Centralising Video Ad Creative for speed, control and visibility

For marketers today, speed to market with fast and flawless execution is paramount. Creative asset workflow efficiency is quickly becoming one of the most critical components to a successful campaign in the cross-screen media ecosystem.

Here, Dan Brackett, co-founder and chief technology officer at Extreme Reach, offers his insight into how brands can vastly improve their workflow to launch campaigns quickly and flawlessly on every screen.

• How is video ad serving different from linear TV delivery, and why do so many brands and agencies choose different solutions for each?

Did you ever see the Disney film, The Parent Trap? It’s a story of identical twins separated at birth who find each other years later and realise how much they have in common despite completely different upbringings. This is a perfect metaphor for two disciplines with different beginnings that are increasingly finding each other because they were meant to be united.

Ultimately, advertisers and their agency partners produce great creative. Media strategists devise masterful yet complex communication plans. These two things have to get connected — the creative must be formatted to match a myriad of specs for broadcasters, publishers and every screen on their media plan. The end goal is campaigns launching on time so that finished creative plays in front of consumers, according to plan. In today’s world, that can mean a commercial for traditional TV or a video ad that will be seen on a laptop or smartphone or in the living room via over-the-top devices. The avenues leading to viewers are multiplying, but the goal is the same regardless of the channel.

• What are the implications of selecting different point solutions for standard video ad serving and TV delivery?

What most people don’t realise — even those in the industry — is how much manual, administrative work is involved in the workflows that guide the finished creative to where it ultimately plays. Ironically, this is especially true in the digital sphere.

The number of Excel sheets, emails, teams, languages, platforms and assets that go into digital campaigns is hard to believe. There is a widely felt pain across all the executional facets of the business — from digital video activation teams to AdOps folks on the receiving end of creative assets.

The consequences of separate workflows and the lack of holistic creative asset management have not been pretty. Having multiple content repositories and numerous teams dipping in and out of them introduces so many opportunities for quality and formatting errors, delayed campaign starts, and ultimately, just a lot of chaos where seamless video execution can — and should — reign.

• Can you focus a little more on why the industry finds itself at a breaking point?

We’re all more interested in what the technology delivers than how it works. So, I think the race to media innovation and using data-driven automation to reach consumers all over the place left the ecosystem focused so much on that aspect that there was no room to think about the foundational piece of how the creative assets would need to be sourced and deployed to match the speed of media.

One might think that if the consumer experience, value, and ROI of brand ads on traditional TV versus on IP-based platforms are so different from one another, that it makes sense to choose different asset-delivery solutions for each. It’s easy to see how the mechanics got swept up in all that.

What makes sense on an intuitive level actually totally fails on the execution front. The idea that video ad serving and TV delivery should be approached differently and handled by siloed teams is actually counterproductive. TV and digital video may be two different media that came of age in different eras, but there are so many parallels in how the creative should be sourced and deployed that the same workflows and proven paradigms should apply to both. That’s why it’s important to demystify video ad serving.

What’s interesting about the digital video world is that media decisions can now be made in fractions of a second, but before a campaign launches, the process to find and format and get all the creative ready is sluggish, manual, and antiquated. Our research shows that it can take weeks between creative being finished and the campaign going live in digital video. Contrast this with linear TV, where a national brand ad can be finished in post-production and on-air in mere hours or even minutes.

So, here it’s helpful to think about video ad serving more in the context of what it does rather than what it is.

• What does a better path forward look like?

When every aspect of the ad industry today feels harder than ever before, the solution in this area actually makes execution easier, with the double advantage of preparing all sides involved in execution for whatever the future brings.

Brands are best served when one partner is accountable for full-lifecycle creative asset management, including all modes of delivery wherever ads play. These functions share common bonds and are interrelated means to the same end-game.

A permission-based, safe and secure, centralised platform for all creative assets, which can be tapped by both linear and digital video teams, better supports today’s content-everywhere mandate. It’s a world simpler, smoother, and more accurate than siloed creative distribution approaches can deliver. And sophisticated, automated workflow processes that connect multiple brand and agency teams are a must-have as the media environment expands beyond what can be handled manually.

There are so many opportunities for advertisers to reach their audiences in creative and compelling ways. Given the advanced technologies of today, getting brand stories to screens on time and perfectly formatted should happen seamlessly and reliably, and that’s exactly the case with a creative platform purpose-built for the way “TV” is consumed today. It's time to unite the video family by centralizing video assets to improve and simplify campaign workflows for marketers globally.

Did you know that Adstream was acquired by Extreme Reach? Together we solve some of the biggest challenges facing marketers, their agencies and production partners around the world. Find out more here.