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Content quality is widely viewed as one of the most important variables for driving performance in advertising. Many brands and agencies divide their efforts between premium media advertising and cost effective media advertising. Buying premium content and video is often utilized to build brand awareness and generate exposure, while cost effective media advertising focuses on conversion points and total reach. Bridging the two practices through software for value and decisioning gives advertisers unreached efficiencies. This will be extremely important as the move to cross screen advertising begins to scale.

But what is the formula for automating the process to determine what is to be considered premium content?

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At this month’s F8 conference, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg gave a big boost to the burgeoning business of live-streaming online video when he said it was a “top priority” for the company. The company has assigned 150 engineers to live-streaming, changed its News Feed algorithms to give live video higher visibility, and is paying several notable publishers (including the New York Times, BuzzFeed and Vox) to create original programming for the format.

That’s a serious commitment by the planet’s biggest social-media company. More interesting, perhaps, is what’s not yet attached to the Facebook offerings: figuring out how to pay for everything. The answers will help determine whether live streaming video becomes only a gimmick used by well-funded brand experimenters or narcissistic hobbyists. Done right, it could supercharge a bracing new platform with its own stars, best practices and yes, monetization schemes.

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Outstream video ad units - video ads that appear within content as readers scroll through - have taken the market by storm since their release in 2013. An increasing number of vendors provide this technology for publishers, to insert video ads into non-video carrying pages.
 
It’s no secret that video represents one of the highest yielding advertising opportunities for publishers, but also one of the most resource intensive to create. Publishers have invested significantly to develop the content required to provide video at scale. The Wall Street Journal, for example, employed a 40-person video team tasked with creating 40 videos per day, while CNN is pushing video views over page views as a measure of success.

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Many brands are overlooking a major opportunity to increase their ad revenue: connected TV.

While research from eMarketer shows that this medium has already taken up residence in more than half of American households and is expected to be in 60 percent by 2019, connected TV remains a forgotten screen among many marketers and media buyers. Yet brands that learn how to effectively incorporate connected TV into their advertising campaign strategies stand to achieve significant competitive advantages.

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A few weeks ago, I got an email from stand-up comedian Louis CK announcing his new show Horace and Pete, available on his website for $5. Not on Netflix or FX or even YouTube but his website. I’ll let that sink in a little.

Now, why would one of the top-earning comedians whose show has a stellar cast (Alan Alda, Steve Buscemi, Edie Falco and Jessica Lange) take this route? Here’s why - Five years ago, Louis sold his Live at the Beacon Theater special direct to customers from his website and raked in a sweet $1million in just 12 days. Since then, he has continued to deal directly with his fans, eliminating the middleman and seen an upward trend in earnings. On his site, you’ll find shows and often tickets to his live shows  as well, sans the much dreaded Ticketmaster fee.

There’s a lot we can learn about doing business in a digital world from Louis CK:

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TV programmers like Viacom and AMC are in the same position that print companies like The New York Times and Conde Nast were ten years ago. As consumers moved to reading content online, the legacy publishing companies figured they could replicate their business on a new channel. No one could believe that a tech company with no real content could compete for brand advertising budgets. We all know how that played out.

Now, consumers are cutting the cord and moving to digital channels to watch TV. There is more to lose on both the buy and sell side during this time around. TV advertising is considered by advertisers to be the holy grail of inventory, and they don’t want to lose it any more than the TV companies do. However, the siren song of audiences at scale and with technical ease could change their minds.

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Every ad that runs on a site serves different goals. The advertiser’s goal is to generate sales; the publisher’s goal is to generate revenue. But most often overlooked is the goal of the user.

The assumption, unfortunately, is that most every time you run an ad, you’re going to bother the user. There are rare exceptions to this - occasions in which you’ve delivered the right ad to the right person at the right time, the user engages and ultimately clicks through. But that happens only six out of every 10000 times the ad is served – and that’s a generous estimate.

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If 2015 was the year the industry started to talk about programmatic TV, we think 2016 will be the year the industry starts to really adopt programmatic TV.

In 2015 we saw leading demand side providers announce multi-screen programmatic solutions that included linear TV. While some of those announcements came as early as first quarter, the first volume of programmatic TV orders started to surface in early fourth quarter. As a result, orders from digital demand side providers accounted for a very small percentage of programmatic orders in 2015 but set the stage for 2016.

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