Advertisers are moving their video ads to connected TV and buying premium content, according to the latest Video Benchmarks Report from Extreme Reach.
The report found that 49% of video ad impressions occurred on connected TV platforms during 2019, up from 38% last year and 14% in 2016. Mobile video impressions slipped to 27% from 30% last year.
On AdBridge, 81% of all ads were served into premium environments in the fourth quarter of 2019, up from 74% a year ago.
“Advertisers likely want to see and know exactly where their ads will appear, rather than leaving that decision to an algorithm,” the report said. “Are we seeing less programmatic buys taking place? At ER we still serve and measure billions of ads through DSPs, but we’re seeing far fewer impressions served through that channel versus premium direct.”
Extreme Reach said that in some areas, aggregators were doing better despite a fall in their share of impressions to 19% in the fourth quarter of 2019 from 26% a year earlier.
The company said that completion rates--which are important to media--are up to 82% from 73%, and aggregators have also improved combating invalid traffic.
Most impressions--69%-- came in 30-second ads during the fourth quarter. Two years ago bite-sized 15-second spots dominated at 62%. A year ago, 30s had a 58% share of impressions.
Longer ads, 60-seconds, dropped to less than 1% of ads served.
Extreme Reach found a drop in invalid traffic to 1.01% in the fourth quarter from 3.52% a year ago
Of that 1 percent of ad traffic considered invalid, high-frequency traffic is the leading contributor at 0.62%. Data Center traffic represents the second largest contributor at 0.26%. Invalid browsers and spider/bot traffic complete the reasons at 0.07% and 0.06% respectively, the report said.
