Turning point: Brands are truly shifting to data-driven video and connected TV

Innovid, a leading marketing platform and video ad serving company, today released its annual global video benchmarks study, and it is now clear that marketers have fully embraced data-driven video and connected TV campaigns. Innovid’s  technology is employed across thousands of brand video campaigns and billions of video impressions, giving the company unique insight into the shifts taking place across the video marketing landscape.

If the driving storyline in prior years was that marketers would eventually shift creative focus and spend toward advanced TV, the 2018 storyline is that the era of over the top (OTT) and interactive advertising is really here.

Innovid’s analysis showed a 58 percent increase in advertisers running data-driven video campaigns in 2017. In those campaigns, there was a 63 percent lift in engagement rate over non-DDV impressions on campaigns that included both DDV and non-DDV video impressions.

Cord-cutting has also moved past the “fad” stage, and with legitimate options like YouTube TV, Hulu, Sling TV,  Fubo TV, and others, more and more people are accessing content exclusively via connected TVs (CTV). While the opportunity to reach these folks in exciting ways has been there for the past few years, marketers are now embracing the promise of advanced TV advertising. Innovid saw CTV impressions increase by 178 percent year-over-year, and, as of 2017, there was a 30 percent increase in advertisers running campaigns over CTV.

What advanced TV advertising really allows marketers to do is to engage audiences in ways they had not been able to with traditional TV buys. Innovid saw an overall 28 percent engagement rate in CTV campaigns in 2017 and custom interactive gained a 237 percent lift in engagement year-over-year.

“The media industry is facing numerous challenges when it comes to transparency, measurement, fragmentation and scalable reach, and we’ve really seen this come to a head in the past year,” said Alan Wolk, co-founder and lead analyst, TV[R]EV. “As brands and agencies turn to data-driven video with personalized messaging, visibility into video advertising performance and measurement will become extremely important, particularly in the era of CTV.”

Adam Flomenbaum

The new Found Remote