Mike Baker, investor and strategic advisor
Differences in the way CTV and linear TV manage commercial breaks are driving a need for technical standards for advertising that will improve the consumer experience. The engineering of CTV apps and stream encoding are among the factors that need to be harmonized to avoid repeating ads in pods.
Mike Fisher, vice president of advanced TV and audio at Essence
YouTube, the video-sharing platform owned by Google, is emerging as a viable alternative to other streamed programming as more households hook up their TVs to the internet. That growth has led advertisers to look for a combination of premium content and audiences within YouTube.
David George, CEO of Pixability
The pandemic led people to spend more time at home while driving a significant shift in viewing habits. As YouTube’s viewership has grown, more brands are adopting the video-sharing platform as a bigger part of their strategies to reach consumers.
Grace Smith, senior digital marketing manager at Saucony
Saucony, the sportswear brand owned by Wolverine World Wide, reached new audiences with a CTV campaign that helped to drive higher purchase intent. About two-thirds (65%) of consumers who bought Saucony’s products after seeing its ads on Amazon Fire were first-time customers.
Tony Weisman, advisor and board member; former CMO of Dunkin’
“It’s no longer a question about whether or not you’re going to invest in YouTube,” Weisman said, “but are you going to do it smartly, or are you going to do it with somebody who can really make sure that that investment is wise? Or are you just going to take your chances? And I would not advise anyone to just take their chances.”
Matt Duffy, CMO of Pixability
While YouTube is mostly a brand-safe platform, advertisers still need to consider whether its content is also suitable for their campaigns. Pixability found in a survey that many advertisers rely on third-party vendors to help understand brand suitability.
Rob Norman, advisory board member for Pixability
“We’ve become familiar with the Amazon walled gardens and the Facebook walled gardens, but we’re about to become familiar with device-led walled gardens, operated by people like LG, Samsung, and Vizio,” Norman said. “The use of identifiers in the TV market is evolving at really quite a space. What I’m hoping people are going to do is to stand back and look at other forms of signal other than identifiers.”
You are watching “Driving Reach and Results on Connected TV,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Pixability. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>Brand safety concerns once plagued digital display and online video inventory. They have been somewhat soothed by brand safety software.
But, as conected TV rises, some of the same concerns are arriving on TV now.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Matt Duffy of Pixability, a vendor of brand safety tooling for YouTube and other platforms, describes how the category is evolving.
Duffy points to a study from Global Alliance for Responsible Media and data from Comscore showing how comfortable advertisers have become with those channels.
“It showed (that) YouTube is now over 99% brand-safe for advertisers,” he says. “According to Comscore, over 40% of CTV watch time is YouTube.”
And Pixability just commissioned its own survey of ad buyer attitudes to brand safety in connected TV.
Duffy summarized some of the results.
“(Respondents) don’t see CTV as a brand suitability threat or safety threat … Their concern is reach and driving full-funnel results on CTV,” he explains.
But Duffy says it’s not that simple – “safety” may be built-in, but “suitability” of content is a different matter.
“CTV content sometimes may have nudity or violence and so forth,” he says. “And it may also express certain opinions that a brand may not want to be aligned with.
“Although YouTube is safe, there are specific suitability issues that some of your advertisers may have with.”
Pixability’s clients include the “big six agencies” plus smaller independents and some brands as well,
Duffy says the same kind of vendors that offer “brand safety” technology can also help out with “suitability”, the alignment of ads to inventory in an expanding CTV universe. “No-one wants one and not the other,” he says.
In fact, Duffy thinks the ‘brand safety” threat has reached the point of becoming an opportunity.
“Suitability has always been a little bit about defence and avoiding content you don’t want,” he says. “(But) it can be also thought of as an offensive measure – go on the offence and find content that performs well.
“We’re seeing a great trend towards agencies and brands embracing that and saying, ‘Yes, it’s not as much about avoiding content as it is about finding content that helps us perform better’.
Companies like Pixability aim to turn video content into metadata signals, surfaced in buying platforms, that ad buyers can leverage or swerve. They are enabling the new wave of “contextual” video ad targeting.
Previously, Pixability released a tool for automating analyses of what specific video iterations are working or not. The system uses machine learning to evaluate the different versions of the uploaded ads while measuring their performance, context and audience against the client’s KPIs.
“We’ve created curated lists around different causes that people want to support or types of creators that people want to support,” Duffy adds. “We have LGBTQ creator lists, we have black and Asian creator lists, et cetera.
“So it’s a really nice trend to see suitability, not just as a preventative measure, but as a way to connect with creators that you want to support.”
You are watching “Driving Reach and Results on Connected TV,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Pixability. For more videos, please visit this page.
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