LIVE FROM STREAMING MEDIA EAST (New York City): Performance metrics for Online Video Advertising

Performance metrics for Online Video Advertising10:30 - 11:30 AM EST session (Track B)

Moderator:
Kate Kaye, Editor, News and Special Projects, ClickZ News

Panelists:
Christine Peterson, Associate Media Director, Carat Fusion
Rob Aitken, Online Video Product Manager, AP
John Ellis, VP, Product Management Valueclick Media
Mort Greenburg, VP of Sales, Metacafe

# # #

(the following are paraphrased dialogues from the panel)

Rob: Having a breaking news event creates a lot of inventory... but we may not have enough ads to serve. Or in some case, like Virgina Tech, it's not appropriate to serve ads. So we try and forecase based on 30, 60, 90-day historical performance.

Christine: The video pricing models we've seen are extremely expensive... There needs to be a way to work with publishers where advertisers can take advantage of these spikes, in a cost-effective way. We should set up some test models...

Fabienne: At metacafe, we find that there is a large user abandoment on everything after 10 seconds. Pre- and post-roll ads can work. We are testing text-based flash overlay which comes up 15 seconds into the video. We are using technology to serve ads that are relevant to the contest based on tagged video content (sometimes referred to as a "ticker)

Christine: There needs to be more flexibility for the length of the spots. We should challenge advertisers to create interactive video content, not just re-purposing tv ads. We might find that if the experience is engaging, the length of the spot might become less and less relevant.

John: Advertisers should leverage the "link-forward" ability of video... because online is an interacive media, not a passive media like television.

Christine: We found that when we serve an ad with a "companion ad unit", this companion ad drove a much higher click through rate then when you're just serving a video ad.

Rob: Yes, we've seen more than a doubling of click-through rate. At first, we saw 60% of our traffic abandon in the first 60 seconds... and now we've seen that drop to less than 30% as a result of shortening the length of our ads.

John: There is a big opportunity for advertisers to reach a really niche audience because of the variety of video content that is available. Today, there is a lot of video content being consumed by consumers, but not enough advertisers ...

MEASURING PEFORMANCE?

John: Beyond impressions and clickthroughs, we look at things like "How many times did someone press the "forward" button?", "How many times did someone watch the ad all the way through?", "How many times has it been forwarded?"... There is also an opportunity to find those clips that are already viral and perhaps relevant to a company's product, to accompany or "insert" an ad into those spots. There is not enough of that going on today.

Fabienne: Behavioral targeting is key to an online campaign. Campaigns should be optimized based on how someone is interacting with your content. Technology allows this today.

Christine: It's important to utilize both qualitatitive and quantitative measurement tools, as well as 3rd party measurement tools like Comscore and Nielsen.

John: Just last week the IAB announced that there needs to be a standard for how we are measuring online advertising. There needs to be agreement between the different parties involved... So that a click is a click is a click.

Kate: And auditing!

John: Comscore has 400,000 people on their panel... but everytime we look at our logfiles, we wonder why their is so much difference between a third party system's numbers like Comscore, versus what we see in on our Omniture reports... If you're on the buying side, and perhaps working with 30-40 publishers, you might be looking at dozens of different formats of data... there needs to be a standard.

Christine: We work with a lot of different systems... Mediaplex, doubleclick's medi avisor, etc... But then it's the job of agencies to create their own system that allows us to take all this data and present it to a client in a single interface that is customized for each advertiser... what's important to an EchoStar is not the same as what Pfizer cares about.



AUDIENCE Q & A

AUDIENCE QUESTION #1: How can you measure brand impact beyond a tool like dynamic impact?

John: Having the ability to let people comment on the ad can be one way. You can work with dynamic logic, [maggot?], and others to measure intent, etc...

Christine: Comscore, insight Express... we've also done mall intercepts to see what's working. We also use visual Max.

John: I think it's important to have a clear offer and compelling call to action.

AUDIENCE QUESTION #2: I am a local broadcaster... how do we get our space bought when people are utilizing big engines like Google, Yahoo!, etc... It seems that advertisers find it much easier to purchase from the big 3.

Christine: Just because the big 3 have a large number of eyeballs, doesn't mean they are the most appropriate channels. Sometimes it's more important to be at a local level with our ads.