One-Size-Fits-All Video Strategy Misses The Big APAC Picture
Opportunities to reach video viewers in the Asia Pacific region are many, so to capture the widest audience, marketers need a correspondingly wide lens.
Opportunities to reach video viewers in the Asia Pacific region are many, so to capture the widest audience, marketers need a correspondingly wide lens.
As a result, a one-size-fits-all campaign clip has become less relevant with the increasing fragmentation of video platforms and formats, explained Keith Eadie, head of Adobe’s Advertising Cloud platform. (Note: Adobe is CMO.com’s parent company.)
To be sure, the appetite for online video is immense–especially in the APAC region, where eMarketer research indicates 1.10 billion live. That’s more than half of the world’s digital video viewers.
Amid language, cultural, and economic diversity, the fragmentation of video services adds another layer of complexity for marketers in the region–one that requires careful consideration when creating content.
“Whether you’re using Snapchat, Facebook, a desktop publisher, a mobile app, or an over-the-top connected TV device, those are very different engagement experiences for video,” Eadie explained. “What a marketer should not do is just take a 30-second TV ad and try and shove that creative asset into all those different channels, because they very much have different consumer behaviours associated with them.”
Instead, he said, “The most successful marketers are customising video creative for the different channels and audience experiences.”
That, of course, comes at a price.
“Marketers have to be mindful of their creative development costs. However, spending a little more or managing a budget for creative development in a different way, and building assets for those specific channels, will pay a significant ROI when they buy media across those channels,” Eadie said.
As an end-to-end platform, Advertising Cloud has access to inventory from search, display, video, and social (Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat).
“Adobe doesn’t own media. For the social platforms, we are partners first and foremost. They don’t see us as some sort of competitive threat with a social channel,” Eadie explained.
Mitigating Risks
Also on APAC advertisers’ minds: the integrity of video inventory and how to protect their ads from appearing alongside controversial, inappropriate, or illegal content. Advertising Cloud, Eadie explained, employs a layered approach to tackling brand risk, combining technological and human expertise.
In addition, the platform helps to ensure advertisers are not losing valuable campaign dollars on fraudulent impressions. In Australia, for example, ad fraud costs advertisers an estimated $116 million per year, according to research by Datalicious. The research company said 7.4% of all display ads are impacted; that’s a lot of impressions wasted on nonhuman “bot” traffic.
Advertising Cloud’s built-in technology is “constantly evaluating billions of data points across the bidder and the bid request, relative to the source of the traffic and looking for those anomalies and then automatically blocking them,” Eadie said.
Finally, any discussion around video typically includes programmatic. Markets using programmatic advertising in APAC include Australia and New Zealand, both of which are considered mature, even world-leading. Others, however, lag significantly in the use of software to buy advertising.
“It’s definitely a spectrum,” Eadie noted. “That means brands need to approach different markets with varied strategies and ensure they partner with a technology that can help navigate the nuances of each to be successful.”
