There is a brouhaha up and down New York’s Madison Avenue over fake news, non-human traffic, ad blocking and non-viewable digital ads. This is a good thing.

“We have a media supply chain that is murky at best and fraudulent at worst. We need to clean it up and invest the time and money we save into better advertising to drive growth.” Those are the words of Marc Pritchard, the chief marketing officer of the largest advertiser in the world, Procter Gamble. The gauntlet has been thrown down.

Why is bad digital advertising bad for brands? Because brands matter and big companies are failing. Brands can’t afford misalignment or worse. The average life expectancy of a brand was once 75 years. It’s now only 15 and that is thought to be driven in part by media.  

In 2017 there will be winners and there will be losers. What we see is that the winners are demanding their messaging runs in brand-safe and transparent environments so their brand doesn’t get tarnished in the current media melee. Despite this upheaval around brand safety, fake news and audience accountability on digital platforms, the one unwavering thing is this: consumer appetite for video and premium content is immense. And the race is on to capitalize on it. 

The landscape is all ablur: YouTube and Hulu have entered the TV business with their live streaming services. The OTT behemoths, Amazon and Netflix are doubling down on original programming and content acquisition to lure younger consumers and cord cutters. Social networks, once the place to share with friends, are now leading hubs for news and entertainment, garnering millions of video views daily.  How are buyers deciding where to invest their video advertising budgets?

Based on a recent study conducted with over 300 advertisers and their agencies about the trends shaping today’s marketplace, marketers have three top priorities on their minds: brand safety, digital video growth and the importance of social video. 

Marketers don’t believe that programmatic delivery can or will solve the brand safety problem.

While there is high agreement about the need for brand safe environments, seven in 10 marketers surveyed find it a challenge to ensure brand-safe environments when buying programmatically on the open exchange. More than half don’t anticipate increased transparency in programmatic buying.

Q.  In the next six months, how do you expect the transparency of the sites you run programmatic ads on to change?

Base: Involved in Digital/Mobile Advertising

Video advertising continues to experience strong growth

Since the release of a similar study conducted in June 2016, there has been a significant shift in where advertisers want to put dollars when it comes to video. Social platforms (Facebook, Snapchat) are now decidedly most important when planning digital video campaigns, voted as such by 68 percent of participants vs. 56 percent last June, a 12 point lift.  That puts social platforms (and presumably Facebook is dominant) as the number one distribution partner, eight points ahead of video platforms (YouTube, Vevo, etc.), which were rated as most important by 60 percent of those surveyed. In previous research, video platforms were ahead of social by a small margin, and only marketer, not agency respondents put social in the top spot. 

Video buyers are looking at social channels more than video platforms to place pre-roll and branded content campaigns

Further inquiry shows that among seven possible distribution platform types, social gets the highest marks for delivering on engagement (59 percent), ROI (39 percent) and customer service (38 percent); whereas video platforms deliver best on measurement/reporting.  Perhaps YouTube’s announcement that they will allow more third party verification and measurement is being recognized here.

Show them the numbers. As advertiser consciousness get raised about issues from brand safety to viewability in the world of automated advertising, platforms must find better ways to prove their worth and accountability. Not only in how well they solve these issues, but in where they reach audiences.

Have a video strategy. Video is the largest advertising growth area in digital display right now according to eMarketer. Advertisers recognize the huge and growing consumer audiences for video and the engagement chops of sight, sound and motion in advertising. Video will be front and center for the foreseeable future. 

Facebook will lead. Who can beat 1 billion daily users? Despite some grumblings that Facebook is driving the fake news problem, they get high marks from buyers for engagement and ROI and have emerged as the definitive partner for video campaigns — at least for right now.

Shorter is better. Short form is the most likely pre-roll digital format to get support and drive engagement. Other formats have their place and we see sizeable investment still promised for premium, long form, live stream and user-generated formats.

Brands today have a new set of expectations around all their messaging including digital video. Publishers need world-class audience targeting. They need to provide brand-safe content and standardized measurement. Most importantly, the media needs to show return on marketers’ investment. Data is more important than ever and in the current market shift, demographics and audiences have quickly become “old school.” Marketers are demanding first party data and one-to-one targeting.   #ShiftHappens #DataIsGold

Welcome to the brand safe economy. Is your brand safe?