Gabrielle Persson from SeenThis on sustainable advertising

Hey Gabrielle, SeenThis has just launched its new segment-by-segment optimisation streaming for display advertising. Can you explain a little more about this technology and how it works?

Our tech is powered by adaptive streaming. We essentially rebooted it with new segment-by-segment optimisation technology.

A video is made up of many different, smaller segments – each of them unique in visual complexity, requiring different amounts of data to ensure high quality.

By optimising each segment one by one for the highest quality that can be perceived by the human eye, we’re able to remove unnecessary data waste in one segment, while enabling enhanced quality in another.

What makes this new improved technology different?

Our original adaptive streaming technology is very powerful in that it avoids delivering content that is not in view for the end-user.

It also adapts to different user conditions such as connection speed, available bandwidth, device and browser – making sure we only deliver the content that the user conditions allow.

The new technology goes a step further by taking the video content itself into consideration, optimising each segment independently.

An additional benefit from the SeenThis technology is our monitoring of data transfer.

With conventional download technologies, when packets of data are delivered to whatever display banner is being served, oftentimes, not all of the campaign data sent is consumed, leading to wasteful data transfer.

Thanks to our data monitoring capabilities and through our collaboration with Fastly, we can offer detailed and transparent measurement of the data footprint in our newly launched Emissions Dashboard, which enables tracking and analysing of carbon cost against targets, as well as reporting – which is especially important with new and upcoming sustainability reporting regulations.

Our new segment-by-segment optimisation technology is an enhancement of our data waste reduction capabilities, and in conjunction with our Emissions Dashboard, users can automatically monitor the volume of data transfer throughout the streaming process and avoid data waste.

This enables advertisers to reduce their own carbon emissions while delivering effective, high-speed video campaigns that are far more likely to engage.

Why is this new update important to advertisers?

First, it proves that advertising can be more sustainable.

At the core, our new adaptive streaming technology is opening up a pathway to advertisers that shows that they can take realistic and easy steps to become more environmentally friendly and carbon efficient.

Second, it further improves campaign performance, quality and user experience.

With ads that load lightning-fast, and are optimised for quality that can be perceived by the human eye, advertisers will start to see a higher return on ad spend (ROAS) as a result, reaching marketing objectives with a lower financial cost, and carbon cost.

All of this can be achieved using our managed services, or by using our drag-and-drop tool where videos of any size can be uploaded; and our built-in editor where marketers can get creative with different ad formats at the touch of a button.

This holds a lot of promise for advertisers, but what about publishers and the wider industry? What kind of changes can they expect to see if they adopt SeenThis into their marketing mix?

When publishers deliver video ads using streaming, they see almost every metric increase, largely due to the sheer speed of delivery and minimised page weight, leading to a faster page load time and better user experience.

And because the ad starts much sooner, at a much higher quality, CTR, conversions, and brand recall start to increase immediately – all of which significantly drive the brand’s ROAS on the publisher’s property, which in turn can lead to publishers yielding a much higher RPM.

And as for the wider industry, technologies like this show how we can start to be more resource efficient across the board.

We’re seeing more vendors actively promoting the importance of reducing carbon emissions across the entire ad ecosystem. Scope3, Impact+, Good-Loop, Ad Net Zero – are just a few examples of the fantastic organisations driving real change as we inch towards a greener future, together.

What type of clients typically use your adaptive streaming technology?

We’re industry-agnostic so the clients we work with are varied – from media agencies and publishers, to brands, to tech vendors.

For instance, we work with leading attention technology platform, Lumen, plus a host of well-known brands such as Klarna and Nissan.

You mentioned the various industry initiatives, who are on a mission to achieve net-zero carbon emissions associated with advertising. Do you think the industry is on course to achieve this?

Reaching net zero is a difficult but crucial task, which we believe is best tackled by focusing on both minimising negative impact and maximising positive contributio

With improvements like segment-by-segment optimisation – we’re on the right path regarding our positive contribution.

We can already see that we’ve been able to further reduce data transfer by 30% compared to previous technology.

By streaming only when creatives are in view, and adapting to the user conditions, we’re seeing reductions in data transfer of up to 40% compared to running a creative of equal quality using conventional ad serving technology.

We know that sustainability is on the top of the agenda for many in and outside our industry, and with all of us focusing on improving resource efficiency in our different areas, we aim to reach it.

Also published in: Mediashotz