Beachfront Media, which last month announced its Beachfront.iO mobile video ad platform, is introducing a new interactive video unit, enabling features to drive deeper brand engagement (see samples here). Advertisers can select up to 4 different calls to action to add to their pre-roll ad, including Facebook/Twitter links, click-to-call buttons, map-it functions and links to app store for further downloads and others. A "skinned final screen" is also available for enhanced branding.

Frank Sinton, Beachfront's founder and CEO, explained to me last week that the goal is for advertisers to gain a stronger ROI from their mobile video ad spend than a typical pre-roll offers. The interactive video unit is accompanied by metrics such as how, when and where a user engaged with the calls to action. This in turn helps advertisers optimize what types of calls to action to present and when to do so. Enabling the interactive features is done simply by checking boxes and entering click-through information. The interactive video unit is available immediately.

Beachfront.iO itself is intended for mobile video app developers that want to monetize with video advertising, whether or not they use Beachfront Builder, the company's cross-device app building tool. Frank said that although there are other mobile video ad platforms in the market, after extensive testing the company determined that none were truly optimized for a "mobile-first" video experience. Beachfront.iO is built on Google's Go programming language that has been open-sourced.

One of the big innovations of Beachfront.iO is sub-millisecond mediation/ad sourcing, with ad serving in under 300 milliseconds. This contrasts with 3+ second load times the company found with other solutions that sometimes also served Flash and/or HD video ads incompatible with the mobile device. Beachfront.iO ad sources include direct sales, ad networks and its own in-house Beachfront Marketplace. Beachfront.iO delivers ads on iOS, Android, Kindle, mobile web and connected TVs with Windows coming soon.