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Heavy Plans Big Push for Husky Ad Platform
(Note: This is the second in a series of posts with companies participating in the 2008 Media Summit, a premier industry event which will be held next week in NYC. VideoNuze has partnered with Digital Hollywood, the Media Summit's organizer, to provide select analysis and news coverage.)
Heavy Corporation, which operates Heavy.com, one of the most popular independent broadband video destinations for 18-34 males, is poised to make a push into the ad platform/network business through its
Husky Media unit. I spoke to Eric Hadley, Heavy's chief marketing officer yesterday who filled me in on their plans.The Husky platform is currently used today by Heavy.com. If you go to the site, you'll see how it operates, showing just one ad with the video selected. As Eric explains, the video is wrapped in the advertiser's skin, so upon starting the video player exposes a big interstitial ad for 2 1/2 second that sort of feels like "barn doors" before opening to the video itself. Then when the video plays, display ads surround the content. Additional related content is queued up and automatically starts playing subsequently. This approach has resulted in a 270% lift in videos viewed as compared with the pre-queuing implementation. This of course means more video usage and more advertising exposure.
Eric believes that this video presentation/ad format is unique in the industry (I agree, I haven't seen anything else like it), and goes straight to the biggest question in the industry: how are people actually going to make money from their broadband video content, especially original creations. Husky aims to combine the best of pre/mid-roll ads with the best of display.Eric said that advertiser enthusiasm for the Husky presentation has prompted Heavy to now offer it to other publishers who target demos other than Heavy.com's 18-34 males. It's still early days, but Eric said that in the next few weeks several major publishers will be launching Husky implementations, as will small-to-medium sized sites. This will form the beginnings of an ad network Heavy can assemble and offer to advertisers. By evolving Husky's focus from internal-only use to external use as well, Heavy will be competing with broadband ad players such as Tremor, Broadband Enterprises and others. The Husky move shows how dynamic the broadband video ad space is, with multiple kinds of formats and implementations being tested and used by content providers seeking to maximize monetization.
Meanwhile Heavy is continuing to build out its Heavy.com destination site, which currently receives 17M+ visitors/mo. Key upcoming focuses are music/urban, cars and racing, sports and travel categories. These are all the purview of the Heavy's recently added head of programming, Jimmy Jellinek, former editor at Maxim. Content sourcing is varied, with Heavy.com producing some of its own, producing some for its advertisers and also some it obtaining some from others, such as Transworld. In the U.S. today, Heavy does not syndicate its programming to others sites, which is a somewhat contrarian position vs. other content providers who are syndicating widely.
Looking ahead to the Media Summit, Eric plans to explain more about the upcoming Husky push and how content providers and advertisers can benefit from it. He also sees the Media Summit as an ideal forum to learn from others what's making a difference in the industry and what's hot.
Categories: Advertising, Indie Video, Technology
Topics: Heavy, Husky Media
