Over the Garden Wall Into Cross-Platform Video: Q&A with Chris Bennett, MD, Pixability
Cross-platform video advertising between walled gardens doesn’t sound like a particularly easy way to go about running an advertising campaign. Advertisers know that their audiences are increasingly consuming video across different social platforms and are developing their strategies to target them effectively, but the challenge is to have a single view across all publisher platforms. ExchangeWire speaks with Chris Bennett (pictured below), managing director Europe, Pixability, about the launch of their new product that will give advertisers just that.
ExchangeWire: Pixability is well-known for it’s YouTube offering, but has just launched Pixability v4, which allows advertisers to be able to run YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter from the same platform. What is the background to this development?
Chris Bennett: Consumers are increasingly watching video on new devices within the walled gardens of Facebook and Google. Video consumption is rising faster than the marketing dollars supporting it because the marketing directors remain largely ill-equipped to engage and to understand how best to take advantage of that time spent with video. Increasingly they are looking for partners that offer sharp tools, which operate across walled gardens, not just in silos – that fuels what we do as an organisation. If the marketing directors are ill-equipped to understand the opportunity, that’s largely because the agencies are dealing with legacy models, or they are baked into relationships with Google or Facebook in silos. That does not enable them to stand back and look across the piste. Pixability was founded in 2008 because CEO Bettina Hein knew that video marketing was only going to become more complex and more data-driven and that is absolutely playing out. Fast forward to 2016, Pixability v4 was created to unify the management of ad campaigns across walled gardens, as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter continue to introduce new ad offerings attractive to advertisers. Having seen and understood the benefits that we had offered to YouTube and Google, and most importantly the advertisers using the Pixability platform, Facebook actually approached us and invited us to build a solution that would help brands intelligently engage with the video proposition on Facebook and Instagram.
Each video publisher is set up differently, with different measures of success. How do you bring all the different data sources together and translate them into a single view for the advertiser?
The strength of our proposition is giving agencies and advertisers the opportunity to measure on an ‘apples to apples’ basis using 25 standard metrics, which we can track, optimise and report against between walled gardens. The measure of success of a video campaign is different for each customer, be it cost-per-view, view-through rate, or even the social sharing capacity of a video. Some advertisers focus on media value as they’re looking to extend reach against a certain demographic, possibly while running a simultaneous TV campaign. We see big brands in the fashion and beauty sectors looking to optimise their buying to very specific audiences; whereas other advertisers, for example in the automotive sector, are focused on driving conversions (clicks through to site, sign-ups, or even test drive bookings), which means they want to understand the value each video platform can bring to their campaign separately. Pixability captures all of that data and ensures it’s presented to advertisers as they want to see it.
Is Pixability able to algorithmically choose the right platform (or combination of platforms) for a client’s desired target audience?
Great question. The very short answer is yes, but I will give it a little caveat as we firmly believe the best way to buy or plan media is through a combination of both human expertise and machine learning. At the heart of our business we have a deep capability for machine learning, building algorithms and analysing, but equally we place a lot of weight on the human capability of reading the data and turning the insight derived from that data into a buy on each platform. Our algorithms enable us to achieve superior campaign performance, providing better targeting for our clients. We use data science to look at more than three million individual YouTube channels to surface the best and most relevant videos against the campaign objectives and KPIs. We will build a plan for an advertiser or an agency that will involve in-depth multivariate testing, with 500 sub-campaigns against one brief to ensure we are getting the best results. There is nobody else that will do that and this is where we differ from our competitors in the market. We find that a combination of machine learning and human talent drives the best results for our clients.
Many agencies don’t break out video into its own channel, but instead keep YouTube within paid search teams and Facebook/Twitter within paid social teams, etc. How will you address that within existing agency models and do you see Pixability v4 going some way to changing the agency ethos and trading model?
It’s a very fair question and a part of many CEO and investment directors’ thinking right now. Most talent pools in organisations are structured and set up with a historical definition of media. Most agency CEOs who I talk to recognise that those definitions are very much out of date, but their challenge is that there is significant investment going through each team. They are questioning how to rebuild to best represent both the market dynamic and their clients’ needs without going through a wholesale change, but instead rearrange their existing talent pools. We can help them move to a new framework as we have relevance to a number of roles inside agencies. For example, we can help insight teams understand the walled garden ecosystem, the relationship between each platform, as well as how consumers engage with them, and what content they are consuming. We can support planners with very smart targeting solutions to help them understand the myriad options available to them — for example, not just investing all budget into Google Preferred, which is preferred for Google, but not necessarily for the advertiser. They can go much deeper and interrogate the plan in much more detail and with much more consideration. We can also help the buying team become much more efficient by using our platform, and then importantly help them improve the campaign buy. Finally, we can support the leadership team before they even win a piece of business at the pitch stage with platform intelligence not available elsewhere.
We are navigating the complete ecosystem; we’re talking to planning teams, AV teams, search teams and display teams. Today, we are largely putting the platform into the social and search teams to help them see the benefits first. This is where we see the most traction within the existing agency environment. The response from agencies has been great. Ultimately, our customer is the person who runs the agency, as the Pixability platform has relevance across all departments being led by them.
Does Pixability have plans to expand its offering into other platforms and formats that exist on the open web?
We certainly have ambitions around the increasing array of social channels. As these social platforms develop and grow their video capabilities, we will absolutely want to be part of that conversation. As audiences migrate to these new channels, marketers will want to seize the opportunity to effectively engage them. The data set and audience size is bigger than anything else that can be aggregated on the open web. There are some new goliaths coming to the market, like Amazon and Netflix, who are bringing long- and short-form video to an app experience for a consumer on a mobile or tablet. I think they will be very interesting to keep an eye on, as they represent the next wave of walled gardens with mass audiences and a large data set.
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