Why Editorial Teams Should Have (& Feel Empowered to Hit) Video Goals

Through recent years, video KPIs have descended on newsrooms, mostly driven by higher CPMs, increased ad inventory and user engagement, dwell time, etc. 

Media organizations have taken several different approaches. Some rely solely on original video production and instream views. Many relegate these KPIs completely to their business development and product teams. 

In the earlier days, top publishers stood up video portals or verticals in hopes that users might consume video all day. However, these publishers built their audiences with their text content, and audience behavior remained unchanged. So began the rise of outstream video products, which no doubt transformed digital publishing businesses, but poses its own challenges for ad buyers. Plus, the most high-value eyeballs are instream.  

Therefore, the media companies with most video success utilize a hybrid approach. With the bulk of traffic and video engagement on article pages, digital publishers must empower their editorial teams to incorporate video programming into their workflows  and grow valuable video supply in the process. Here’s how.

Empower your writers, content creators and editors

Some organizations appoint video programmers or create a video team to insert video content on high-performing article pages. This is a great way to create ownership and accountability within the team, but also a good starting point for those dipping their toes into editorial video programming.  

Better yet is to empower all writers and editors to program video content alongside their written content, similar to how they might choose an accompanying image in your digital asset management tool. 

Either way, they’ll need the right tools to do so. Optimize your CMS, and make it simple for editors’ to incorporate video programming into their workflow. Similar to how you might license images from a wire service, you may want to license a third-party video library and make it readily available for your editors to program. 

Reconcile video goals with editorial standards

Understand and address any editorial concerns that may arise, like fear of autoplay or contextual relevancy in dynamically curated downstream video playlists. Product, revenue and editorial teams can often find themselves at odds when there’s a lack of understanding on all sides. At the end of the day, video programming should be a win-win-win.  

Rather than push video content down your users’ throats, it should feel aligned with your editorial strategy, and it’s because of this that your editorial team is your best partner. 

Work with editorial leadership to create team-based SMART goals

It’s important for ownership and accountability for any strategic initiative to be spread across multiple touchpoints on a team. This ensures that all team members are aligned on business objectives and can help alleviate any frustration that can arise from a lack of communication. At the same time, KPIs should follow SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, time-based) guidelines, with the emphasis on measurable, attainable and relevant. 

Revenue goals and visibility are beneficial in keeping all interests aligned across the team, but at the end of the day, the editorial team has no hand in things like CPMs or fill. Therefore, try to emphasize their goals in creating supply. Video starts, video views and engagement metrics are all “SMART” in this case. 

Ultimately, the most high-value eyeballs are on pages that editorial controls. So while programmatic, ad ops and product teams focus their energies on all of the challenges posed in the video landscape - yield, demand, IAB compliance, latency and more - allow your editorial teams to take the lead in increasing high-value, audience-aligned video supply.

 


To find out how you can access new audiences using new content verticals, contact us. We can help you discover how VideoElephant’s library of over 2 million premium videos can help you achieve your goals.

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