Videoplaza: Publishers Must Become Audience Architects to Future-Proof Their Video Businesses

By 2017, 30% of all video advertising spend will be based on audience trading, according to new research report from IHS and Videoplaza

LONDON – Publishers sit on a mine of audience data. They frequently save data, without making sense of it or making it useful, according to the latest research from IHS, a leading global source of critical information and insight, and Videoplaza, the sell side video ad serving and management provider.

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“The pace of change in the video advertising space is rapid and publishers have a real opportunity to capitalise upon their unique audience assets by building a data strategy which will enable them to take a new role as audience architects”

The research report, ‘A Future for TV: The Publisher as Audience Architect’ reveals that there is a huge opportunity to leverage this data to drive audience-based trading. Trading using audience data delivers differentiation by helping the publisher build unique offerings for their advertisers. Success relies on creating a clear data strategy – big data is meaningless without a clear purpose, structure and approach for connecting ‘islands of data’. Audience data available to publishers can include age, location, gender, and interests. This data can then be used to target advertising at specific segments.

“The pace of change in the video advertising space is rapid and publishers have a real opportunity to capitalise upon their unique audience assets by building a data strategy which will enable them to take a new role as audience architects” commented Daniel Knapp, director of advertising research at IHS. “Data is a new raw material which can be dynamically shaped and assembled by publishers to maximise the value they can offer to brands”.

The research features new data highlighting why data should become increasingly central to a publisher’s strategy. By 2017 in Western Europe:

  • Video advertising will reach a predicted spend of €2.5B – one of the fastest growing categories of online advertising
  • There will be 1.1B devices which will equate to 2.5 devices per person and 3x as many video capable devices as TVs
  • 32.5% of all online video advertising will be programmatically traded

The cumulative effects of these trends are driving buyers towards audience trading – the opportunity to buy the audience wherever they are, across any device. Audience trading is enabled by data: 1) collecting, understanding and packaging up audience data and 2) buying and selling inventory programmatically, leveraging that data to add value to inventory. It is therefore critical that publishers are able to make the shift to audience trading.

“Publishers are the gatekeepers to their audiences, particularly in a cookieless world. They are sitting on a goldmine of audience data, which once they have made sense of it and made it useful can deliver the foundations for ongoing revenue growth in video” said Sorosh Tavakoli, CEO of Videoplaza.

MTV3, Finland’s leading broadcaster, is innovating in this space: “We have taken a proactive approach to becoming audience architects by setting a clear data strategy and defining how we want to work with our audience data”, said Pasi Raassina, head of online solutions at MTV3. “This approach means we can bring truly competitive and compelling offers to market for our advertiser clients, and get ready for a world in which data and audiences are the focus for programmatic trading”.

‘A Future for TV: The Publisher as Audience Architect’ is available now to download from Videoplaza’s website.

About Videoplaza: videoplaza.com | twitter.com/videoplaza | Introduction video

About IHS: www.ihs.com