As the mobile industry continues to rapidly evolve, it should be no surprise that mobile advertising has gained steam alongside it. Marketers realize that if they want to reach their audience, they need to have a presence on the favored device. But as with all things mobile, there is a need for this presence to be highly personalized, which is why interest programmatic media buying of mobile video is on the rise.
Research tells us that not only are consumers watching a ton of videos, but they’re watching them on mobile devices. It comes as no surprise, then, that mobile video advertising is growing three times as fast as spending on desktop video. As a result, advertisers are rushing to grab the video ad spots, and increasingly putting their share of digital budgets towards programmatic buying. The U.S. has been a leading market for this trend, with programmatic mobile video ad spend reaching $2.91 billion in 2015, according to data by eMarketer.
Programmatic technology allows advertisers to target individuals by serving ads that are highly relevant to them, maximizing their ad’s impact and ROI. Using audience insights, advertisers can reach out to the right person, at the right time, in the right context and, most importantly, at the right price.
What are the advantages of programmatic mobile video ads and why must advertisers invest in it to maximize their campaigns?
1. Get the Impressions You Want
How many times have we skipped a YouTube video because it is interrupting, annoying or irrelevant? That’s because traditional ads do not differentiate between audiences, leading to wasted portions of the ads. For instance, if a product is primarily targeted at 18 year-old college girls, then the ads are probably wasted on 30-year old women.
On the other hand, programmatic campaigns are heavily tailored to suit the needs of the audiences it is targeting. This enables advertisers to make decisions regarding when and how much are they willing to pay to serve their ads. Each impression is valued and weighed, depending on the information advertisers have about the users, and then the ads are served accordingly. Programmatic advertising allows you to target audiences with the messages they think fit best with users’ preferences, leading to higher click through rates, conversion, and most importantly, ROI.
2. Better Targeting For Higher Engagement
Since video offers an extremely engaging experience, video ads tend to outperform traditional ones. In fact, a study by DoubleClick found that audiences are approximately three times as likely to replay an online video ad unit than they are to click through on a standard ad image.
And when coupled with the programmatic tools, video ads can empower advertisers to maximize the impact by engaging their target audience with the right ads, at the right time. Programmatic technology makes optimum use of first- and third-party data to target desired audiences. It’s through these data insights, that advertisers are able to identify the audiences who are most likely to engage with the brand messages and convert, and segment their video ads accordingly.
3. Real-Time Campaign Optimization
Video ads offer a range of viewer actions that can be tracked for better campaign optimization. For instance, the view rate is a good indicator of how engaged viewers are with the content, and a video with higher view rate will win more auctions in comparison to a video ad with a low view rate. Using programmatic capabilities, advertisers can optimize the performance campaigns in real time and make desired changes to tweak the campaign for best results. Whether it’s choosing the inventory type, managing the campaigns by dayparting or geo-targeting, or capping the frequency of campaigns to prevent audience fatigue, programmatic advertising grants advertisers control over the efficiency and effectiveness of their ad spend like never before.
4. Scale and Efficiency
Speaking of efficiency, with programmatic technology, media buying has become automated leading to a tremendous increase in efficiency. It also offers greater scale, allowing advertisers to reach wider audiences, which would have been difficult with traditional way of buying and selling ad spaces. By scale, we don’t just mean the number, but also reaching audiences across multiple devices with a single transaction. Automation also allows brands to access the breadth of video advertising options, since video advertising doesn’t work on mass model such as TV ads.
Video’s Programmatic Future
Programmatic video as arrived and is on an upward rise. As programmatic technology evolves, and consumers’ move to video away from the TV screens, the shift in programmatic video technology is only waiting to happen. For advertisers and publishers, alike, programmatic video represents a huge opportunity for improved efficiency as well as profit.
