Yahoo announced Wednesday that Audience Ads, supporting demographic and behavioral data for programmatic buying, now integrates into the BrightRoll Demand Side Platform. The move increases brand access to video ad targeting and inventory on and off Yahoo properties, and integrates data from Yahoo Search and Yahoo Mail. Connecting silos of data becomes key.
Through Audience Ads, Yahoo claims to have behavior and interest data from more than one-billion users globally, since the company acquired BrightRoll for $650 million in November 2014.
Digital video advertising in the U.S. rose 56% in 2014, to $5.96 billion, and is expected to grow by 30.4% in 2015 -- totaling $7.77 billion, per eMarketer. In the U.K., digital video advertising reached £505 million in 2014, and will grow 41.6% to £715 million in 2015, the firm estimates.
Programmatic video advertising in the U.S. will reach $3.84 billion by 2016 -- or 40% of all digital video advertising dollars -- up from $710 million in 2014, eMarketer estimates.
Yahoo believes that digital video has gone mainstream. Some 48.3% of agencies said a majority of their requests for proposals included a video ad component in the past year. Compare that with 38.1% in 2013 and 30.2% in 2012, per the company.
Meanwhile, most advertisers still believe online video is about as effective as television ads. A recent BrightRoll study shows that 41% believe online video is about as effective as TV, followed by 31% who say online video is more effective than TV, eighteen percent who think online video is less effective than TV, and 10% who just don't know.