• by Tobi Elkin  @tobielkin, November 16, 2016

Ad-tech firm Sizmek on Wednesday said that globally, rich-media ads increased consumer engagement 7.44 times more than standard banners, according to its 2016 Rich Media and Video Benchmarks report detailing advertising benchmarks for the first half of 2016. That data point varies by country and region, Sizmek said.

In addition, advertisers using the Sizmek platform experienced 9.21 times more lift in North America by switching to interactive video from non-interactive video. It also found the variance between fully-played in-stream and rich media videos (in all regions) is less than 15%, suggesting that audiences are likely to watch through to completion once a video in a rich-media unit starts, almost to the same extent for both formats. 

The report aims to educate advertisers about the advantages of rich-media formats and assist them in making ad-spend decisions, according to Jaime Singson, director of product marketing at Sizmek.

Sizmek said that its analysis found that advertising creative has become a core focus in 2016. Sizmek analyzed 21 unique ad formats, 2,500 unique unit size combinations, 1.3 million individual ads, and hundreds of billions of impressions served via the Sizmek platform during the first half of 2016. 

The report’s comparison of benchmarks indicates that rich media is often used by advertisers looking to foster ad-unit engagement, raising brand awareness without making it necessary that consumers interrupt their online experience. Analysis of rich media engagement lift over standard banner shows that all verticals benefit from the use of rich media formats. In particular, the tech, Internet, retail, and restaurants categories come in at the top of the list, with 40 times or more in engagement lift. 

Asked what Sizmek was trying to achieve with the report, Singson told Real-Time Daily via email: “It feels that creative has taken a back seat of late,  especially with the rise of programmatic, and the proliferation of uninspiring, low-value creative. We wanted to provide creative and media agencies with some quantifiable justification as to the importance of more-engaging creative.”

Singson pointed to the fact that while ad formats like rich media, expandables, pushdowns, and interactive video have been around for some time, they continue to offer solid lift and performance that advertisers seek.  

“One area that we’ve noticed there’s more interest in is the emergence of high-impact units within the programmatic environment, usually through Private Marketplaces,” Singson said. Units like expandables and pushdowns are trickier due to idiosyncrasies in working with different domains and making the units scale in programmatic.

Sizmek has observed a 145% lift for expandables and a 178% lift for pushdowns for example. Sizmek has begun seeing an increasing number of its high-impact formats run in complex programmatic environments. It has retrofitted many of its formats to run scalably in programmatic environments through a single tag, according to Singson.