5 MINUTES WITH…
Cynopsis sat down with LiveRail Senior Vice President, Client Services Vijay Balan to discuss digital advertising from standardization to mobile ads. He will participate in next week’s Cynopsis Digital’s Video Forum in San Francisco on Aug. 6 as part of The Million Dollar Question: How to Advertise and Monetize panel. Join us in San Fran by registering here.
What digital trend is most interesting to you right now?
Mobile advertising. People are consuming more content online, conducting more transactions online, and turning to their PC as a last resort. While this shift is not necessarily new for the U.S., emerging regions like Latin America are increasingly leapfrogging traditional mediums and going straight to mobile.
Digital video advertising is expected to hit $6 billion this year – what’s one major problem still challenges this medium when it comes to the bottom line?
Finding the right audience for your brand continues to be a complex task. Viewers’ expectations are high and they expect to see relevant ads delivered seamlessly. The challenge for the industry is to aggregate data from an extremely fragmented audience and then leverage that data in execution. There’s a lot of work to be done, but I expect we’ll see a lot of improvements over the next few years.
Do you see a standard for monetization for digital video coming about in the near future, or will it be about customization?
The short answer is no. I don’t foresee a standard for monetization of digital video emerging because you can’t think of it as an isolated entity. You have to consider the way media is being transacted today, with different sales channels addressing different portions of inventory. A lot of time is spent talking about programmatic. It often gets lumped into the same bucket as buying RTB on exchanges. Programmatic is about bringing efficiency into sales and operations; targeting audiences and placements to extract the most value out of a budget. I think the focus should be less on standardization and more on how technology can be utilized to make transactions more effective and efficient.
What industry innovator would you love to take a selfie with, and why?
Elon Musk, because he is basically the real-life version of [Ironman] Tony Stark!
