How Marketers Are Approaching Digital Video: Performance And Measurement Remain Primary Pain Points

To maximize the impact of their clients’ video spend, marketers must stay on top of the rapid pace of change in the evolving digital video space. To understand what matters to marketers through this year and beyond, Pixability commissioned a survey to gather insights from across the industry, and analyzed the results.
Our goal was to help marketers understand how their peers are approaching video, and take the pulse of the industry — seeking to understand what marketers are excited about, and find out what’s keeping them up at night.

Performance And Measurement Are The Primary Pain Points For Video

When we asked marketers about their challenges, performance and consistent measurement were most commonly cited as major pain points in 2017, and increasingly identified as major pain points in 2018:

Campaign Performance

It’s critical that marketers ensure they’re reaching and engaging the right audience and minimizing wasted spend — but lack of insight into that core audiences’ viewing behavior and the vast scale of digital video makes driving performance a significant challenge. To maximize performance across major video destinations like YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram, marketers should invest in a deeper understanding of their audience’s viewing behavior, and test more sophisticated video strategies, including YouTube for Action, Facebook and Instagram Stories, and other clickable/shoppable advertising products.

Consistent Measurement

To drive performance, marketers need to be able to understand what’s working — but divergent view definitions and asymmetrical metrics across video destinations pose a significant problems to marketers. However, by partnering with third parties, marketers can ensure they’re achieving consistent measurement, and uncover actionable insights to drive video performance.

Brand Safety

Despite the issue being top-of-mind for more than two years, driving reach in the right contexts remains a challenge for digital marketers. It remains particularly difficult at scale, as fast-changing user content trends, difficulties in analyzing video content, and lack of nuance between what’s brand-safe and brand-appropriate makes for a major headache. There’s a clear need across the industry for a deeper evaluation of video strategies, and a greater focus on sophisticated contextual targeting to reach the right audiences within the right video environments.

Connected TVs & Viewability

As viewing continues to move to mobile and connected TV devices, marketers need to plan for this shift to multi-screen viewing. Pixability’s recent analysis of the state of digital video found that fully 14% of YouTube views occur on connected TV devices — indicating that marketers are reaching leaned-back, engaged viewers in fully viewable environments for a fraction of the cost of linear TV. Interestingly, viewability saw its status as a major pain point decrease, indicating that viewability is increasingly seen as standard for video advertising.
Need help navigating the challenges of the rapidly-evolving digital video landscape? Let’s connect to discuss how Pixability can help you maximize the impact of your video advertising.