BrightRoll Breaks New Ground with Reporting Suite

Last Thursday's BrightRoll announcement of a suite of 3rd party verified reporting tools, including comScore, Nielsen, Insight Express, and Vizu, breaks new ground is addressing the online video advertising efficacy problem. The suite aims to help marketers understand the actual results of online video campaigns with an eye to driving increased spending in the medium. On Friday, I had a chance to chat with BrightRoll's CEO, Tod Sacerdoti, who explained the reasons for this value-add reporting service.

Tod said that the idea for enhanced reporting came from three problems. The first is that an extraordinarily high number of media buyers - somewhere in the realm of 85% according to BrightRoll's research - did not understand the effectiveness of their online video buys. The second problem was that buyers don't fully use ad networks' in-house analytics and don't fully trust them anyway. Further, as ad spend has poured into online video, so have many low quality networks, who can rely on unsavory tactics to get views and thus lower overall CPMs. Thirdly, internal analytics don't get at the big picture, including for example, how a placement on BrightRoll performs versus a competitor.

To address these problems, BrightRoll partnered with some of the top third-party measurement services.  With the new plan, an in-house BrightRoll team will curate the data to create custom reports for their clients. This is somewhat similar to the holistic approach Kantar Video has been touting. For extra verification, the third parties will then review the reports.

The level of reporting provided to clients will depend on both the budget and the client's needs. Smaller budget buys in the  $25,000-$50,000 range will receive a validation report, while bigger budget buys would get full comprehensive reports, including options such as brand funnel metrics. Importantly, no matter the budget level, marketers armed with these reports should have a much clearer idea of how their video ads performed.

Tod is eager to show through these reports how well BrightRoll's ad network stacks up against its competitors on a campaign level. Tod sees these reports as an investment that he hopes will help grow the overall market, and more importantly allow BrightRoll to differentiate itself and charge higher CPMs. In the meantime, a side benefit is that BrightRoll could potentially see a lift from advertisers focused on gaining greater campaign insights.

With BrightRoll having raised the reporting bar, it will be interesting to see if other ad networks also start offering similar analytics with third-party data. The announcement helps further highlight the opportunity to go beyond relying strictly on metrics like views or impressions. In addition, it emphasizes that there is room for innovation in the analytics space, by curating valuable third-party data for different segments and clients.

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Categories: Advertising

Topics: BrightRoll, comScore, Insight Express, Nielsen, Vizu