Act your age: why online video buying should not be like TV
With online video becoming an increasingly important channel Tyler Greer argues treating it like TV risks losing its differentiation.
The recent arrival of Nielsen Online Campaign Ratings (OCR) tracking across digital video is steering digital video down a path that more strongly reflects TV buying models. How publishers and networks respond will be interesting. Sure, taking traditional gross rating point (GRP) thinking into the online realm demonstrates how digital is finally straddling the offline buying world. But it may come at a cost.
Greer
GRP is a way that TV has traditionally been bought. It is calculated as a percent of the target market reached multiplied by the exposure frequency, the idea being to obtain the highest possible GRPs at the lowest possible cost.
Nice piece, Tyler.
I agree that the idea of better targeted online video is appealing and that broadcast television does almost always result in significant wastage. Despite this, I still believe that television can remain an effective tactic, on a weighted CPM basis, for reaching smaller audiences.
I am also pleased that reach is becoming a more considered metric in the online world, not because it’s the same currency as TV, but because I’m really interested in what proportion of my audience may have been exposed to my campaign.
Agree it’s a very good piece. My only question is that without NOCR, by what yardstick do I fairly measure against TV? At this time post campaign reports can only really give me proof that my video ran. That it had X number of UI’s. That it was viewed all the way through by x% of people etc etc. and program targeting in Catch Up TV remains opaque.
I’m not arguing that Traditional TV measurement is any better, but in order to move budget to digital from traditional media, I need to be able to compare apples to apples and to date NOCR is looking useful to me.
I know that there are better tools out there (eg. nex_step), but only now are they emerging.
Real nice piece Greer. The 3rd last paragraph pulls it all together in real world terms
My goodness, who sits through television commercials anymore?
Traditional tv is done and dusted. Event TV has merit for brands but in general I’d be advertising into online video so people actually see the product.