Posts for 'Advertising'

Yesterday, NBCUniversal announced plans to reduce the number of ads in commercial pods by 20% and reduce ad time by 10% across all its networks in prime time. The move will almost certainly meet its goals of creating a better viewer and advertiser experience. But an overarching question is whether it will ultimately benefit NBCUniversal and the broader TV industry? The answer to these questions lie in whether NBCUniversal can make the math work on fewer ads and less ad time.

Obviously it’s a risky move for any business to reduce the quantity of what it sells, betting that customers will be willing to pay more for a scarcer resource. But basic laws of supply and demand are in NBCUniversal’s favor: when supply is reduced, then even at constant demand, prices should rise.

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Pixability has launched a self-service platform for buying video ads across YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. As Pixability’s CTO Andreas Goeldi and Chief Product Officer Alan Beiagi told me in a briefing, the move means that all of the company’s buying tools which have been available only as a managed service to date, will now be available for self-service.

Pixability believes this is the first time ad buyers have had self-service access to buying tools across these major social networks. The initiative comes in response to major agencies being under pressure to provide more value for clients and take more control over the video ad buying process. Pixability unifies buying and reporting across social networks that have their own disparate ways of targeting users.

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JW Player and SpotX recently announced a new header bidding solution to drive improved video ad monetization across JW’s huge base of content publishers. Dubbed “Video Player Bidding,” the solution is meant to radically simplify and accelerate JW publishers’ implementation of header bidding, while exposing their inventory to SpotX’s deep pool of demand sources. I caught up with JW’s co-founder and SVP, Strategic Partnerships Brian Rifkin and SpotX’s CRO Sean Buckley, to learn more.

For those not familiar, header bidding is a way for publishers to increase yield on their ad inventory, by simultaneously accepting bids from various demand sources, with the highest bid winning. The approach contrasts with the traditional “waterfall” model, whereby bids are sequentially evaluated. As programmatic buying has gained in display ads, header bidding has become widely used.

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I’m pleased to present the 408th edition of the VideoNuze podcast, with my weekly partner Colin Dixon of nScreenMedia.

Roku reported a strong Q4 ’17 holiday quarter this week as it continues to transition to an ad-based business model driven off its 19 million+ active users. Roku is in the middle of all of the industry key trends and Colin and I discuss the company’s results and how we see the business going forward.

We then turn to how HBO and Showtime have been revitalized by OTT delivery. 2017 results show how both traditional networks are using direct-to-consumer and new online distribution models to make their programming more easily accessible to viewers and achieve record subscribership. Their success is a textbook example of how OTT is shaking up longstanding industry norms.

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A couple of weeks ago, RhythmOne closed its acquisition of YuMe, one of the original leaders in video advertising. The deal was announced last September and was valued at approximately $185 million. The deal is the latest in a series of mergers and acquisitions consolidating the fragmented video ad tech landscape. To learn more about the deal and RhythmOne’s plans, I interviewed Dan Slivjanovski, ‎Chief Operating Officer.

VideoNuze: Explain what RhythmOne does and why it acquired YuMe

Dan Slivjanovski: RhythmOne connects advertisers to audiences through a combination of differentiated supply, innovative technology and data-driven insights. Our end-to-end platform, called RhythmMax, offers direct, efficient and effective connections, driving ROI for advertisers and publishers. We were founded in 2004, focused primarily on internet video search. In 2007, we became a public company, and are traded on the AIM exchange, or the LSE, in London.

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Roku reported a very strong holiday Q4 ’17 yesterday, with revenue increasing 28% to $188.3 million from $147.3 million in Q4 ’16. Roku turned in its most profitable quarter ever, with net income of $9.5 million, up from $3.4 million a year ago. Active accounts increased 44% to 19.3 million, with streaming hours up 55% to 4.3 billion hours in Q4.

