BrightRoll, the world’s largest video ad network, today unveiled the results of its inaugural UK agency survey, revealing a growing confidence amongst UK advertisers in the medium of online video.

online video advertisingBrightRoll has carried out the survey in the US for the last three years, and has now rolled this out to the UK, undertaking the first of what will become an annual report of the UK video advertising industry.

BrightRoll’s report analyses information from 100 leading UK media buyers and advertising agency executives and shows that 38% of respondents predict online video will represent the largest increase in digital media spend over the next 12 months. Compared with the results from the equivalent US survey (28%), UK advertisers appear significantly more confident than US advertisers in the growth of online video as a medium.

The key selling point for advertisers is the ability of online video to reach highly targeted audiences, with 37% agree that targeting remains one of the medium’s most valuable factors. Other clear differences between UK and US respondents include UK agency executives preferring demographic targeting, while in contrast US respondents are more interested in behavioural targeting. BrightRoll says this difference could be due to the varying growth stages of online targeting technologies in the US versus the UK, and that a greater adoption of behavioural targeting may follow in the UK as relevant technologies continue to develop.

“BrightRoll recently expanded its operations into the UK because we can see that it is an especially exciting and rapidly maturing market. The results of our first-ever UK survey emphatically support this belief,” said BrightRoll CEO Tod Sacerdoti. “As with our previous US studies, our goal with this report is to contribute to the growing body of research that helps move the category forward by helping to identify what’s working and what’s not in digital video.”