As VP of marketing for Tremor Media, Shane Steele has spent the past year and a half helping the online video network grow its roster of publishers and big brand advertisers. But her connection to both digital and traditional brand-building runs deep. Before Tremor Media, she spent four years with Coca-Cola, where she ultimately oversaw all of the company's emerging media marketing initiatives in North America.

On the eve of DM2 Media's first digiday:VIDEO UPFRONT, we talked to Steele about some of the trends she's seen evolve over the past 16 months in terms of buying and selling online video, including: What have become the "go-to" metrics for brand marketers, and of course, whether the idea of buying digital video ads "Upfront-style" is a viable option for more than just a handful of advertisers.

digiday:DAILY: How would the idea of a video upfront work? Are brands ready to buy video at the start of the year, instead of on a per-campaign basis?

Shane Steele: We're seeing many more brands and media agencies wanting to at least have the "upfront" conversation, and that's tied to three trends: 

• It seems obvious, but many advertisers are realizing that digital video is a medium they need to devote more of their marketing budgets to.
• There is more access to high-quality, professionally-produced content -- not just UGC, and not just indie web series. 
• There's a better ability to deliver against a real audience, which is how both brands and agencies look at TV.

A real audience, as in a broader audience than before? Is it all just about reach?

It's not just about reach -- but being able to deliver a high number of impressions, or clicks or whichever metric a marketer is looking for, is key. That's a big part of making it worthwhile for someone to spend large sums of money on campaigns in advance. As an industry, we need to be able to guarantee them reach that's on par with what they'd get through TV.

But is TV's reach really guaranteed? By most accounts, TV ads are bought, sold and measured using panel data. That's not nearly as accurate as the targeting on the web.

Right, and the targeting is a major value proposition -- but it still goes back to boosting scalability, and we're still making improvements. For example, we use targeting technology that lets us call multiple data-providers to clarify which audience segment we're about to reach before an ad request is responded to. In the past, you needed to have someone visit a site, cookie them, then retarget.

The real-time targeting allows us to deliver accountability that's better than TV, and deliver the scale. I think we'll see an increase in these kinds of products coming from both networks like Tremor Media, as well as some of the big video publishers themselves.

Are specific brands flocking to online video ads? Does it vary by vertical?

Overall, the market segments that are spending on digital video map pretty predictably to the segments spending money on TV. The largest category is consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands, since they have the money to spend. Other big verticals are telecom and retail. In terms of the most growth in spending, I'd say automotive, but that's because they're coming from a year where they were cutting budgets -- not increasing. 

What kinds of metrics are advertisers using to benchmark these campaigns? How do they determine their ROI?

From a planning perspective, they're thinking about what role digital video should play in their overall mix, so we're working with metrics like reach, frequency and efficiency. The goal is to prove that when you incorporate video, you can optimize reach and frequency at a lower overall CPM than if you just used TV.

For delivery or post-campaign metrics, it depends on the objective. Some campaigns are for branding, so we benchmark things like brand awareness, engagement, favorability and purchase intent, through studies similar to what you'd see from a company like Dynamic Logic.

Other campaigns are aimed at inducing a certain behavior, so we pull data on the behavioral impact: What was the total view-through? Was there search penetration, meaning, did someone view the ad and then go search for a keyword? Did the video increase time spent on the site? Did they ultimately go purchase something three days later? Being able to provide that kind of data helps retailers, in particular, recognize the value of buying video.

We're also seeing much more interest in cross-media metrics. Advertisers want to quantify the synergy between online video and TV -- and for CPG brands -- offline purchase behavior.