From Fergus Dyer-Smith, CEO of Wooshii
Video marketing budgets tell a striking story in 2024. The Advertising Association reports UK marketing spending reached £10 billion in Q1, projected to reach £40.5 billion by year-end – a 10.6% leap from last year. Digital platforms and video formats drive this surge, yet a fundamental question remains unanswered.
Are these campaigns working? Do brands know if their creative resonates? Or are they simply watching money evaporate into the digital ether?
The CPM (cost per mille or cost per thousand impressions), has been a foundational metric in digital advertising that can be used to evaluate the efficiency of ad spend in reaching a large audience. But it is a poor proxy for the cost of video ads. Brands and media buyers need to embrace new technologies to measure Effective CPM (eCPM) that analyse the true cost of getting a brand or message in front of an audience.
Why is CPM outdated?
The current CPM measurement has significant limitations in the context of video advertising. It is a measure of cost indicating the apparent efficiency of a buy. It tells you nothing of the effectiveness of your ad or its value. Plays, views or APV’s (average percentage viewed) are only marginally better, giving you an understanding of how much of the video content was consumed, but not whether the audience was actively engaging at the critical moments.
Impressions of these moments is what really counts, providing a more nuanced evaluation of effectiveness. This focuses on whether the ad’s core message reached and resonated with its intended audience during key points of exposure.
What the traditional CPM fails to measure is message delivery. An impression doesn’t guarantee that the core message or branding within the ad was seen or heard by the viewer. For example, a brand pays £1000 for 1,000,000 impressions of a 30-second video ad. Traditional CPM might show this as a reasonable purchase, even if 50% of viewers skip after 5 seconds and only 20% watch till the end where the key message is delivered.
Creative Effectiveness
AI now enables us to measure these critical moments, producing comparable, meaningful Effective CPMs. These are a more accurate way to measure the cost of a campaign. Effective CPMs measure the viewership of key message points in a video and the cost to do so, rather than just the cost to put a video in front of a thousand people.
The numbers tell a sobering story – across billions of impressions, we’ve seen campaigns where as much as 40% of ad spend generates zero brand or message exposure. That is a huge opportunity.
Measuring Effective CPMs “inflight” means brands can react when they see messages aren’t landing and allocate budgets to be more effective.
Cross-platform analysis
Platform analytics have always faced a fundamental challenge: comparing performance across systems that measure success differently. Yet creative effectiveness offers an elegant solution. Whether a message lands – whether it truly engages its audience – remains constant regardless of platform. This platform-agnostic truth creates an opportunity for genuine cross-platform comparison.
Until now though these types of measures have been difficult to scale as brands increasingly embrace creator-driven ads. Only now, with the integration of AI, has comprehensive creative measurement become possible. These creative insights reveal not just how content performs on specific platforms, but how audiences engage with the creative itself – providing a platform-agnostic view of what truly resonates.
For media brands, this unified view transforms how they optimise campaigns. Rather than wrestling with platform-specific metrics, they can focus on what truly matters: whether their message connects with a viewer. Since the same creative often appears across multiple platforms, this wider perspective ultimately leads to a better understanding of both where and how content performs.
By measuring genuine engagement with key moments rather than surface-level metrics, brands can build advertising strategies that deliver real value across platform boundaries.
