Marketers increase reliance on video completion as branding metric

TubeMogul Asia vice president Susan Salop said the company is witnessing a shift by programmatic advertisers towards an increased focus on video-completion metrics, ahead of the standard clickthrough rate.

Marketers now prioritize completion rates and cost-per-completed view as their primary success metrics for video advertising campaigns.

“There is a developing understanding and appreciation of the power of video-branding campaigns in Asia and a shift away from old display and performance measurements,” she added.

The results come from a research report by the programmatic video advertising company, which found that marketers are becoming increasingly savvy and moving away from traditionally performance-based measurements in favor of metrics that more accurately reflect brand awareness.

In addition, although mobile inventory has grown consistently across Southeast Asia, advertiser spend has not yet fully caught up to the increased viewership.  

This gap is consistent with trends in the US and other global markets, and demonstrates the need for centralized planning and standardized measurement across mobile inventory sources and ad formats.

Other key findings include:

• The best performing programmatic desktop video ads are 30 seconds in length, while a 15-second ad delivers the optimal branding outcome on mobile devices.
• Vietnam is the lead market for mobile programmatic adoption, with 19 percent of advertisers running campaigns exclusively on smartphone and tablet devices. Indonesia is second with 14 percent, while Hong Kong advertisers are last with only 5 percent running mobile-only campaigns.
• The strongest performance of all video assets is being reported in markets like Singapore and the Philippines, where clients are beginning to make a push towards premium inventory and data-targeted buys.

Salop said TubeMogul is still seeing advertisers buying mobile and desktop video in silos in all seven countries tracked in the report. However, the expansion of the company's cross-channel advertising capabilities in the third quarter meant more clients showing interest in buying video on all screens, especially in Malaysia and Singapore.

“Desktop video is still leading the way in terms of scale and demand, but mobile-only deals are also starting to emerge,” Salop added. “We expect this to continue to grow in markets where programmatic buying of mobile is more advanced, especially with the steady increase in mobile app inventory.”

Across Asia, linear television still dominates media buying, but the high smartphone penetration in all markets across the region has pushed programmatic mobile into the spotlight, Salop said.

“Television is still king in markets such as Thailand and Indonesia, but mobile penetration is significant, and ripe for programmatic advertising,” she added. “With the emergence of more local supply-side and exchange offerings, it's likely that demand in these countries will increase quickly for mobile video.”