David Murphy talks cross-screen with Antoine Barbier, director of product, mobile, at TubeMogul.

MM: So give us the brief intro to TubeMogul please, Antoine.

AB: Sure, we’re a cross-screen platform and we try to make sure we can help clients plan measure and buy and optimise across all screens, taking into account the specifics of each screen.
Mobile is very different to desktop in terms of supply sources, data and measurement, so we are making sure we have the right partnerships in place to do the right things on the mobile side. My job is to make mobile not a silo but something that fits into the big picture.

Programmatic is a reality, so now we want to automate the buying and measurement process. For the past three years we have been making sure we have access to the right inventory, with a big focus on mobile video, but also social and display. We did a Facebook integration a couple of months ago and Twitter in the US more recently.

MM: So what do the KPIs look like typically when you are running a cross-screen campaign?

AB: There is no one silver bullet. We launched a cross-screen planner which covers TV, mobile, desktop and connected TVs in the US, and the input we look at is what is the audience target and then looking deeper into the attributes of the audience, including purchase intent. And the second piece is to ask the client if they run TV budgets.

TV is still the biggest medium so we take account of that in our approach. If the brand has a plan on TV we can complement that across devices in the spirit of incremental reach. With TV advertising you get the same audience again and again. With digital you have much more control on the frequency of exposure to an ad so here we have done a good job I think, in helping brands plan for incremental reach across TV and digital. In the US we are leveraging Nielsen data and we have done a good job of combining the consumption of content on TV and digital, and we are now looking for the right partners outside the US.

MM: So that’s about using the other screens to reach people the TV campaign doesn’t reach. What about looking at things from the other perspective, using cross-screen to retarget people who have seen an ad on TV on their other devices?

AB: The first version of the panel was for incremental reach but we can also retarget users who were exposed to a TV ad on digital channels. We have the tools to do that.

MM: So when there is an existing TV campaign and long-form assets, what’s the approach to putting that on desktop and mobile?

AB: You can take an ad you are running on TV and you may be able to run it on desktop, but not on mobile, because of the pattern of consumption and the expectations from users when consuming content on mobile devices. You need the right format to expose users to your messaging. A 30-second video on mobile does not work. You’re looking at 15 seconds maximum, 10 is the sweet spot. In this respect, the UK is a bit behind in terms of being able to repurpose TV ads or creating custom units for mobile. The US is ahead on this. Close to 70 per cent of our mobile video campaigns in the US leverage assets of 15 seconds or less.

MM: And what’s your take on the mobile advertising landscape overall?

AB: We’ve seen a lot of progress and change in the past two to two-and-a-half years in terms of mobile video being available programmatically. Where we have seen the most change in a good way is around audience data measurement, but there are still a lot of things in front of us.

Traditional data providers and DMPs (Data Management Platforms) have made the move into the mobile space and some of them were late so they are catching up. But it comes back to the cross-screen view – they have audience data across desktop and mobile so this helps brands reach users wherever they consume content.

But there are still challenges, particularly around viewability. On the video side especially, the tech that you would use on mobile in-app is so different from web third party viewability measurement. Companies have invested in that space but their offerings don’t cover all the mobile inventory out there so there are still challenges. It’s a moving target, but what we want to do is to make sure that we can identify users and provide a better user experience across all screens.