Direct­ly address­ing the vexed ques­tion of whether the inex­orable rise of dig­i­tal video is actu­al­ly effec­tive in dri­ving online adver­tis­ing sales, ad met­rics start­up Bran­dAds has launched its first video mea­sur­ing prod­uct. Just about every­one with media jobs in inter­net adver­tis­ing, from busi­ness devel­op­ment mangers to advert­ing sales man­agers, would like to get their hands on some hard data about the effec­tive­ness of video ads. So, can the new prod­uct – Bran­dAds Bridge – mea­sure up?

At last, some hard data on video for the hard-boiled busi­ness devel­op­ment manager

Bran­dAds’ co-founder and CEO, Avi Brown, is aware that more agen­cies and brands want to know which of their ads are pay­ing off. And they’re skep­ti­cal about num­bers sup­plied by ad net­works and pub­lish­ers, who might just have a vest­ed inter­est in pre­sent­ing them in a very pos­i­tive light. To com­pound mat­ters, the data avail­able from third par­ties is very lim­it­ed: what busi­ness devel­op­ment man­ag­er can tell from a hand­ful of met­rics like com­ple­tions and clicks – data which isn’t usu­al­ly avail­able until sev­er­al hours after the ad has appeared – what’s real­ly working?

Bran­dAds was set up in 2011 to fix that. Bran­dAds Bridge, launched this month, takes the form of a series of onscreen dash­boards dis­play­ing met­rics like Effec­tive­ness, Engage­ment and Audi­ence. And accord­ing to Brown, it yields data in real-time (each dash­board is updat­ed every three seconds).

A raft of measures

The dash­boards rely on ‘direct audi­ence mea­sure­ment,’ mean­ing that a sam­ple of view­ers watch­ing the video ads are asked to com­plete some short sur­vey ques­tions. The net result is that the dash­boards reveal basic data such as how many impres­sions a par­tic­u­lar cam­paign has gen­er­at­ed and addi­tion­al infor­ma­tion like whether the view­ers have expe­ri­enced a change in their knowl­edge or impres­sion of the brand after watch­ing the ad, whether they’ve made any social men­tions of the brand (and what sen­ti­ments were con­veyed) and what they believe about brand safety.

Brown believes that video ad met­rics have been so lim­it­ed to date because “it’s such a nascent area.” But the times are chang­ing, as any sea­soned busi­ness devel­op­ment man­ag­er can tes­ti­fy: video is on the rise. As Brown puts it:

“This is about the future of tele­vi­sion. It’s not just video on your desk­top or mobile — it’s where the ecosys­tem is headed.”