• by Tobi Elkin , Staff Writer @tobielkin, December 17, 2015

RTBlog checked in with Bertrand Quesada, CEO of Teads -- a company that places native video advertising -- for his 2016 predictions. Among Teads’ publisher clients are The Washington Post, Hearst International, Condé Nast, Reuters and Slate.

Native video will overtake pre-roll. Driven by Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Teads, the industry's top publishers will continue to shift away from the use of pre-roll in favor of native video. Facebook’s native video is on track to overtake YouTube, and most other video players have adopted these formats.

Pre-roll video forces users to watch, and users are fed up. Native video can be elegantly inserted between editorial content and offers consumers a choice to opt-out. Since the Internet has a lot more text than video content, publishers will flock to native video to achieve greater scale.

For publishers, native video is respectful of the audience. And brands are only paying when the video is played.

By the way, in Germany 60% of pre-roll video is ad blocked on mobile and desktop. Native video on mobile is inserted at the heart of the content.

Programmatic video goes premium, and video will lead the way for brand advertising in programmatic. Premium video inventory has a supply constraint, since pre-roll depends on preexisting video content, which most premium publishers have very little of.  With the rise of native video, premium print publishers can now insert video ads in between editorial text content or feeds. This grows premium programmatic video inventory exponentially, which allows publishers to leverage multiple sources of demand beyond direct sales.

A lot of publishers didn’t have video content. We now finally see premium video content at scale. We’ve created the scale -- but still, only 4% of video content is premium. Our technology has made this premium video available at scale, programmatically. This is a game-changer.

Mobile monetization will catch up with mobile traffic growth. Thanks to consumers for being more than willing to watch video on their mobile devices, publishers and advertisers are waking up to the fact that this is a big industry. Mobile has surpassed desktop for content consumption but has always been monetized through display advertising. With the emergence of native advertising and more engaging mobile video formats, the industry can achieve higher yield and derive better value with mobile advertising. 

At Teads in the U.K., mobile video revenue now represents 50% of our total video revenue. In the U.S., it will be close to 40% by the end of Q4. I predict it will be about 60% for us by year-end 2016.

Where the consumer is, is the key. We see 70% of inventory for publishers coming from mobile. We’re turning mobile pages into Web pages. In the end, the web is mobile.

Increased respect for consumers online. The rise of ad blockers signals that consumers have had enough of intrusive, irrelevant advertising. In 2016, we'll see publishers be more strategic with how they approach the consumer experience on their sites. Advertisers will step outside of the box with respect to how they approach advertising creative, and look for new ways to target consumers, ensuring they reach the right audience with the right message.