The digital advertising industry is an ever changing industry and one where we have seen major industrial changes over the past few years. With the prevalence and demand for video distribution all publishers have to adapt to such demands within the advertising industry.
The real question for publishers became the definition of when a video is viewed: viewability is now one of the most common words inside an advertising team. There are various metrics that people consider when defining such. Such metrics include: the duration of how long a user stays on the video, use of autoplay or not, engagement with video, sound, etc.
According to Google’s “Global State of Play” report, the video ad viewability rates across the web vary significantly between countries, (this data excludes YouTube, where Google says on average 93 percent of ads are viewable, compared to an average of 66 percent elsewhere across the web). The highest-rates country was the Netherlands with 81 percent of its video ads in view and the lowest country being Italy, with 55 percent.
Another essential factor for the advertising industry is the discrepancies in viewability of ads between desktop, mobile and tablets. Currently, there is an increase in mobile advertising (not only for videos) spend while other forms of digital advertising shows static signs.
According to figures from Meetrics in a report conducted on the first quarter of 2017, Germany had a 3 percent decline in viewability banner ads with 55 percent, Austria rose one percent with a total of 67 percent viewability, France rose to 60 percent and UK significantly behind at 47 percent viewability of banner ads.
The changes in video advertising will constantly reframe how publishers and marketers conduct business.
With mobile continuing to drive the way in which users watch video, companies have to constantly adapt to these changes. A report from ZenithOptimedia said that “globally consumers spent nearly 20 minutes a day watching online videos on mobile devices, four minutes more than they watched on desktop computers and smart TV sets in 2016.
That is nearly 40% from a year earlier”. ZenithOptimedia predicts that mobile video viewing will grow 33 percent in 2017 and 27 percent in 2018.
Some trends that will impact video advertising in the future are implementation of third-party companies who will track and report data on the impressions around invalid traffic and fraud, shorter advertisements, header bidding to name a few. All in all, as players of this industry, we have found that there is an emphasis on spending towards mobile campaigns and mobile Video Ads with the past years than ever before and as a company, we always have to adapt.