Today, TubeMogul released the US version of its first quarterly report (download here), focused on real-time video advertising trends and best practices for marketers and trading desks (the UK version of the report, which launched last week, is available here, and Econsultancy’s analysis here). There is a lot more detail in the report, but a few key trends emerged:
Pre-roll video advertising inventory available for real-time buying is expanding rapidly, growing 4.7% per month in the US and over 13.8% per month in the UK, which topped 29.9 million streams per day in July.
comScore 100 Video Metrix sites are not the best proxy for getting viewers to watch an entire ad; TubeMogul’s own tiers — ranked by a team manually reviewing sites for quality — appear to be a better proxy, with tier one sites averaging the highest completion rates in the US — 3.6% higher than comScore 100 sites.
In the US, CPMs for pre-roll video ads grew at a rate of 2.5% per month in the first half of 2012, peaking at $9.93 in June. Contrast this with the UK, where CPMs declined in the second quarter amid a large expansion of available inventory.
Weekends are a relative bargain to video advertisers, representing 29.6% of the week’s video viewing in the US but having the lowest prevailing CPMs at $8.67. The trend is similar in the UK.
Small variances suggest that where an ad runs is clearly not everything, which is why a media buying platform’s emphasis on transparency matters so much — only when analyzing the exact media mix with in context of the targeting and optimization options real-time buying makes possible, as well as variances in performance of the ad creative itself, can marketers begin to make the right tradeoffs.
