AdExchanger Talks is a podcast focused on data-driven marketing. Subscribe here. This episode of AdExchanger Talks is supported by StackAdapt.
On the podcast this week, Unruly Media CEO Norm Johnston talks about the evolution of video ads – how they’re bought, how they’re sold and who gets to sell them.
Unruly’s value proposition is to provide high-quality audiences outside the high-gravity orbits of Google and Facebook.
“Nothing against Facebook or Google, but most people would agree they shouldn’t be upwards of 70% of the total industry and 90% of the growth in digital,” Johnston says. “Most advertisers and agencies are looking to diversify their portfolios.”
Unruly offers that diversity by aggregating inventory from properties owned by its parent company, News Corp, as well as from outside sites. The company’s original pitch was “social video” but now it offers many formats. It adds value by layering in biometric and survey-based data on what videos – or portions of videos – resonate well with an advertiser’s desired audiences.
“A lot of advertisers have these wonderful creative agencies that like to win awards and produce beautiful four-minute videos to do that,” Johnston says. “But it doesn’t quite work in programmatic environments and online where you have shorter attention spans … We will find parts of videos that resonate the most strongly. You can cut it up by segment, to target different individuals with different parts of a video that resonate with those groups. If advertisers have a predefined segmentation model with first-party data, it complements that.”
Also in this episode: Does scale still count for media agencies? How long will TV and digital video silos persist?
