By 11/19/2012
From the press to the panels, the spotlight’s on premium. Easily one of the most used and abused words in media today, premium (the true, valuable, and meaningful kind) remains paramount for top tier brand advertisers looking to connect with consumers. But what is premium… really?
Premium is what is exceptional and valuable. To be premium and valuable to a brand marketer, content must be high quality and consistent with a brand’s stature and personality; this is absolutely necessary. But the objective and measurable metric for what qualifies as premium and what is sufficient for successful brand advertising is this: Premium video content has high in-stream video ad completion rates, with completion rates of 75% or higher qualifying as premium.
So why all the confusion? The main reason premium has been so tough to define is because what’s premium is inherently subjective—what one user emphatically prefers and values is almost certainly not universal across all users. While one user might value sports content, another might prefer celebrity news, TV shows, or anything else. In the world of free ad-supported apps, the user’s willingness to view an advertisement in exchange for great content, or a fair value exchange of content for advertising, is the only objective way to measure premium, regardless of content type.
Assuming the content meets the basic requirements (high quality and consistent with brand personality), when a user values content enough to indulge a 15-second brand ad, that content is both premium and valuable to brands. It’s as simple as that.
Pictured: Ujjal Kohli (center) and fellow panelists at the the recent Cynopsis Digital “Content, Content Everywhere” panel, where all eyes were on premium. Panelists made points that premium is audience dependent, that one person’s premium may not be the same as another’s—all the usual suspects in a debate on premium’s definition. Rhythm CEO Ujjal Kohli, a member of the four person panel, had the definition to end the debate—75%+ in-stream completion rates plus high quality and brand consistent content equals premium.