2017 will mark a qualitative change in the role of advertising technology on television

Television advertising technology, the growing importance of programmatic and the convergence of television and video are some of the main lines that the market is expected to follow this year.

Jana Eisenstein, CEO of Videology, has made public a series of considerations about how the advertising market will change throughout this year.

Eisenstein foresees that we will experience a qualitative change in the role of advertising technology on television. In his opinion, we will see a considerable increase in the deployment of advertising technology across all channels, which will have particularly rapid activation. In the United Kingdom, 2017 will be a fundamental year in the development of programmatic television. Sky, Virgin and BT prepare progressive advertising products using proprietary data and set-top box technology. These platforms will make total TV accessible, with audience allocation and multi-device measurement as effective on the main TV screen as on other digital devices.

He also anticipates that programmatic technology will gain more ground and generate more efficiencies within the ecosystem, through effectively planned and targeted tactics, based on automation software. According to the report eMarketer UK Programmatic Advertising Forecast Report 2016, this year the proportion of total digital video advertising managed programmatically in the United Kingdom exceeded 50% for the first time, reaching £553.4 million. In 2018, it will exceed 70%. eMarketer estimates that mobile will be responsible for 63% of total programmatic video advertising spending this year, and that in 2018 the proportion will increase to 85%.

Another forecast is that the purchase of television advertising will move towards video. The importance of guaranteed purchases and private marketplaces will continue to increase as video develops its own path into the digital future. TV advertising purchasing models will continue to be the basis of the market but will take advantage of the benefits of technology to manage an increasingly complex and fragmented purchasing portfolio. The report 2016 UK Video Market At-A-Glance from Videology has highlighted the continued convergence of TV and video advertising buying: nine out of 10 advertisers buy their video ads in the same guaranteed model as when they buy television spots.

Online content

En cuanto contenidos online, Jana Eisenstein considera que la visualización de televisión y de contenido digital tiene cada vez más cosas en común dada la convergencia de los comportamientos del consumidor. La visualización online ya no es un nicho de comportamiento sino una actividad generalizada que atrae a distintos grupos de edad y de clase social. El vídeo digital premium es cada vez más visto en la pantalla de TV así como en otras pantallas más pequeñas, y tanto en entornos de visualización individual como de visualización compartida en grupo. Según Thinkbox, el 61,6% de la visualización de vídeo en Reino Unido en 2015 se realizó a través de TV en directo y el 35% a través de canales digitales. La visualización a través de canales digitales aumentó a casi el 52% entre los jóvenes de 16 a 24 años, y se espera que crezca más.

As the programmatic market matures, substantial progress continues in real-time advertising measurement, identification and decision-making to improve brand safety and campaign view rates, as well as combat non-human traffic. Something that must be maintained if the industry is to continue operating effectively at scale and reassure its key customers, advertisers.

Advertisers will demand, according to Videology, more evidence of effectiveness throughout the conversion funnel. Although digital video ad spend has increased, advertisers are still looking to understand if and how their online video efforts have changed opinions about their brand. In 2017, more agencies will demand a reliable and quantifiable way to show their clients the effectiveness of video in achieving results.

On the other hand, there will be greater use of multiple data sources in 2017, as more companies try to combine fragmented data sources into a unified view across devices. Those that succeed will be able to use sources such as television measurements, registration data from networks and operators, customer data from advertisers and third-party data with all kinds of behavioral, purchasing and geolocation data to create a much more powerful view of their target consumer.

It is also worth noting that changes to EU law, particularly general data protection regulation, will put data regulation back in the spotlight as brands, agencies and media act to ensure they comply with the law.

Jana Eisenstein estimates, finally, that the pressure from advertisers on private reserves will be greater and more coordinated. While aware of the essential place of Facebook and Google in media plans, advertisers will increasingly argue that it is absolutely necessary for them to be subject to the same third-party measurement to offer holistic and comparable reporting on campaigns. Facebook's recent setback regarding the duration of each video is indicative of the need to create universal measurement standards that the entire ecosystem can trust, Videology says.