At Monday's OMMA Ad Nets show in LA the buzzword was "complexity." Those of you in the video ad ecology should feel lucky ... for now. You don' yet have to deal with a display
ad network supply chain that just about every honest person in it admits is too damned intricate, interdependent and confusing. From DSPs (demand side platforms) to RTB (real-time bidding) the
alphabet soup of ad technologies is stultifying. In just the last two years the number of data and service providers inserting themselves into the targeting process has multiplied.
In fact,
almost as a joke, investment firm GCA Savvian created a chart that has been circulated widely now that graphs out the pieces, from agency "trading desks" to DSPs to data exchanges, data
optimizers analytics, verification and attribution providers to the many ad nets themselves.
But there is another chart getting built as well and this one involves the video ad ecology. GCA Savvian VP Josh Wepman gave us a superb presentation Monday on how his
firm views this morass and where it suspects there will be opportunity.
Publishers, he warned are under threat by these new demand side platforms because they can depress overall CPMs and
advertisers can find their audiences now elsewhere for much less money. But Wepman recommended that publishers need to leverage their assets more effectively in terms of embracing targeting on their
own sites, demonstrating the value of context and selling data directly to advertisers themselves.
Wepman singled out one very important defensive position for publishing -- video. "Video
promotes more engaging ad content" he said. "It has a 5x to 6x higher yield than display advertising." More to the point, video is the content that will directly pull from the biggest
untapped well of all -- TV dollars.
And now there is a new GVA Savvian chart for the video segment. Wepman's video economy charts enjoys the benefit of being compared to the near-comical
display chart. In comparison, its six categories of content creation, publishing tools, delivery/content management, enablers, monetizers and aggregators seems disarmingly clear, clear and (dare we
say) sustainable.
Let this be a warning to the video side of online advertising. At yesterday's Ad Nets I was
struck by how much faith, money, time and complexity are being poured into targeting technologies that some agency panelist admitted had not really demonstrated superior performance yet. In order to
manage and even understand the new digital advertising order of highly automated, algorithm-driven buying, agencies chuckled over the need to hire math Ph.D.s and add immeasurably to their own
overhead.
When Wepman presented this much cleaner chart of the video economy I had to wonder whether streaming media ultimately will have the upper hand when attracting ad dollars. Not only
is it simpler but in some ways TV has already made the case for its effectiveness. Dave Martin of Ignited Media said something on one panel that seemed to say it all about the advantage video had over
display.
In essence he said that it didn't matter how much a display ad targeted the right consumer at the right place with the right message at the right time. When it came to advertising
that movie that is opening this Thursday, it is preferable just to get your likely customer to watch a trailer for the film, and that audience often is best found and leveraged when they are in the
context of an entertainment site.