BrightRoll has released findings from its 3rd annual U.S. ad agency survey, including among other things, that agencies believe targeting is by far the most valuable benefit of online video advertising. Cited by 56% of respondents, targeting alone exceeded all other benefits combined: reach (20%), price relative to TV (8%), other (8%), ad unit format (7%) and ability to reuse creative (2%).

The value placed on targeting aligns with other findings in the survey. For example, part of the story behind online video's improved targeting is based on the use of programmatic buying, which is still nascent in TV, but is growing fast in online video advertising.  Programmatic allows buyers to use data to zero in on their specific desired audiences.

Agencies expressed growing interest in programmatic, with 22% of respondents planning to spend a majority of their online video ad budgets on programmatic in the next 12 months, up from 6% last year, whereas 43% plan to spend the minority of their budgets on programmatic, down from 63% last year.

More tangibly, 2 of the 3 most-cited success metrics for online video advertising were conversion (18%) and brand lift (17%), both of which benefit significantly from improved targeting (the most cited metric was completed views at 20%).

All of this no doubt contributed to a shift in the perception of value of online video vs. TV, with 72% of respondents saying online video advertising is as effective (41%) or more effective than TV ads (31%).  RFPs with a video ad component grew to 48.3% in 2014, up from 38.1% in the prior year.

Looking forward, mobile video is the ad category agencies believe will have the biggest increase in digital ad spending this year, cited by 60% of respondents, followed by desktop video (48%) and programmatic TV (27%). In addition, 79% of respondents said they're very likely or likely to devote a portion of their ad budgets to tablet-based video, up from 68% last year.

The full survey results are available for download here.