Posts for 'Advertising'

Mobile ad platform AdColony has released results from a number of clients’ recent ad campaigns using its “Instant-Play HD Vertical Video” format. Across the campaigns the format delivered an 89% average video completion rate and a 10% average engagement rate. Clients included UFC, a premium cable TV network, a global consumer tech platform and various Fortune 500 brands. The vertical video ads were inserted across popular mobile apps.

AdColony’s Instant-Play HD format, which is integrated with mobile apps via an SDK, includes a “Dynamic End Card” feature that gives advertisers a way to creatively engage users with a rich experience that includes the ability to swipe, tap, watch, purchase and access more content (samples can be found here).

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Video ad tech provider Eyeview is ramping up its emphasis on addressable TV, hiring former TiVo SVP Brian Katz as its new VP, Advanced TV Insights & Strategy. Katz is charged with helping retail, CPG, auto and travel clients understand how to leverage addressable TV in conjunction with their digital campaigns. Eyeview focuses on outcome-based video marketing, with highly personalized video ads driving purchase conversion.

In an interview, Katz told me that a key part of his role will be removing the complexity of addressable TV advertising for clients and helping to educate them, in order to accelerate spending. Addressable TV has been complicated by fragmentation in the pay-TV space, where addressable set-top boxes have been rolled out at different paces by operators, making it difficult to execute and measure campaigns at scale.

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Showing growing confidence in its ability to deliver more precise ads for clients, NBCUniversal announced this morning that it is committing $1 billion of ad inventory in advance of the upfronts for clients who want to buy targeted ads across NBCUniversal’s portfolio. The move is the latest by TV networks to enable data-driven ad buying in order to better compete with digital behemoths like Google and Facebook which are increasingly pursuing traditional TV ad dollars.

With the move, NBCUniversal is guaranteeing that data-driven campaigns will deliver “precisely defined customers” on its platforms, part of its “Symphony” strategy of tapping into all of its broadcast and cable TV networks, digital properties, distribution partners, theme parks and talent.

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Please save two dates on your 2017 calendars for VideoNuze’s big annual conferences. On Wednesday, June 14th, we’ll be hosting our 7th annual VideoNuze Online Video Advertising Summit at the Westin Times Square in NYC. And Wednesday, November 29th will be our 3rd annual SHIFT // Programmatic Video & TV Advertising Summit, also at the Westin.

Last year, each of these conferences drew 425+ attendees, 50+ speakers and 16-18 sponsors. Over the years they have both become must-attend days with well-curated programs, high-impact executive speakers and extensive networking opportunities.

I’m pleased to share that FreeWheel will be the Title partner for both conferences in 2017. Other industry leaders already on board include Premier partners VertaMedia and Videology, Headline partners Beachfront Media, Cedato, SintecMedia, Smart AdServer and Vemba and Branding partner SpotX. If you’re interesting in partnering, please drop me a note.

The web sites for both conferences will be live soon and lots more information will be coming, so stay tuned.

In addition to our VideoNuze conferences, I’m excited to be producing the 3rd annual NABShow Online Video Conference, in Las Vegas on April 24-25. We have an amazing program planned, including two keynote interviews I’ll be doing, on day 1 with Jim Lanzone, Chief Digital Officer of CBS and Chief Executive Officer of CBS Interactive, and on day 2 with Michael Paull, who was just named CEO of BAMTech and was previously VP, Digital Video at Amazon where he led the Amazon Channels business.

You can save $100 on NABShow Conference FlexPass tickets using the code EP06.

VidMob, whose platform provides clients access to thousands of video post-production professionals, is expanding its scope, announcing this morning that it is launching a self-service ad platform for Snapchat. This means that small-to-medium sized businesses will be able to buy, create and manage video ad campaigns through one interface. To date only larger brands and agencies have been able to buy Snap Ads.

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Mobile video is white hot, and here’s yet another data point illustrating it: 67% of U.S. consumers say they watch mobile video daily, which is almost equal to the 70% of U.S. consumers who say they watch video on their desktop or laptops daily. And 62% of consumers say they plan to watch more online videos in the next 6 months, on whichever device is handiest.

