Due in part to the strength of CTV in the digital landscape and the trust advertisers have in premium publishers, the share of impressions attributed to premium media vendors increased 31% year-over-year (y-o-y) in Q2 2019. Extreme Reach’s Q2 2019 Video Benchmarks Report [download page] reveals that premium publishers accounted for 83% of total impressions for that quarter, with the remaining 17% of impressions attributed to media aggregators.
Direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands almost exclusively rely on premium publishers. Indeed, according to the report, virtually all (99.8%) of video ad impressions for DTC brands were served by premium publishers.
DTC brands’ reliance on premium publishers also means that they tend to favor longer ads. In Q2 2019, fully 95% of DTC brands’ video ads on the Extreme Reach platform were 30 seconds in length. By comparison, 30-second ads accounted for 64% share of all video ads in Q2 2019.
While a report from the IAB earlier this year found that more than half (57%) of the marketers planned on using 6-second video ads this year, this report shows that 6-second ads only accounted for 1% of ads in Q2 2019, although this must be caveated with the fact that the data is based on ads served via Extreme Reach.
DTC brands also boast a healthy video completion rate. On average, video completion rates were at 89% in Q2 2019, which is higher than the overall 77% completion rate Extreme Reach reported for 2018. However, the average video completion rate for DTC brands was at 92% for Q2 2019. This is likely the result of DTC brands’ use of premium publishers and reliance on CTV – which typically has the highest ad completion rate of any device.
The full report is available for download here.
About the Data: Figures are base on ads served from Extreme Reach’s AdBridge™ platform for a range of advertisers among multiple categories.
