Digital advertising spend figures for the UK paint an attractive picture of an industry now worth more than £3 billion. As consumer appetite for video content across multiple devices grows, advertisers are showing mounting confidence in online video as an advertising medium. What’s more, as TV budgets increasingly shift to digital – or take a more integrated TV/digital approach – there’s never been a greater opportunity for brands to reach the right audience with every ad campaign.

Yet, in reality, how and where consumers watch video is evolving faster than the way we buy and sell advertising today. Undoubtedly we’ve made great strides this year in building compelling audience verification. New measurement standards (the likes of Nielsen’s Online Campaign Ratings (OCR) and comScore vCE) are starting to change the way video advertising is traded, by enabling buyers to pay only for ads served to their target audience, across both TV and digital. We can safely expect to see these movements in the US make an impact this side of the pond.

However, the market stands at a crossroads. The maturity of the video-on-demand (VOD) market, and this shift in budget to digital, means we’ve reached a point where the advertising industry simply has to up its game when it comes to quality. Only guarantees of premium quality inventory will give brands the confidence to commit more of their TV ad budgets to digital.

So, if 2013 has been the year of audience verification, what’s the pressing focus as we move into the New Year? In a word: context. Key to securing that all-important quality is, not only securing the right audience, but equally, it’s about securing the context in which premium advertising is placed. An environment that complements the content, look and feel of an ad is crucial for making campaigns more valuable. Video has the unique capacity for bringing together compelling content and advertising, creating a symbiosis that enables one to reinforce and enrich the other.

That’s why getting context right is so important. While the vast majority of inventory accessible via programmatic buying does not does not always guarantee premium inventory, contextual advertising combined with audience targeting, takes the efficiencies of programmatic buying and merges it with the appropriate content and media in which an ad will sit. The emergence of sophisticated targeting tools means that advertisers are able to purchase environments that correspond to their ad messages, ensuring they’re appearing in the relevant page, player, and positioning.

As Christmas looms ever closer, we’re entering the time of year when everyone’s vying for the same premium inventory. Buyers are constrained by time and supply, and it’s tempting for less scrupulous players to throw in non-premium sites when inventory is scarce. It’s a prime example of a situation where ads get placed in the wrong environment – and we can’t afford for it to happen.

That’s why it’s so important that the industry protects brands by opening up more strategic partnerships, which enable them to have far greater involvement in the purchase of media; in securing the right words, visuals and context to enrich their ad campaigns. Powerful data can be mined to understand the performance and effectiveness of ads. Just as important as the enabling tools, however, is the collaboration between ad technology companies and brands to derive the greatest value and understanding from that data.

The growth in the online video market will increasingly be delivered by those players who can address the need for contextual targeting combined with audiences, and who can best utilise it to instil confidence in brands looking to complement their linear TV strategies with online video.

Ultimately, it’s an issue of control. It’s not just the big brand advertisers; even the smallest players in the ecosystem want assurances over the environment (and increasingly the actual video content) their campaigns appear within – and rightly so. By adding smarter contextual targeting tools to the mix, it creates greater transparency within the industry. In the context of providing reassurances around shifting TV budgets to digital, that can only be a good thing.