CTV’s brand-building credentials are well established, but James Wilby, Head of AV Trading at Dentsu, argues that purely looking at premium video through a brand-building lens risks underestimating its ability to drive short-term sales – and providing the right metrics and cost structures are in place, there is further opportunity to use premium video as a performance channel.
In this edition of the Buy-Side View, Wilby explores the increasingly blurred lines between performance and brand-building in video, the shift to measuring quality metrics and outcomes, and how AI is being used to develop planning and buying models.
What is your biggest bugbear when it comes to video and CTV advertising?
I’ve been in this business quite a long time, and it’s without a doubt the most interesting time to be buying video. If I had a bugbear, it’s the complexity of the video ecosystem. Advertisers often find the same content available through multiple buying routes. There’s this notion of co-exclusivity that we come across at the moment, which just means that there’s different pricing structures, technology layers and fees. And that can make it really difficult to understand where the value is and where the budgets are working as hard as they should. We’re constantly evaluating what video we should be buying, and a lot of that comes down to the premium nature of that video, and whether that can be compared against another environment.
So I think that’s at the heart of the complexity of it, and that can sometimes result in premium video and CTV being benchmarked against lower-cost environments that don’t necessarily offer the same value, particularly for brand-building. So comparing prices across that ecosystem is often complicated, and we’re often trying to explain to our clients the need for quality content and looking at other quality metrics like the viewing experience and audience engagement, not just the cost per impression. And I think as an industry, we’re not always great at making that really clear, or making those nuances between less premium and more premium video easier to understand for advertisers.
How do you think the role of the agency has changed over the past ten years?
We’ve moved from primarily being media buyers to helping our clients navigate that complex ecosystem. So while the fundamentals of video haven’t really changed – it’s still about reaching the right audience in the right environment with the right content – what’s changed is the sheer number of ways we can do that. So it’s that opportunity, but also that challenge around the growth of CTV, streaming, programmatic buying, data partnerships and measurement solutions. There are so many different ways that we can buy video and so many different opportunities for our clients. The agency’s role is helping them to navigate that and to provide clarity in what is a complex ecosystem.
So I think as a result, agencies now play a much broader role in making sense of that fragmented marketplace, evaluating the true value of all those different buying routes, understanding the trade off between scale, quality and price, and making sure that every investment is working as hard as it should be for whatever our clients’ KPIs are. And the low-cost performance model can work in many cases, but in some cases it’s about communicating that it’s not always best to go down the cheapest route when more premium environments are available. So the challenge is no longer lack of choice, it’s just knowing which choices will deliver the best business outcomes for our clients.
Which do you think video advertising is the most effective for – generating awareness and brand-building, or driving short-term sales?
Obviously the richness of the video format, combined with its ability to reach audiences in premium environments, means it remains one of the most effective channels for generating awareness and building brands. And obviously we have some challenges around the way audience behaviour has changed, as consumption is much more fragmented than it used to be. That doesn’t mean that broad reach is no longer achievable. Through intelligent planning, the right kind of partnerships, and effective use of data and measurement, you can continue to really prove the ability to build brands. It’s just becoming a more complex way of doing so.
That said, I think we do miss a trick sometimes with premium video and CTV, and we underestimate its ability to drive short-term sales. And again, I guess it comes back to that point about trying to evaluate premium video versus other environments, such as social video and online video. And too often we assume that premium video is purely looked at through a brand-building lens, when it can be just as effective in supporting performance, if you have the right cost structures and metrics in place to evaluate it. So I think there’s much more opportunity there to use premium video as a performance channel.
One of the things that we’ve done at Dentsu is to work with our media partners to think innovatively about pricing and delivery, to make sure that we’re making that buy work harder. But ultimately the most effective way to do that for our clients is to try and achieve both with the right mix of video, and work closely with media owners and technology partners, to prove business outcomes, dependent on their KPIs.
What team within your agency handles CTV, and why?
CTV and ‘big screen’ video are predominantly planned and bought by our Total AV team. Total AV means we focus on premium AV environments. And that’s helping clients to reach audiences wherever they’re consuming high-quality content, whether that’s through traditional broadcast, linear, BVOD, streaming services or CTV platforms. I guess that sounds pretty simple, but the reality is that those lines are much more blurred than they used to be, and that video now sits at the centre of a broader ecosystem. So our AV specialists need to be responsible for evaluating that media as to whether it’s premium, and whether it’s delivering the strongest KPI outcomes for our clients. And that encompasses practically all video.
