Study: Hyper-growth of Connected TV & data-driven video

Video marketing platform Innovid has released its annual global video benchmarks report, highlighting the growth and impact of data-driven video (DDV) and connected TV (CTV), based on a year-long study analysing thousands of video campaigns with billions of impressions across 340+ global brands.

The report covers data collected throughout 2017, delving into baseline performance for major KPIs, such as awareness, completions, engagement, time earned and others on video campaigns across various publisher placements, ad lengths, and formats across devices. While past reports told a numeric story, this year’s report reveals a macro-level story that addresses the state of the video marketing space and where it is headed, to help marketers succeed amidst rapid industry changes.

Among its key highlights, the 2018 annual report discusses the rise of personalised DDV ads and how they are driving significant lifts in performance. Another area of focus is Over-the-Top (OTT) content, including how CTV is changing the way brands think about video. As with past reports, the study updates benchmarks on video advertising performance, such as those showing increasing impact of advanced video (i.e., advertising with interactive elements such as overlays and clickable content) versus standard, static pre-roll video advertising, along with trends in other video marketing areas, such as mobile.

“The most exciting part of this annual study is seeing the market trends reveal themselves in our data – and this year it’s certainly evident with the hyper growth of connected TV advertising and the adoption of data-driven video marketing across all screens,” said Beth-Ann Eason, President, Innovid. “We always knew a change would come, but we’re seeing it happen now at an unprecedented pace.”

Key highlights from the May 2018 annual benchmark report include:

• Data-driven video adoption and engagement are growing: The analysis showed a 58 per cent increase in advertisers running data-driven video campaigns in 2017. In those campaigns, there was a 63 per cent lift in engagement rate over non-DDV impressions on campaigns that included both DDV and non-DDV video impressions.
• Connected TV impressions continue to skyrocket: Based on the study, CTV impressions increased by 178 per cent year-over-year. Furthermore, as of 2017 there was a 30 per cent increase in advertisers running campaigns over CTV, and within broadcast publishers, more than half (52 per cent) of all impressions are served to CTV devices. Additionally, we saw an overall 28 per cent engagement rate in CTV campaigns in 2017—a typical ‘lean back’ experience is now shifting to ‘lean forward’ by consumer choice.
• Advanced creative in video advertising continues to outperform standard pre-roll across the board: Custom interactive gained a 237 per cent lift in engagement year-over-year.
• Mobile has reached an inflection point: The distribution of mobile impressions surpassed that of the personal computer in 2017.
• Distribution of impressions to broadcasters grows: The study defines broadcast publishers as digital inventory for networks, such as ABC or NBC. The analysis showed a noticeable increase in the distribution of impressions to broadcasters year-over-year, coming from platforms/ aggregators.

“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 personalised messaging, visibility into video advertising performance and measurement will become extremely important, particularly in the era of CTV.”