Article by Steve Ellwanger
Boston, MA, November 7, 2016 When placing video ads inside walled digital gardens, should you engage those gardens directly or through an intermediary? The direct route, according to Pixability’s Bettina Hein, comes with a fox and a henhouse.
The Pixability story is concise: Many advertisers don?t want the lion?s share of their video ad dollars going to Facebook, Google and very few others, but they have no choice because of the audiences they need to reach. However, they shouldn’t do it on their own.
“You have to see that if you make a direct buy, it?s essentially a fox in the henhouse approach. You?re grading your own homework,” Hein says of the walled gardens themselves in an interview with Beet.TV.
What is supposed to make Pixability the caretaker of the hens is that its platform places ads on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube—the latter since 2008—and thus has deep audience targeting insights across the quartet. And Hein, who is CEO and Founder, says her company has the ear of those who own the gardens because it works closely with them.
“We frequently work with them on alpha and betas to sort of influence these large behemoths on behalf of our advertisers and advocate for their needs,” Hein says.
Because Pixability works with some of the largest brands in the world, “We actually get to give that feedback directly to the engineers, the product managers and help them understand what a brand needs when they do video advertising.”
Hein explains the reasons why walled gardens have increasingly become the place to go for marketers. “Their audience is moving away from television,” Hein says. “Their audience is annoyed by video on the open web.”
So the walled garden platforms win because they are well policed, there’s not a lot of fraud and viewability is high, according to Hein. “The brands don?t necessarily want to give 100% of every new digital dollar to Facebook or Google, but they understand that’s where their audience is,” she says.
Without citing specific companies, Hein says Pixability is expanding into more social media platforms. “We also see the possibilities in OTT, for example. Our customers are interested in that,” says Hein. ?Everywhere young audiences are migrating is what’s interesting for Pliability because we represent those brands that need to find those audiences.”
We interviewed her last month at the Progress Partners Connect conference. Our coverage of the conference is sponsored by Simpli.fi. More videos from the series can be found on this page.