You know who needs PR help? The Click-through Fan Club. They’re getting murdered, pretty consistently now.  There have been What-Are-You,-Crazy? stories about the worthlessness of click-through for years, and apparently, it’s all sinking in.

A new survey of 1,000 brand marketers in the U.S. and U.K. by ad tech firm Unruly discovers that those people think click-through is the least important metric they see when evaluating online video campaigns.

The most revealing data: The viewability and completed views numbers. That’s what marketers are looking for.

Says Sarah Wood, the COO, in an email conversation, ”Click-through rates were once the only metric that mattered. So to see that marketers have now downgraded it to the bottom of the key performance indicators (KPI) list shows a sweeping shift in the way we measure value in digital campaigns, particularly around video. In the survey, you’ll see that the KPIs of vewability and complete views are neck and neck - with 24.7% of US marketers selecting each as a top metric. The focus on complete views indicates marketers are placing greater emphasis on winning a viewer’s attention. And to be actively watched, the ad must be seen, hence the equal weighting of viewability as a KPI.”

CEO Scott Button  says, “the tectonic plates of ad tech have shifted” away from click-through. Asked to rank important indicators of a campaign's success, just under 10% of U.S. marketers said click-through. Just 6.4% did in the U.K. 

The new Unruly report is pegged to the increasing use of programmatic, and shows that three-quarters of the respondents are now spending a portion of their online video budget on programmatic. In the U.S., over 22% are allotting 41% to 60% on programmatic video, the largest percentage cluster.

But the survey also says that in both nations, fewer than half of the marketers think they’re really very smart about what programmatic video buying is all about; about the same percentage feel comfortable orchestrating a programmatic video campaign. So, it’s fair to say, marketers seem to be eager and also nimble. Hey, they need a seminar sometime this summer.

“We all know that marketers are continuing to increase investment in programmatic video.” Wood said in her email from London, “and our survey shows that they will continue to do so. But there’s less press and analyst coverage about the skills gap in digital, so some people may be surprised to see the disparity between levels of investment and levels of knowledge and expertise. The survey also shows a strong desire for emotional and psychographic targeting to complement the more emotional and personalized approach that brands are taking with their content creation.”

Indeed, discussing that emotional tug also leads Unruly to note this little morsel of acquired research: The fact that emotional targeting is marketers’ top choice, this report says, is  “not surprising, given that emotional advertising studies have shown that emotional campaigns are 88% more profitable than rational ones.”  So, that’s the secret!

THE YAHOO DEAL: More on Yahoo’s acquisition of the Oct. 25 game between the Buffalo Bills and the Jacksonville Jaguars, from London: There’s been a little lively discussion about whether Yahoo can make money, after paying the NFL a reported $20 million for the rights, for one probably not very good game. Says Brad Adgate, senior vice president of research at Horizon Media, in a Twitter conversation, “I think it can [make money] but even if it doesn't the publicity, the promotional platform would be worth the venture.”  

On the other hand, A knowledgeable network sports executive who preferred to stay anonymous, told me: “I’d see them as very, very unlikely to recoup.  It sounds mostly like an attempt by Yahoo to regain some relevance and a chance to be the incumbent for any possible package of higher-quality OTT-only games down the road.”

The Street.com calculates, through a source, says the game is likely to reach an audience of 500,000 and reap ad revenue of $3 million to $5 million, and says it will have to pay CBS at least $1 million to produce the game for them. But that Web site more or less concludes that Yahoo is doing it for name value, prestige and all of that. Is there a price tag on that? Maybe not, but that sounds like pretty expensive PR.

And right now, I’d say it still hasn’t paid off. Rightly or not, Yahoo and AOL are blasts from the past for a lot of people. The lead of The New York Times story about the NFL deal reads, “Yahoo may be well past its glory days, but its quarterback, Marissa Mayer, can still score a touchdown now and then.” That’s what? Half-good publicity?

pj@mediapost.com