While industry academics and conference panelists continue to debate the relative merits of GRPs as a currency for online video, major media agencies have quietly embraced the metric. This is most clearly demonstrated by the number of campaigns we've seen in recent months, mandating the inclusion of Nielsen's Online Campaign Ratings service. This adoption shouldn't really surprise anyone -- why wouldn't an advertiser want to apply a trusted, uniform metric against all video sources? But the impact of TV's buying currency, as the spark that lit the fuse for the "TV-ization" of online video, has still been eye-opening.
So, what are some of the major themes shaping this movement and potential implications for the online video industry in 2012?
Video agnostic buying teams become prevalent
Buyers ultimately shape any market. So perhaps the strongest indicator of the "TV-ization" of video are the first signs of consolidated TV and online video buying teams at the major media agencies. Zenith's recent announcement, combining broadcast with online video to create a national buying team, was indicative of this new mind shift.
Implications: Cue the coming-out party of video from online poster boy to burgeoning, fully fledged TV daypart, complete with its own line item on the TV flowchart.
GRPs and the increasing importance of audience reach vs. impressions
GRPs, TV's barometer for coverage against an audience, will become a standardized buying currency for video. Reach, frequency, and cost-per-point will similarly become key measures. Impressions, the legacy buying metric, will become marginalized -- further separating video from its digital brethren. Richer, nuanced behavioral targeting overlays will still be employed but ultimately factored into the campaign GRP bucket.
Implications: Given that audience reach is the major component of GRP calculations, publishers will scramble to do two things: 1. Aggressively drive unique audience to bolster their ability to drive scale. 2. Catalog their audience by traditional TV age and sex demos and merchandise appropriately, which segues nicely to number 3...
Audience guarantees based on third-party (i.e. Nielsen) validation
Nielsen's Online Campaign Ratings (OCR) has already been a major catalyst for the "TV'ization" of video, with the ability to independently validate impressions by age and gender, helping to establish video's place in the TV ecosystem. This offering becomes infinitely more attractive to advertisers with version 2.0 -- which promises to fuse OCR with Nielsen's offline TV ratings.
Implications: Buyers will demand audience guarantees based on demo. Reciprocally, sellers will take steps to understand their audience based on Nielsen's validation methodology. A bright, potentially uncomfortable light is shone on third-party targeting providers. Nielsen and Facebook (the lion's share of the OCR panel) will slowly but surely establish an inextricable beachhead as the next generation measurement "currency."
Content remains king
The heritage of consolidated buying teams will be grounded in TV, and their daypart approach to video will be dictated by content transparencies. The importance of brand safety, the long-time Achilles heel of the video industry, takes on even greater significance. This time, the promise of TV dollars will lead to aggressive self-policing.
Implications: The potential influx of TV dollars will drive publishers to catalog inventory in a more TV-centric way -- think channels, dayparts, and estimated ratings. Brand safety verification services that evolve from text-based to frame-by-frame video analysis will become a must-have component of any buy.
Will upfront dollars move into online video?
Consolidated buying teams, the adoption of GRPs, audience guarantees, and content cataloging all pave the way for potentially the biggest implication for the industry as a whole -- the movement of television upfront dollars to video. It's a day we've waited for with baited breath for many years, and maybe, just maybe, it's finally upon us.
Vijay Rao is the senior director of strategic planning at Adap.tv.
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