Digging deeper, it’s clear that Roku is continuing its transition to an OTT ad business, built on its installed base of Roku players and Roku TVs. The company’s “Platform revenue” which includes both content distribution and advertising, accounted for $85.4 million, or 45% of total Q4 ’17 revenue, as compared with Q4 ’16 when it was $37.3 million, or 25.3% of revenue. Within Platform revenue, advertising generated 75% of the total, compared to less than two thirds a year ago.

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I’m pleased to present the 407th edition of the VideoNuze podcast, with my weekly partner Colin Dixon of nScreenMedia.

First up this week, Colin explains a very interesting analysis he has done indicating that Netflix viewership may be erasing up to $6 billion in TV ad inventory annually, which could be up to 8% of the market. Colin explains how all the binge-viewing that’s going on is taking time away from ad-supported TV, a trend that is only accelerating.

Part of the TV industry’s solution to this problem is to make ad-supported TV available more inexpensively through so-called “skinny bundles” or “vMVPDs.” One of these, YouTube TV, this week announced it added the Turner networks and plans to raise its rate by $5 per month. We discuss how YouTube TV appears to be gaining momentum and what Google’s long game likely is.

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Video ad tech provider Pixability has announced a new brand safety solution guaranteeing that 100% of an advertiser’s YouTube campaign will be in brand-safe placements. There are two options, DependAbility Premium and DependAbility At Scale, which are both available as part of Pixability’s overall video ad suite. Pixability is providing refunds on any views that happen in non-brand-safe context.

Brand safety has emerged as a huge industry issue over the past year, with YouTube in particular coming under scrutiny. Advertisers are justifiably focused on making sure their ads don’t show up adjacent to controversial content. But managing this has turned into a major challenge.

To learn more about Pixability’s new solution, I interviewed Andreas Goeldi, the company’s chief technology officer. A transcript follows.

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New research from SpotX reveals an expected shift in advertising spending from TV to OTT over the next 2 years. The research was conducted by Kagan among 41 U.S. pay-TV operators, OTT providers, content owner and advertisers. Just 11% of advertisers reported spending 21%-40% of their budgets on OTT today, but that’s expected to rise to 67% doing so in 2 years. Meanwhile, 33% said they currently spend 21%-40% on TV, but that’s expected to drop to 22% in the same time frame.

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Last week, ad tech provider AppNexus shared several examples of customers which are having success with Prebid Video, the company’s video header bidding solution. I caught up with Eric Hoffert, AppNexus's SVP, Video Technology, to learn more about Prebid Video and also what’s ahead for the year in video advertising. (If you want a good primer on header bidding, a few months ago AppNexus released a helpful white paper.)

VideoNuze: AppNexus announced customer momentum with its Prebid Video solution for header bidding. What news did you share?

Eric Hoffert: AppNexus has shared metrics of client success with Prebid Video, built on Prebid.js, the industry’s most widely adopted open source header bidding technology. Premium publishers, including Ranker, FANDOM, and Diply reported increased share of revenue through video header bidding, including eCPMs up to 100% higher than tag-based integrations; ease of integration and extensibility with different video players; advantages of customization with different video ad servers; and optimized national and international video yield. These publishers are all Top 100 web sites in the US (based on Alexa and Quantcast data).

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I’m pleased to present the 404th edition of the VideoNuze podcast, with my weekly partner Colin Dixon of nScreenMedia.

This week we’re joined by Henry Embleton, who is the Head of Ad Products and Revenue at Ellation, which owns the Crunchyroll (focused on anime) and VRV (focused on aggregation and pronounced “verve”) streaming services. Ellation itself is wholly owned by Otter Media, the JV of AT&T and The Chernin Group, as of earlier this week. Together the services have over 2 million registered users.

Henry walks us through how he is optimizing the video ad experience on the services by extensively testing different models. As with all ad-supported services, Henry is looking to balance ad loads with viewing time and satisfaction. He relies on 2 key metrics, Minutes per User and Revenue per Hour to guide the testing.

