Yahoo Brings Audience Targeting To Video Ads

Yahoo has announced that Audience Ads are now available on the BrightRoll Demand Side Platform (DSP), the video advertising platform the company acquired last November. With this initiative, Yahoo is bringing its extensive audience data and targeting capabilities to video advertising.

Audience Ads provide advertisers with the ability to target users based on demographic and behavioral data across BrightRoll’s video supply on and off Yahoo’s owned and operated properties. Through Audience Ads, Yahoo claims to have behavior and interest data from more than 1 billion users globally.

According to comScore, BrightRoll served more video ads and reached more consumers in the U.S. in 2014 than any other platform. Yahoo claims it now has the largest video advertising inventory across the Web.

“Video is a core focus for Yahoo, and since the acquisition, we’ve been focused on accelerating innovation to bring even greater value to advertisers,” said Tod Sacerdoti, BrightRoll founder and CEO. “We recognized an early opportunity to integrate Yahoo’s unique data assets into the BrightRoll DSP, and this truly is a game changer. Only a handful of companies in the world have the ability to reach audiences at this scale with this level of consumer insight, however, no other company makes their data available for targeting outside their walled garden of O&O [owned and operated] properties.”

Yahoo and BrightRoll clearly want to highlight the fact that offering inventory beyond the “walled garden” sets them apart from Facebook and YouTube, at least for now.

There’s no question that digital video advertising is on the rise. According to eMarketer, digital video advertising in the U.S. rose 56 percent in 2014, to $5.96 billion, and is expected to grow by 30.4 percent in 2015, to reach a total of $7.77 billion. Programmatic video advertising in the U.S. will reach $3.84 billion by 2016, or 40 percent of all digital video advertising dollars, up from $710 million in 2014, according to estimates from eMarketer.

Yahoo initially launched Audience Ads in January 2014, and video has been a clear priority for the company for more than a year now. Yahoo acquired Flurry, a mobile video advertising and analytics platform, in July 2014. In November, the company integrated Flurry’s network and exchange video inventory into its ad offerings. Additionally, Yahoo has a focus on TV-style video content, such as the Yahoo Screen app, which features exclusive distribution of Saturday Night Live episodes as well as the new season of Community, a sitcom that the company saved after it was canceled on network TV.

Yahoo’s video efforts seem to be paying off. According to predictions from eMarketer, Yahoo’s focus on premium video advertising will help its display ad business to experience positive growth in 2015. The research firm estimates that video’s share of the display ad market will increase from 21.6 percent in 2015 to 30.1 percent by 2018.

Do advertisers think that online video ads are as effective as television ads?

A recent BrightRoll study indicates that 41 percent believe that online video is about as effective as TV, followed by 31 percent who think that online video is more effective than TV, 18 percent who think online video is less effective than TV, and 10 percent who say that they don’t know.