A Video Ad Industry Call to Action
At Extreme Reach, we are passionate about seeing thorny problems from our central perspective before anyone in the trenches even has time to look up and imagine better ways. Which is why I'm excited to share this Open Letter from our CEO and Co-Founder, John Roland. It is a call to arms illuminating a serious, yet little discussed, problem that has the ad industry's best and brightest video teams mired in broken campaign workflow. But here's the good news: we can all fix this overnight to bring deep and wide benefits to the advertiser and their agency teams. It is a simple change that will set a new industry standard. Will you join the revolution on behalf of advertisers and teams everywhere? It's easy and everyone wins.
AN OPEN LETTER TO THE VIDEO ADVERTISING INDUSTRY
It’s time for the video advertising industry to acknowledge a problem that is holding back the promise of a programmatic future. Though buying and selling media in milliseconds via technology is now commonplace, it takes days or even weeks for video teams to source and prepare the very same creative used on TV so they can execute a video campaign.
At the root of this disconnect is the fact that the workflow to get an ad to TV and the process to get that exact same ad to video screens are completely different and managed in silos by separate teams. The unspoken truth: The video side of the executional equation is ugly. If we don’t fix the implementation of screen-agnostic campaigns right now, it will get exponentially worse as video spending continues to rise.
In a highly automated world, the number of manual steps video teams must navigate to source the campaign creative looks like a scene from the 1990s. Digital agencies reach out to creative agencies who reach out to TV delivery companies in a back-and-forth maze of calls, emails and texts. And they pay to have digital files duplicated and formatted into a matrix of specs. Then they send huge folders of files back through the chain to the DSP, ad server and/or publisher.
Putting aside the toll this takes on our agency teams, the price of this manual process dysfunction is sobering. Video campaigns start late. Video ad quality suffers. Money is wasted on file duplication. Talent & Rights violations for non-compliant use of ads on the Internet stack up to the tune of over $75 million annually. Bottom line: the current workflow to get the same ad used for TV to video screens compromises our collective ability to best serve those at the very heart of our industry – advertisers.
A better way exists right NOW and immediately eradicates widespread, costly pain without leaving a single vendor by the wayside. There are no politics to overcome. Everyone wins and there are no losers. Remarkable in its simplicity, it harnesses the basic elements that govern the operation of the Internet, using links to play content from a single, quality-controlled, permission-based source. In this case, an advertiser’s precious ad is the content. The solution – streaming video ad creative from its original source instead of distributing copies across the Internet.
Streaming is a simple construct that has transformed industries. When Netflix? moved from distributing copies of movies to a streaming model, it changed the way we watch movies. When Spotify? launched its streaming music platform, consumers shifted from downloading copies of songs to accessing playlists on any device straight from the cloud. Sharing a video with a friend today rarely involves sending copies. Now we simply share a link.
It’s this easy: The creative is ready. The TV and video plans and buys are approved. The creative is uploaded directly into the cloud. The creative assets undergo rigorous quality checks and are automatically formatted to all required specs. The video team accesses and shares the links (VAST/VPAID tags) with their preferred ad servers, DSPs and/or publishers.
The benefits are transformative. Streaming ensures scalability for programmatic by moving creative at the speed of media and enables flawless execution of screen-agnostic campaigns. Simultaneously, this simple move enables thousands of agency pros to get back to the creative, strategic work that attracted them to this great industry in the first place.
Let’s unite to make cloud-based video ad streaming the industry standard in 2017. It is the transformation we need to best serve advertisers and set up agency teams to succeed.
Video ads can be streamed from the Extreme Reach cloud, today. Here’s to a very bright future in the stream.
John Roland | CEO & Co-Founder, Extreme Reach