Yahoo is bringing its extensive audience data and targeting capabilities to video advertising.
Yahoo announced Wednesday that Audience Ads are now available on the Brightroll Demand Side Platform (DSP), the video advertising platform the company acquired last November,. Audience Ads allow advertisers to target users based on demographic and behavioral data across Brightroll’s video supply on and off Yahoo’s owned and operated properties. Yahoo claims to have behavior and interest data from more than a billion users globally. It also harnesses user data from Yahoo Search and Yahoo Mail for targeting.
Yahoo claims to have the largest video advertising inventory across the web, thanks in large part to Brightroll, which served more video ads and reached more consumers in the US in 2014 than any other platform, according to comScore.
“Video is a core focus for Yahoo, and since the acquisition, we’ve been focused on accelerating innovation to bring even greater value to advertisers,” said Tod Sacerdoti, BrightRoll founder and CEO in a statement. “We recognized an early opportunity to integrate Yahoo’s unique data assets into the BrightRoll DSP, and this truly is a game changer. Only a handful of companies in the world have the ability to reach audiences at this scale with this level of consumer insight, however, no other company makes their data available for targeting outside their walled garden of O&O [owned and operated] properties.”
Offering inventory beyond the “walled garden” is clearly a point of differentiation (for now) from the likes of Facebook and YouTube that Yahoo and Brightroll want to drive home. Brightroll’s network includes tens of thousands of sites and mobile apps.
Yahoo debuted Audience Ads in January 2014 when it announced an overhaul of its ad products. Audience Ads enable programmatic targeting based on a combination of Yahoo data, first-party advertiser data and third-party data on Yahoo properties and other partner sites in Yahoo’s and, now, Brightroll’s network.
Video has been a priority for Yahoo for a more than a year now. In July 2014, Yahoo acquired Flurry, a mobile video advertising and analytics platform. The company integrated Flurry’s network and exchange video inventory into its ad offerings in November. Yahoo’s focus on TV-style video content includes the Yahoo Screen app which features exclusive distribution of Saturday Night Live episodes and now the new season of Community, the sitcom with a cult-following that the company saved after it was cancelled on network TV.
Emarketer predicts that Yahoo’s focus on premium video advertising will help propel its display ad business into positive growth in 2015. The research firm estimates that video’s share of the display ad market will increase from 21.6 percent in 2015 to 30.1 percent by 2018.
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