Digital Video Advertising Services

How Digital Video Buying Works

Digital video is bought on impressions, not on airtime, and the placement type changes what you are actually paying for.

Connected TV and OTT run full screen on the television, inside apps like Max, Prime Video, Disney+ and Hulu. These placements are non-skippable and sold on a CPM basis, and most are measured on completed views rather than clicks, because nobody clicks a television. Sound is on, the screen is full, and the viewer is usually sitting still. It is the closest thing digital has to traditional TV, with targeting attached.

Pre-roll runs before content the viewer already chose, on YouTube and across premium publishers. It can be skippable or non-skippable. Skippable formats generally charge only when the viewer watches past the skip point or engages, which means the first five seconds are effectively free exposure whether they stay or not.

Social video runs in feeds on Meta, TikTok and LinkedIn. It is usually watched muted and scrolled past quickly, so it needs captions and a visual hook in the first second. It is a different creative problem than CTV, and treating them as the same asset is the most common mistake we see.

What You Can Target in Digital Video

• Location, from national down to a radius around a single address
• Demographics, including age, gender and household composition
• Interests and behaviors, based on content consumption and browsing signals
• Contextual placement, putting the ad next to a specific type of content
• Retargeting, reaching people who already visited your site or watched a previous ad
• Household targeting on CTV, matching to an address-level audience rather than a cookie

CTV targeting works at the household level, not the individual level. That is a real distinction: you are reaching a living room, not a person, and frequency capping should be set accordingly.

What You Can Measure

• Impressions and completed views, the base counts
• Video completion rate (VCR), the share of viewers who watched to the end. CTV completes at a much higher rate than skippable pre-roll, by design
• Cost per completed view (CPCV), the most honest efficiency metric in video
• View rate, on skippable formats, the share who chose not to skip
• Reach and frequency, unique viewers and how often each saw the ad
• Site visits and conversions attributed to exposure, matched through a pixel

We do not report view counts on their own. A completed view on a television and a two second autoplay in a feed are not the same event, and adding them together hides more than it shows.