The data comes from AOL’s new 2017 State of the Video Industry Global Research Study, which covered 7 different markets.

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Yesterday Facebook shed more light on its plans to get users to consume a lot more video, by announcing that it will launch a connected TV app soon for Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV and Samsung Smart TV, with others to follow. In addition to the blog post, Facebook’s VP of Partnerships Dan Rose was interviewed at Code Media and provided more details on Facebook’s overall video strategy (see video below).

The connected TV app will allow users to watch videos shared by friends or Pages that they follow, live videos and recommended videos. Perhaps the most interesting use case is watching videos that you saved while scrolling your news feed.

Of course the whole idea of a connected TV app being relevant to Facebook users is predicated on the company’s aggressive push into video. In yesterday’s interview, Rose talked at length about the role of the new “video tab” in the Facebook UI which acts as a central repository for live and on-demand videos, augmenting what is seen when scrolling the News Feed.

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Here’s a great data point highlighting how TV and online video advertising are converging: new data from Videology revealed that in Q4 ’16, 23% of online video ad campaigns utilized TV viewing segments to help target audiences, more than double the 11% rate in Q1 ’16, though slightly down from 27% in Q3 ’16. Once again, the advertiser’s TV schedule was the top TV segment used.

As always, demo (used in 100% of campaigns), geo (85%) and behavioral (54%) were the most used data types for targeting video ads, but the increasing use of TV segments shows how advertisers are looking at video ads more holistically, converging them with TV ads to extend the value and ROI of their overall ad spending.

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I’m pleased to present the 356th edition of the VideoNuze podcast with my weekly partner Colin Dixon of nScreenMedia.

This week we explore the concept of “TV as an app,” which represents a paradigm shift in how TV is accessed by viewers. Of course the rise of Netflix, Amazon, Hulu and others has paved the way for app-based viewing, but an entire TV lineup being delivered via an app to a connected TV device is still a significant change from conventional set-top box-based viewing.

“TV as an app” got a boost this week with Comcast’s beta release of the Xfinity TV app for Roku. I’ve given it an initial try and provide some observations. In addition, Colin was moderating a panel on video apps this week and shares further insights he heard.

We then shift focus to this Sunday’s Super Bowl, which will once again feature multiple free streaming options as well as localized dynamic ad insertion in the streams, which is a first. I’m keeping an eye on the ads to see if they offer any meaningful viewer engagement.

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This Sunday’s Super Bowl will once again be a showcase for great football and for compelling, creative advertising. As always, advertisers will be spending big to be in the game as the rate for a 30-second spot is approximately $5 million. Add in the cost of producing the ad and pre-promoting it, and the Super Bowl is easily the biggest single advertising investment a marketer makes.

While the Super Bowl ads will no doubt entertain and move us, the bigger question is, will they engage us? Will they spur us do something beyond saying “Wow, that was cool!” before we shift our attention to the next ad or back to the game?

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Many analysts will be looking past Facebook’s Q4 ’16 earnings, which will be reported later today, for reassuring signs of how the company will continue its blazing revenue growth in 2017 and beyond. Over the past couple years, there has been no other company (except possibly Google and Apple) that has benefited financially more from the shift to mobile lifestyles.

Facebook’s 1.8 billion monthly active users in Q3  ’16 were 93% mobile. And 97% of the company’s $7 billion in Q3 ’16 revenue, which was up 56% vs. Q3 ’15, was advertising-based. Clearly Facebook has become a mobile advertising machine.

But trees don’t grow to the sky; the number of global mobile users is slowing and Facebook’s ability to include more ads in users’ newsfeeds is reaching its limit. As a result, Facebook has messaged that revenue growth will soften. Clearly Facebook needs a next act, and so over the past 6-9 months Facebook executives, including CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg, have repeatedly signaled that the company intends to be “video-first.”

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I’m pleased to present the 355th edition of the VideoNuze podcast with my weekly partner Colin Dixon of nScreenMedia.

