ad agency in Northbrook, Ill.
It was mid-December, and Blue Chip was in the middle of a campaign — for a client that doesn’t want to be named — selling what the agency would describe only as “a mom-related product.” A few weeks earlier, Sarah VanHeirseele, an agency vice president, and her team had written what is called an insertion order. It’s a document that lays out for a media buyer — the company that actually places the ads — exactly what a campaign should look like.
Blue Chip stated in its insertion order that all the ads should be preroll, generally meaning the kind that run before a piece of video content — a sitcom on NBC.com, for instance. Ms. VanHeirseele wanted most of the videos to be on the large side, about 6 inches by 5 inches on a standard desktop computer. All were to be user-initiated, meaning that a viewer had to click on something to start the ad; none were to run on auto-play.
Is that what Blue Chip got? Oddly enough, it wasn’t sure. “You’d ask a media company where an ad was running and they’d say, ‘We can’t pull that list,’ ” Ms. VanHeirseele said. “Or they would give you a massive list but you had no way of telling if it was accurate.”
So Blue Chip hired a video verification company called BrandAds to track the campaign for the mom-related product and find out where the ads were placed. At that December meeting, BrandAds delivered its report, and Blue Chip finally got a peek behind a curtain.
“We looked at this data and my jaw dropped,” Ms. VanHeirseele remembers. “And then I felt a little sick to my stomach.”
Many of the ads were running in tiny players, 3 inches by 2 inches, on the sites. Some were auto-playing. But disappointment turned to rage when she read the list of domain names where the ads were running; it included pornographic websites. The team opened one site with an especially lewd name and gaped in horror. “Oh my God,” some shouted. Others cursed. Ms. VanHeirseele picked up her phone to call the media buyer in a fury.”
This is a guest post by Dave Allen.
