Turning faith into evidence

What people are interested in is content – not device – and advertisers want to reach those consumers regardless of the screen they use. It’s welcome news then that the new Nielsen Online Campaign Ratings provide advertisers with the window they need to finally optimise their spend at an impression level – and make sure that video messages are aligned and efficiently targeted. By Videology’s Rhys McLachlan.

Video advertising in the UK is about to change radically. After years of spend growth based on good faith, metrics nobbled from the display market, it will now have its own, built-from-the-ground-up currencies.

In the next three months, we anticipate that around 25-30% of all Videology’s campaigns will come with a demand that the audience reached has been validated by the new Nielsen Online Campaign Ratings (OCR) methodology.

Going from 0% to 30% in just three months is rapid growth indeed, but if our experience in the US is anything to go by, demand for campaigns validated by OCR and its competitor, comScore’s Validated Campaign Essentials (VCE) are only going to increase.

Demand for OCR in the US saw a slower climb after its initial launch as advertisers and the industry at large took some time to understand the new product. There has been a spike in interest by advertisers utilising the Videology platform in recent months, however, with several of its largest advertisers now requesting that audiences be validated against Nielsen OCR criteria for age and demographics.

What these new metrics do is create a currency that has been built for the digital age. They allow advertisers to understand who’s seen their video in the language of traditional video – TV.

This enables them to assess its delivery and performance across multiple screens within the campaign framework they understand. It allows them to invest in confidence and enables them to assess delivery in a consistent manner.

Nielsen OCR has only just become a live market proposition in the UK, but we are already seeing high levels of interest from advertisers. It allows brands to be much more sophisticated in the way they track and measure their activity, using not just click through and completion rates but also assessing the newer forms of audience targeting such as behavioural that many brands are now using.

It marks the start of an era when marketers can confidently shift video money across from TV into online, mobile and on-demand formats. Audience verification tools allow advertisers to assess the success of their investment against proven metrics already familiar to them in TV buying.

OCR is based on privacy-protected data from Facebook and enables advertisers to deliver granular level GRPs by age, gender and demographic that can be directly compared to TV activity.

What people are interested in is content – not device – and advertisers want to reach those consumers regardless of the screen they use to view content, be it TV, PC, tablet or mobile.

OCR provides them with the window they need to finally optimise their spend at an impression level and make sure that video messages are aligned and efficiently targeted.

Videology has worked closely with Nielsen to develop its own predictive targeting solution to help advertisers take maximum advantage of this new planning opportunity.

We’ve developed forecasting tools that can predict volumes, pricing and composition levels. We can ensure smooth delivery and real-time audience optimisation and even guarantee audience composition depending on pricing and campaign objectives.

Such tools are vital because our experience in the US shows that publishers need to adopt the same metrics that advertisers are now using.

It’s vital that both demand and supply sites of the online video equation grow together, with both sides being able to measure effectively what’s being delivered, using the same language.

Failure to do so can lead to a mismatch between buyer and seller that undermines both sides’ confidence in this emerging and hugely effective channel.

Nielsen OCR brings with it new opportunities to manage all video platforms in a unified and much more efficient way.

The good news is that while advertisers and agencies will need time to discover how to truly maximise this opportunity, there are already solutions that will help them on that journey.

Rhys McLachlan will be speaking at next week’s Connected Consumer conference. Click here for more details.