BrightRoll Inc. has announced a full slate of new partnerships – and the new services coming out of these partnerships might make marketers’ lives a little easier.
Yesterday, at the BrightRoll Video Summit in New York, the programmatic buying platform announced it had inked partnerships with audience measurement providers comScore and Nielsen, two of the biggest firms in measuring audiences’ engagement with media.
BrightRoll will be integrating these firms’ analytics with its own platform, which allows advertisers to engage in programmatic buying. That means they can bid on a commercial spot just before a YouTube video starts playing – and for marketers already using BrightRoll’s services, this means they will get access to highly detailed reports from both comScore and Nielsen for their campaigns.
Armed with this information, they’ll be able to map out their campaigns, figure out their costs, target the campaigns, and optimize delivery, and that won’t cost them anything, says Tim Avila, senior vice-president of marketing at BrightRoll. Normally, getting access to reports from comScore or Nielsen might cost “thousands of dollars” per campaign, he adds.
“BrightRoll is actually providing all of that reporting on our platform for free for all advertisers. So this is a pretty big deal, and I think it generated a lot of excitement at our event,” he says.
“Marketers were pretty excited to find out, wait, you’re going to make that available to me for free? And so that was a driving force behind this. We realized we’d see accelerated adoption of video advertising if we made reporting that validated performance more readily available.”
This may also have some effects in Canada, Avila says. Many Canadian marketers have wanted to stick to working with comScore, which previously did not provide the same measurement capabilities in Canada that it did in the U.S. Now that comScore is building out its product, more Canadian marketers should be jumping on board.
“We expect Canadian adoption of video to accelerate … We’re very, very bullish on prospects in Canada,” he adds.
BrightRoll has also scored a partnership with Google Inc.’s DoubleClick Ad Exchange, which gives marketers the chance to buy inventory from DoubleClick’s properties, including YouTube.
The company already had a long-standing partnership with Google, but last year, DoubleClick became integrated with BrightRoll, offering its customers access to its inventory. Now that relationship is being reciprocated, and marketers on BrightRoll can buy DoubleClick inventory directly from the BrightRoll console.
Yet what’s more interesting is BrightRoll’s announcement that it has signed on with its first mobile targeting partner, BlueKai by Oracle Corp. (Oracle acquired BlueKai in February).
This means BrightRoll marketers will be able to do targeting with mobile video, and not just on their audiences’ desktops. In the past, there was no way to do common targeting for Android smartphones and iPhones, but that’s an area where marketers are quickly zeroing in, Avila says. And BrightRoll will be definitely be eyeing more partnerships like this one in the future, he adds.
For Avila, what ties all of these partnerships together is the desire to get marketers using BrightRoll’s platform for their entire campaigns.
“You can imagine, just from a difficulty standpoint, you’re managing hundreds of campaigns and it gets a little bit onerous. So from that perspective … we’ve made things simpler. But more importantly, from a performance perspective, having that entire end-to-end workflow in one platform makes sure [marketers] will get the best possible performance,” he says.
Access to comScore’s Validated Campaign Essentials and Nielsen’s Online Campaign Ratings services should be generally available by the end of the quarter, or around June, according to Avila.
Marketers will be able to buy inventory from DoubleClick at the beginning of May, while the fruits of the Oracle-BlueKai acquisition should be available by the end of the quarter.