Avi Brown, co-founder and CEO of BrandAds, said there are big challenges facing companies that want to know if their online video ad campaigns are actually paying off.
On the one hand, they can look at the numbers provided by publishers and ad networks, but both groups are “fundamentally biased.” Or they can use data from independent third parties, which is limited to a few metrics like clicks and completions, and even then are delayed by a few hours or more.
That’s what Brown said he and his co-founders are trying to fix with BrandAds. The company was founded in 2011 and is launching its first product BrandAds Bridge today.
Brown gave me a demo of BrandAds Bridge, which consists of a number of dashboards covering areas like Audience, Engagement, and Effectiveness, each of them updated every three seconds, he said. Those dashboards can give you basic information like the number of impressions for a given campaign, but they also go further with things like brand lift (i.e., the improvement in people’s knowledge/impression of the brand as a result of the ads), social mentions and sentiment, and brand safety.
To provide that data, Brown said BrandAds relies on direct audience measurement — in other words, a portion of the users who see the ads will also be asked to complete short survey questions. He pitched this as a superior alternative to panel-based measurement, where there may only be a tiny overlap between the people selected to participate in a panel and the people who saw an ad.
Brown also said that the company is committed to transparency, so the dashboard also includes numbers showing BrandAds’ confidence in its estimates and the percentage of the campaign that it could actually measure.
Looking beyond BrandAds, Brown suggested video ad measurement has been relatively limited because “it’s such a nascent area.” Ultimately, however, he suggested, “This is about the future of television. It’s not just video on your desktop or mobile — it’s where the ecosystem is headed.”