We’ve developed something at Dentsu called YouTube Fit for TV, where we’ve worked with a number of our broadcast partners and premium video partners to create a curated marketplace for YouTube video. So where’s the line between performance, brand building and other forms of video? And our teams don’t operate in silos, they work closely with our addressable, social, search and OOH teams, because clearly video plays a part through all those media. So we take a connected approach to try and optimise that media mix, to make sure that we’re getting the maximum value out of every pound we invest through video.
How is the growth of CTV changing your TV buying strategy?
Reaching audiences at scale to build mass awareness has always been one of TV’s strengths. But achieving that scale has become a bit more complex and more challenging in the current market, as obviously audience viewing is now spread across so many different forms of video.
That means our strategy has evolved from planning around individual channels to planning around audiences more, wherever they choose to watch premium content. So the growth of CTV has definitely expanded where we connect with those audiences, and rather than replacing traditional TV, it complements and extends it. That’s obviously helping us to reach light TV viewers, and TV viewers that spend less time watching linear TV but are still watching in premium environments. So more viewer choice is obviously translating into more buying choice for our advertisers and our buyers, allowing us to build increasingly flexible and targeted video strategies for our clients.
So ultimately I think CTV has made TV more powerful, and again more complex. And success now depends on bringing everything together in the right combination to maximise reach, frequency, and drive stronger outcomes. And I think that’s increasingly where we’re going as an agency. We’re trying to add value all the time to navigate that diversified video marketplace, while ensuring every pound works as hard as it should.
What could agencies do better to help clean up the industry?
Transparency is obviously really important, and that should be a fundamental starting point for everything that we do. And that applies equally across agencies, media owners and technology partners. Clients should have a clear understanding of where their money is going, the price they’re paying, and how that investment is reaching premium brand-safe content, especially if that is a key KPI for the campaign. So that’s at the heart of everything we do. But again, the video ecosystem has become more sophisticated, and that means we have to work harder to show how that level of sophistication doesn’t come at the expense of clarity.
I think the other side of that coin is measurement. Audiences are fragmenting across different platforms, so accurately measuring reach, frequency and completion rates, while avoiding duplication, becomes increasingly challenging. And I think that’s a key part of what our industry needs to do better. I think there’s real power in being able to demonstrate that you’re not duplicating any of those key metrics. So moving beyond measuring delivery, towards a greater emphasis on quality metrics and outcomes, is one of the ways we’re trying to do that. That means we can give advertisers a bit more confidence about where their impressions are being delivered, and the impact that they’re having on audience behaviour.
Part of that is just proving the accountability of everything that we do. But I think that’s obviously a win-win for advertisers, agencies and media owners alike, because we can demonstrate that, and we can get more intelligence around the outcomes that premium video is driving, whether that’s sales uplift, search activity or app downloads. That gives stronger confidence to the product and premium video’s ability to drive business results and make it more credible. Those are all areas we’re really focused on at Dentsu at the moment. We’re trying to develop our end-to-end capability from targeting to measurement, and we’re working in partnership with our media owners, technology partners and clients to do that.
Which metrics do you value most in video and CTV advertising?
The metrics that we value most really depend on the ones that our clients are trying to achieve. That can vary from campaign to campaign and brand to brand, but different objectives will have different measures of success, whether that’s building awareness, driving consideration, or driving a direct commercial outcome or specific call to action. The challenge for agencies is understanding which environments and which signals are most effective at delivering those very specific KPIs for our clients.
At Dentsu at the moment we’re actually evaluating the performance of all of our video partners. We’re currently undertaking a project to do that, and to better understand which factors within those video environments drive the best results, depending on what those KPIs are. And that again goes beyond traditional metrics of reach and frequency, or ad completion, and goes into things like content quality, audience and data quality, screen size, attention, ad clutter, and how they impact brand and sales metrics. So we’re doing quite a deep dive into all our video media partners, to evaluate which ones work best for those different metrics.
Again I think that’s the exciting part of the current video market, is that we increasingly have access to all this data and intelligence, and we can build bespoke video strategies around individual client objectives, rather than just applying a one-size-fits-all approach. And we continue to tailor our investment towards environments that are best suited for our clients.
As those tools develop, we’re going to be able to do that with even greater levels of sophistication. AI is clearly a great way that we’re starting to develop our planning and buying, making sure that it continues to evolve, and that we’re assessing the true value of every investment that we make, as our ability to optimise campaigns against those really important business outcomes for clients becomes ever more sophisticated.
Follow VideoWeek on LinkedIn.
