So, Boston this week for DMN, and eTail East, the retail eCommerce conference staged by Worldwide Business Research.
By chance, it’s my first eTail conference, although DMN has a long history with the event. Actually, it’s the event itself which has a long history — certainly by the standards of conferences of this kind. I’t sbeen around for 18 years, and has grown to a network of nine annual conferences held in centers like Palm Springs, Toronto, London, and Berlin. In almost a decade, of course, the focus must have changed, even though the organizers claim always to have been “focused on multi-channel.” In 1999, nobody could have imagined what multi-channel would look like today (or of course “omnichannel,” as we move into a post-channel, channel-agnostic marketing world).
And so we’re promised insights not into just the eCommerce web, but VR/AR, wearables, and — of course — AI. From Keurig to Keds, from BlueConic to Bluecore, there are so many brands and vendors represented it will be hard, as at any good conference, to know where to start. But expect Boston dispatches all week.
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Whatever your brand’s channel of choice to reach the content-hungry masses, you’ve doubtless considered video. One of the hot topics in video marketing, of course, is metrics. What counts as a viewed video (especially when we’ve all found videos playing on a tab or page we forgot to close but weren’t watching)? And how much of a video does a consumer need to see to be affected by it?
Those are some of the questions tackled head-on in a partnership between mobile ad specialists AdColony and digital ad search engine Moat. The relationship goes back to 2015, with Moat aggregating ad metrics to generate benchmarks for viewability (by humans), in-view time, reached completion rate, and completion quality (i.e. visible/audible completions).
The reason AdColony has been trumpeting the partnership over the last few weeks is the success of its Instant-Play videos compared Moat’s industry benchmarks. Geared to provide an HD experience with very low load/buffering time, Instant-Play videos significantly out-performed the averages on each metric, but showed a striking 228% increase on reached completion rate.
I guess it matters less which viewability metric you think important if your content performs well against all of them.
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Speaking of big numbers, a final shout out to the Keli Network, creating social content for millennials across a range of channels (tech, sports, beauty, gaming), which this month exceeded one billion monthly views. Keli touts its vertical specificity as boosting engagement. It’s video-first content, of course, and Keli seeks to maximize frequency of views by using data to understand audiences.
Something we discuss a lot here, and something I’m sure I’ll be hearing more about this week.
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