In preparation for the new year, PerformanceIN continues its annual tradition of connecting with performance marketing experts to get their single biggest prediction for the industry in 2017.
In her piece, Einav Dinur, director of marketing and business strategy at Inneractive, sums up her expectations around video and advertising.
Advertisers will continue buying audiences as opposed to buying real-estate. Historically, advertisers would look to buy specific apps or websites, associating that inventory with a particular audience. With today’s available data, they can target audience across properties, making buying a specific app or site less relevant.
The shift to buying audiences is going to lead publishers and CROs to invest more than ever in understanding their own audiences, segmenting them and selling them for varying prices. While segmentation has historically been dominated by the buy-side, publishers who want to maximise monetisation will need to step up their game when it comes to analysing and packaging their audience, at least as well as the buy-side can.
New trends for video
The benefits of outstream (or in-feed) video have been discussed at length over the past year, the greatest being a publisher’s ability to offer highly lucrative video ad inventory without having to produce video content. However, lack of standardisation, and the lack of ability to flag inventory as outstream - vs. pre-roll, for example – led to some negativity around outstream. With Open RTB 2.5 creating more standardisation around this by adding the outstream parameter, this video format will be able to be targeted specifically, making both advertisers and publishers more likely to adopt this format.
Mobile and video have demonstrated tremendous growth over the past years and there are no sign of slowing down. With the promise of mobile and video come the fraudsters who want to get a piece of the pie. This year will continue proving that high volume is not a value proposition to advertisers, and the focus will be on quality inventory (bot-free, viewable, etc.). Publishers/exchanges that can’t prove the quality of their inventory will see less and less ad dollars.