One of digital marketing's greatest strengths is its ability to target consumers on an individual level. The efficiency of such campaigns grows each day and makes it a very attractive channel for advertisers.
Video advertising is one such marketing channel. Faster Internet speeds and video-friendly mobile devices have triggered an explosion of video consumption, and video content creation has followed suit. This presents great opportunities, but restrictions on how advertisements can be delivered often puts a ceiling on the true value of such marketing channels.
That's about to change, though, and it's all thanks to something called live ad insertion.
The One-Size-Fits-All Video Dilemma
As video content has risen dramatically in popularity, the ability to deliver ads relevant to consumers has been limited. Ads have traditionally been fixed within a piece of video content, which means the relevance of an ad can vary from one consumer to the next.
This isn't exactly a disaster, but it does limit the value of those ads to consumers, thus lowering their potential returns. This is why live ad insertion has the potential to spur on such significant change. By solving the problem of video advertising's one-size-fits-all approach, brands can get more value from their video campaigns, thus driving up value and encouraging the further maturation of digital video content.
How Live Video Ad Insertion Works
Live ad insertion functions similarly to how Web page advertisements — and social ads, for that matter — appear to individuals. When you travel the Internet, you carry identifiers with you. Your age, location, interests, income level and other attributes serve as a profile of you as a digital consumer. Many of the ads that appear to you online are presented based on that demographic information, which marketers use to determine how relevant you might be to that particular ad.
In video advertising, everyone sees the same ads. As a result, ads are selected based on the video content, and what type of audience that content might attract. This inevitably leads to ad displays that are not relevant at all for some viewers. That's wasted money, and it hinders the value of video advertising.
Live ad insertion lets advertisers select video ads the same way display networks function: by presenting a commercial based on each user's demographics. That means that the ads paired with a video can be different based on who's watching them. While that might seem small, the implications are huge.
What Live Ad Insertion Means for Advertisers
With live ad insertion at their disposal, companies now have much more incentive to invest in video advertising. Campaigns will become more efficient and more scalable, since advertisers can have greater control over how many views their ads receive in a day.
Those views will be much more relevant, increasing their returns over time. In the long run, this technology and increased spending will encourage the growth of online video content, diversifying the medium and making such ads more accessible to smaller, resource-limited businesses.
Once a channel reserved for deep-pocketed brands, live ad insertion is now bringing video ad opportunities to the masses.
