With video advertising expected to account for a growing segment of marketing spend in the coming years, one market intelligence firm said brands and ad agencies need to focus more on the type of ads they’re buying as much as the messaging in their campaigns.
GumGum made the case with a new survey that evaluated responses from 3,000 consumers in the United States, Canada and United Kingdom, which found the overwhelming majority of video viewers — 94 percent — prefer contextual-based ads to identity-based spots.
Contextual ads include those that utilize a person’s current interest for targeted delivery of spots — which can include the type of show or movie a person is watching on a channel or streaming app at a given moment. By comparison, identity spots utilize actual or inferred traits about a TV viewer or streamer to target them based on a number of traits, including relationship status, career development or living situation.
When it comes to privacy, only around one-third of consumers said they feel it is the most-important factor of an advertising experience. By comparison, 42 percent said ads related to their current interests, and 80 percent are more-likely to engage in ads that relate to the show or movie they’re watching.
“Let’s face it: Online video experiences today aren’t working, and video is only become more-prominent,” Ken Weiner, the Chief Technology Officer at GumGum, said in a statement.
Weiner said the problem is getting worse over time because brands and marketers are “facing poor ad performance, wasted impressions and growing viewer dissatisfaction.”
To address this, GumGum is utilizing artificial intelligence through its proprietary platform to “better understand the digital environment and mindset a consumer is in, so that they want to watch the ad instead of skip it and move on,” Weiner said.
