The Need for Independently Verified Video Analytics

As the year winds to a close, we take stock of lessons learned and begin to think about what lies ahead. In the marketing world, that means closing out 2016 budgets and projects and planning for 2017 programming (ideally with additional budget).

To me the biggest marketing lesson of 2016 was that the industry is in dire need of better video analytics solutions. These solutions need to acknowledge the current media landscape and be — intuitively cross-player and cross-platform. Most importantly, data needs to be independently verified.

If the #Facebook debacle has taught us anything, it’s that’s publishers need to stop grading their own homework, when it comes to video analytics. This is true for advertising, native content, branded content, or any video for that matter.

Video is worth a lot. The industry is growing bigger and bigger each year. When it comes to video advertising, we’re getting better. But when it comes to branded, native, or owned content we are sorely behind

Publishers need to better understand how much this content is worth so they can better monetize it to advertisers. And without independent verification, advertisers will just have to take the publishers’ word for it.

And they shouldn’t.

Advertisers who buy video brand/content integrations (or the like) from publishers need to know who is watching their (costly) videos and if they are actually paying attention to the right pieces of the video (i.e. where the brand integration occurs).

And they shouldn’t just take the publishers word for it. They should — as I said before — demand independent verification.

Getting this done is very easy.

Installing two lines of code from Limbik, will tell you how many people are watching you video, who they are, and if they’re paying attention, regardless of the player, platform or device on which they’re watching.

It’s a solution to possible the biggest issue in video analytics today.