• by Jayne Pimentel , June 11, 2014

“Point, then shoot” might not sound like a radical approach to media planning, yet when it comes to video, for many marketers it is.

Video has made enormous headway in recent years, becoming a nearly billion-dollar segment of the ad market. New metrics such as Nielsen’s OCR and ComScore’s vCE are helping to flatten the buying landscape, putting video on TV buyers’ radars in a serious way . At the same time, better content plus faster smartphones have made video a more reliable way for marketers to reach a broad swath of the population.

Still, many video campaigns are executed backwards. That’s right, backwards.

More often than not, agencies drop their creative assets in the laps of planners, and the strategic thinking that went into developing them fails to be passed through. As beautiful and well conceived as the creative might be, execution is often determined more by specific channel-spend allocation than by audience. With the division of budgets and the need to “check the box” on every channel, too often asset distribution is carved up before the content -- and the specific audience -- is finally confirmed. In the process, planners adopt a shoot-and-point mentality -- a legacy of television-style thinking -- and miss out on the opportunity that a truly integrated cross-channel campaign can deliver.

Instead, planners and marketers need to point and then shoot. Here’s how:

Put audience first. Even if you’re repurposing creative, let the asset dictate the placement. For any given asset there will be a number of formats and platforms that suit your ad. Instead of placing your ad on a channel simply because that’s what you’ve planned or budgeted for, prioritize audience first and then figure out which channels will give you access to that audience while letting your video shine.

Consider programmatic. Applyingaudience-first thinking to video will pay dividends on programmatic buys. Seeding a video programmatically helps lay the groundwork for viral sharing. Today, videos such as T-Mobile’s “Liverpool Dance “or the popular Old Spice commercials are often mistakenly assumed to have achieved viral status purely through organic growth on YouTube and Facebook. In fact these campaigns ran programmatically, using the distribution method to generate more growth after seeing an initial positive organic reaction. What’s more, programmatic can be optimized in-flight – you don’t have to jump off the cliff and hope for a safe landing.

Think holistically. Consider video in the context of the whole customer journey. Think about what your viewers are doing before and after they watch your video – and what you want them to do. In the best of all possible worlds, your video will point users to another high-engagement channel, one that will move your customer right on down the funnel.

Apply insights across channels.Integrating video with the rest of your campaign allows your entire campaign to benefit from insights derived from each individual channel. One of the benefits of running an integrated campaign with a data-management platform is that you can apply the audience segmentation you’ve done for display directly to your video campaign. What’s more, audience-related insights you garner from one channel -- display or search, for example -- can shed new light on how to go about reaching your audience with video.

One of our clients running a direct-response campaign saw a significant uptick in conversions when it paired video and display. The client found that running one highly effective video cost less than the multiple display and search ads that would have been required to achieve the same results.

Video still sits toward the bottom of what will be a long upward curve. Those who are just starting to dip their toes into online video may feel safer with a video specialist, but savvy marketers have begun to recognize (and rightly so) that video is just another tool in their arsenal of engagement -- and a versatile one at that. There’s no question that with the flattening of delivery and metrics, video is becoming a more integral piece of the marketing puzzle, one that can help smart marketers zoom out for a better look at the big picture.