London-based Videoplaza has rolled out "Karbon," its new flagship ad management platform, to serve ads to all imaginable connected and mobile devices. Katy Turner, Videoplaza's VP of Marketing, told me that Karbon is the direct result of broadcast and publishing customers demanding simplified ways of monetizing content on the variety of devices now being used.

Karbon includes The Device Library, with profiles of over 7,000 different devices' supported codecs, bit rates and resolutions and The Asset Factory, which transcodes ads for the requisite devices and delivers them appropriately. The idea is that an ad can be uploaded to Karbon once with target devices selected. The ads are transcoded so that when an ad call is made the device is detected, its profile understood, and the proper ad delivered - all in real-time.

Simplifying the workflow was a major goal of Karbon's development, with Katy noting that many ad ops teams don't have the time to be in the technology weeds. With Karbon, publishers can focus more on monetization: optimizing the ad loads for specific devices depending on user behaviors, targeting specific audiences by device/content and maximizing CPMs. Katy cited French publisher M6 as achieving a 30% improvement in efficiency in its early use of Karbon while reaching all of its targeted devices.

As monetization strategies get increasingly complex, Karbon is meant to be a single workflow and to future-proof for new devices down the road. Continued device proliferation is a fact of life and a headache for everyone in the video ecosystem - advertisers, content providers and distributors. Newly empowered consumers have come to expect a high-quality experience with an appropriate volume of ads depending on the device.