Henry explains what he’s learned from his testing so far and what he’s still exploring. He also talks about which devices are working best and how all of his work supports the SVOD part of the business. Henry offers a ton of fascinating insights about how online video ad models are working and how to optimize them.

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On two separate sessions at AdExchanger’s Industry Preview conference last week, NBCUniversal’s Chairman, Advertising and Client Partnerships, Linda Yaccarino and CBS’s President and Chief Advertising Revenue Officer Jo Ann Ross made forceful cases that TV is still highly relevant for advertisers and its impact is essential in the overall marketing mix.

It’s no secret that TV networks are fighting a pervasive media narrative that traditional TV viewing is becoming anachronistic for younger audiences in particular, ad-free SVOD viewing is dominating and big digital platforms like Google and Facebook offer improved ROI to advertisers through targeting.

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I’m pleased to present the 403rd edition of the VideoNuze podcast, with my weekly partner Colin Dixon of nScreenMedia.

First up this week Colin shares thoughts on a keynote session from CES he watched featuring Turner’s Chairman and CEO John Martin and Hulu’s CEO Randy Freer. Colin zeros in on the discussion around addressable/targeted ads and how vital they are to profitability and keeping TV competitive with SVOD. Turner has been among the most aggressive TV networks investing in data and segmentation and is clearly urging the industry forward.

We then transition to discussing Facebook’s News Feed algorithm change, which I wrote about earlier this week. Colin and I are struggling with how to synch up the de-prioritization video is now going to receive with CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s repeated assertion that he wants the company to be “video first” in all that they do.

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Activating video ad campaigns continues to be a complex process full of friction that results in many errors and much frustration, according to new research released by video ad workflow platform Extreme Reach and conducted by Advertiser Perceptions. In a survey and follow up interviews with 150 video ad ops professionals at agencies, 3 key pain points emerged: insufficient lead time, lengthy searches for appropriate assets and overwhelming variety of specs/formats required by media plan participants.

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Video ad tech provider SpotX has announced server-side ad insertion interoperability with Amazon Web Services’ Elemental MediaTailor service. This means that content providers which are joint customers of SpotX and AWS Elemental MediaTailor are able to use SpotX’s ad decisioning capabilities to dynamically serve targeted ads, using server-side ad insertion.

With server-side ad insertion (“SSAI”), which is also known as ad stitching, relevant ads are integrated with the content at the server level, providing a better viewer experience as compared with when ads are inserted by the player on the user's device. The latter model often results in buffering as the player transitions between content and ads and vice versa. Buffering is major challenge for content providers because it is the leading cause of abandonment, which in turn diminishes monetization.

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New research from video ad tech provider VideoAmp reveals that advertisers and agencies are bullish on planning and buying ads across linear TV, VOD and online video, but that challenges remain. Fully 85% of buyers believe that TV and online video ads are either somewhat or extremely complementary, something I’ve long-believed.  

66% of buyers said they are already leveraging digital data in their linear TV buys, while 57% said that they are targeting TV viewers across digital screens and devices. Meanwhile 74% cited accuracy in planning and execution across TV and video as benefiting from holistic buying.

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In 2017 Amazon continued launching into new businesses as it leveraged its massive scale and resources to disrupt the status quo. As we look ahead to 2018, online video adverting appears to be yet another juicy opportunity for Amazon to pursue, as all the pieces seem to be falling into place.

As background, Amazon is already investing heavily in ad tech and ad sales staff. Of course, ads and recommendations have long been a part of the Amazon shopping experience, with text and banner ads popping up following searches and on product pages. But video ads give the company a whole new opportunity.

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I'm pleased to present the 400th edition of the VideoNuze podcast with my weekly partner Colin Dixon of nScreenMedia.

In this week’s podcast Colin and I discuss our top 10 online video stories of 2017. It’s been another incredibly busy year with tons of industry innovation and progress. As always, it has been a lot of fun to analyze all of this and report on it. Let us know what you think of our choices, whether you agree or disagree!

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Unless there’s some big news, this will be my last post for 2017.

Happy Holidays to all!