• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, September 28, 2017

How do you become a video-first business? Make lots of video. At least that was the answer panelists gave during an Advertising Week panel organized around them Thursday morning.

The bigger issues, they said, concern technology and data, including what platforms video publishers use to distribute, what data they use to analyze and optimize, and what revenue models they use to ensure a meaningful return on those investments.

“Higher prices are coming with better targeting,” Jourdain-Alexander Casale, vice president-strategy at programmatic media exchange Index Exchange said, adding that publishers and platforms are just “getting ready for that world when we can actually figure out what’s there and what it’s worth.”

That would be a good thing, the panel agreed, given the cost involved in producing and distributing video, and the fact that it's now common to “find rates that are below desktop a lot of times.”

One way to improve the rates, the panelists agreed, is to get better data identifying the characteristics -- and inherent value -- of consumers watching those videos and being exposed to the brands that want to reach them.

“For us, it’s all about the data, and our video teams are looking at the data to figure out what works,” said Jana Meron, vice president-programmatic and data strategy at Business Insider. That data includes “what are the most-watched videos, along with the demographics.”