In the first three articles of this series, we discussed how correctly planning and buying video advertising can triple the value of your media spend, i.e., deliver $300K value for every $100K you invest. To recap:
- Buy completed views, not impressions. That way, you can guarantee you get 100% direct return on ad spend (ROAS). Otherwise, your direct ROAS could average 40% or lower.
- Measure and value partial views. When you buy the right inventory on cost-per-completed-view (CPCV), the value of free partial views usually equals 110% to 175% of ad spend.
- Measure and value the “multiplier effect.” When you benchmark and measure brand lift and the effects on all your paid, earned and owned media, video ad campaigns return an extra 100% or more of added value.
Now, here’s the kicker…the 4 Ws of video ad value. Let's see how they add priceless value
WHO
The first W is Who. In this case, it stands for the audience and something we call Audience Verification, which is an invaluable dividend of the way our platform builds video ad campaigns.
Most advertisers have a clear sense of their target audiences, but usually not to the granular level that we can identify and reach them with our advanced micro-targeting.
For example, in the first campaign we ran for Wendy’s, the target audience was 18 to 44 year old males. However, throughout the campaign, we identified micro-segments of that broader audience that responded more to the video ads than others, e.g., 18 to 24 year old males watching videos about (of all things) politics. That unxepected insight likely never surfaced before in other media campaigns.
Verifying an advertiser’s audience and identifying micro-segments they never knew existed delivers benefits not just for the current campaign but for future video ad flights and other media spend.
WHAT
The second W is What—i.e., the message—which must go hand in hand with the targeting. To that end, we also provide Creative Validation in all our campaigns, delivering additional high value information about:
- The audience micro-segments your ads resonate with—most and least,
- The offers and CTAs that produce the best responses and
- The points during your ad when viewership drops off.
In the initial campaign we ran for select Nationwide Insurance agents, we noticed a greater than usual drop off after the five-second skip ad mark for several locations' ads. This prompted us to test moving the agents' photos to the beginning of the ad, in an effort to put a personal, local face on the brand message as soon as possible. View rates shot up and we adopted the change for all the agents’ ads. Now it's become a best practice.
WHEN & WHERE
The third and fourth Ws are When and Where. We address the elements of time and place in the ongoing process of gathering Campaign Intelligence by measuring view and response rates during day parts and week days, as well as by location.
The Wendy’s campaign mentioned earlier not only taught us who the audience was, it revealed day part viewing patterns that we used to structure the next campaign, which introduced three new menu items in ads that ran in parallel flights at different times of day.
Location learning is deeply ingrained in every campaign we run and, depending on how the budget is sourced, it informs ad spend management to produce greatest efficiency and performance.
Pre-Campaign Optimization
One priceless value of the 4 Ws is that they enable advertisers and their agencies to pre-optimize campaigns—i.e., run limited duration and location campaigns to gather data about the audience, the ads and offers, optimal day parts and location profiles. Then you can apply that learning to the full campaign and maximize ROAS from day one.
There isn’t another medium that delivers data and actionable insights as rich as these. Taken together, they are just one facet of online video advertising that returns 3x or more of the value of your media spend in every campaign.
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