This week we discuss four topics that caught our attention and we wrote about: research from GFK MRI that 30% of U.S. millennials are now “cordless” (here), Netflix’s move into reality TV programming (here); Google enabling YouTube ad targeting based on users’ searches (here) and the new chairman of the FCC, Ajit Pai (here). We dig into all of these topics and discuss their implications.

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Extreme Reach has released a new e-Book, “Video Ad Streaming: A Simple Change that Will Set a New Industry Standard,” highlighting the inefficiencies of current cross-screen video ad fulfillment and urging a modern approach with ad creative centrally managed and accessible.  

The e-Book identifies the core problem of siloed TV and video workflows, which result in TV ads that are widely used online to be duplicated and re-formatted repeatedly. All of this causes major delays in getting the right ad to the right place at the right time.

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Brightcove has published a manifesto highlighting ad-supported online video’s challenging economics and proposing improved viewing experiences, ad optimization and reduced operational complexity as critical solutions. While observing that online video usage has clearly “crossed the chasm” to become a mainstream experience, the manifesto notes that “the extreme concentration of ad dollars among a few mega companies” (citing Morgan Stanley research that 85% of incremental spending goes to Google and Facebook) will ultimately mean fewer content options.

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Last Friday, while most of the world was focused on the presidential inauguration, Google announced that YouTube advertisers will now be able to target their ads based on users’ past Google searches, as well as their demographic information. Depending how this is executed, there could have significant upside to YouTube’s advertisers, further incenting them to shift budgets from TV to YouTube.  

In a blog post, YouTube’s director, product management Diya Jolly provided the example of a user who is searching for winter coats on Google and is then presented with video ads by a particular retailer on YouTube. No doubt we have all had the experience of searching for a product, only to have ads immediately start appearing in web sites we subsequently visit. The same would now happen, but with video ads on YouTube.

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TV advertising is moving the way of online video advertising - with an emphasis on greater data use and audience-based targeting. That’s the conventional wisdom driving huge investments at TV networks. But in a candid panel discussion yesterday at AdExchanger’s Industry Preview, senior TV ad executives raised lots of questions about the extent to which TV will ultimately go the digital route and specifically whether sophisticated data-based targeting will take hold in the TV industry.

The session included Maureen Bosetti, Chief Investment Officer at Initiative, Peter Naylor, SVP, Ad Sales at Hulu, Marianne Gambelli, Chief Investment Officer at Horizon Media and Donna Speciale, President, Turner Ad Sales, with Kelly Liyakasa, Senior Editor at AdExchanger moderating.

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Videology has released its “2017 TV & Video Outlook,” a series of interviews with ad industry executives from AT&T AdWorks, Bell Media, CNN International, comScore, GroupM, LiveRamp, MediaCom, Nielsen, OMG, Oracle, WhiteOps and others. The executives provide their insights and analysis on TV/video ad convergence, programmatic, targeting/data, mobile, measurement, fraud and lots more.

Reading through the interviews, it’s clear the proliferation of viewing devices and fragmentation of audiences are critical market drivers (no surprise!). That makes efficiently targeting specific audiences with ads, using data and automation a big opportunity. But many of the executives are pragmatic about where data-driven targeting currently stands and what still needs to be done. Overall the tone is both optimistic and realistic.

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The application of data and automation by national TV networks to help sell their ad inventory was the topic of one of our afternoon sessions at the SHIFT // Programmatic Video & TV Ad Summit recently. Greg Anderson (Managing Director, Xaxis Media Group, North America), Brett Hurwitz (Business Lead - TV, AOL), Brian Napolitano (VP, Ad Sales, Ovation), Vin Paolozzi (SVP, Innovation, MAGNA), Chris Raleigh (Chief Commercial Officer, Placemedia) and Dan Punt (Managing Director, FTI Consulting) moderating.

The group dug into how programmatic opens up the value of TV ad inventory to new buyers, how new efficiencies are being created, how all of this is affecting organizations on both the buy and sell sides, and how cross-screen measurement and emerging currencies will evolve, among other topics.

Watch the session video