Programmatic video, with a touch of history

Once upon a time, programmatic video advertising was not an obvious choice for publishers wishing to monetize their inventory. The word programmatic, the use of software to purchase digital advertising, was met with blank stares and questionable motives. Thankfully, as the industry began to realize that manually negotiating, serving ads, and banner tracking were too much for the ad networks to handle, it was essential to find an automatic solution. To be fair, the digital marketing industry has historically been able to “keep up” with the complex and ever-growing web. It’s been a tango, to say the least, with the first banner ad in 1994 on Hotwired creating the need for ad servers which in turn birthed the demand for ad networks. These ad networks were able to hold down the fort but the web kept growing and growing and eventually things got out of hand again – insert, Google. Thanks to AdWords and Adsense, the web could be trusted again. Then, in 2007, Apple launched the iPhone, and Google followed shortly with Android OS which completely changed the game. The web grew exponentially along with the audience. Manual ad serving was now out the question, for most publishers, as it was becoming increasingly difficult and, needless to say, unprofitable to pace the industry. Using computers and algorithms to make ad serving more efficient means that programmatic advertising is not just the future, it’s already the present. This brings us back to video ads served programmatically, an obvious choice now for publishers worldwide who wish to optimize yield. The reality is that serving ads programmatically enables data-rich, targetable, and scalable inventory trading. Advertisers can buy across thousands of sites, focusing only on your target audience, and are not limited to existing users only, but new ones as well. Programmatic advertising is CPM-based, meaning that you for the actual impression, not per click on the website.

Publishers have a few options when it comes to programmatic video:

• Creating their own unique video content and featuring it through their embedded player – this option allows publishers to offer this content to direct advertisers for premium prices as well as to programmatic buyers
• Subscribing to an online video library and choosing content verticals that are most related to their content or featuring YouTube type video content
• Allowing 3rd parties to embed their own player and content to be featured on a site with their own monetization

Automatic, data-enriched ad serving has proven that time is money, and publishers and advertisers are adopting programmatic ad serving at a rate that would make RTB run for the hills. Oraki has a wide variety of video ad tools for our clients, and we would love to share them with you.