Google launches premium video ad exchange

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EMarketer predicts video ad spend will grow from $4bn to almost $6bn in 2014, yet one barrier to growth has been the difficulty in finding high quality video ad inventory, according to Google.

The Google Partner Select premium marketplace will involve a select group of publishers, bringing together “the best of brand with the best of programmatic”, Google says in a blog post. 

The programme allows brands to place bids on pre-roll and mid-roll ads via real-time auctions, with Google’s algorithms matching advertisers’ desired audiences with the inventory available across the platform. Demand-side platforms and agency programmatic trading desks will also be able to buy inventory through Partner Select.

The launch pits Google head to head with specialist video exchanges such as BrightRoll, LiveRail and Specific Media’s video offering.

Google has not yet revealed how many publisher partners it has signed up to the programme, nor the terms it has negotiated with them for revenue share. The blog post does, however, include a quote from Time Inc, which suggests it is one of the first publishers joining the programme.

In recent months, Google has been asserting its dominance in the brand marketing space, with its senior vice president and chief business officer Nikesh Arora stating in April that “marketers that historically built their brand on TV are reorienting to digital”.

Alongside Partner Select, Google is also introducing a new way for brands to also buy video ads directly through its DoubleClick platform, streamlining the traditional process of long negotiations followed by insertion orders.

Neal Mohan, Google’s vice president of display and video advertising products, writes in the blog post: “This new option is meant to help streamline what today can be a cumbersome process, involving days of back-and-forth negotiations, dozens of phone calls and sometimes, yes, a fax machine. We hope brands and publishers will be able to spend less time on logistics and more time building partnerships and winning creative and content.”