Hollywood’s Largest Trade Show Runs 30+ Million Online Ads, Ups Video Ad Spend

Online video consumption continues to explode, generating billions of video views daily.

As a result, digital video is one of the fastest growing ad mediums, expected to reach nearly $10 billion this year in the U.S., according to eMarketer, which also projects 60% of digital video ad spend will be transacted programmatically in 2016.

Encore client, American Film Market (AFM), the global film industry trade show, which drives more than one billion dollars in deals every year, and has launched 21 “Best Picture” Academy Award winners, has substantially boosted online video advertising this year, especially through programmatic buying.

Here are nine insights into the online video component of the attendee marketing campaign, which will deliver more than 30 million video, display, text, social, mobile and native ads around the world for AFM 2016, opening on November 2 for its eight-day run in Santa Monica.  See one of AFM’s video assets.

AFM is using programmatic video to retarget its audiences by leveraging its first-party data, such as visitor activity on the show website, on a real-time basis.

Programmatic is also being used to scale reach by using third-party data to enable AFM to get its video ads in front of new attendee prospects not currently in its cookie pool.

AFM is buying against multiple pricing models, including CPC, CPM and CPV, and seeing wide variances in prices due to the diverse range of ad inventory sources and global geographic footprint.

AFM’s video ads are being delivered via multiple formats, including pre-roll, in-feed native and text links, on web, video and social sites, across desktop and mobile in order to maximize reach, and evaluate performance in different environments.

By using programmatic tools, AFM is able to control frequency, and optimize as necessary to achieve its frequency/reach objectives, especially avoiding the delivery of too many ads to the same person.

A significant portion of AFM’s programmatic video ad spend is on social ad inventory, enabling it to leverage social sharing, which has provided substantial earned media resulting in a more cost-efficient buy.

AFM is employing different video ad lengths, including multiple cut downs of its show video, and all video assets leverage both voiceover and text overlays to deliver the most compelling messaging.

The transparent reporting available through programmatically-sourced online video ads provides AFM granular data on ad delivery, views, audience retention / drop-off, video completion rates, and other engagement metrics, which it can use to optimize ad spend.

While all video ads include call-to-actions (CTAs) at the end, AFM is also employing CTA overlays that are persistent across the duration of the video and other CTA tactics to increase engagement from viewers that don’t watch the entire video.

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Posted on October 17, 2016