Posts for 'Advertising'

Brightcove announced this morning that it is acquiring Unicorn Media for approximately $49 million, a savvy move to expand into cloud-based video ad insertion, which is particularly beneficial for mobile devices.

Unicorn has differentiated itself by enabling content providers to dynamically insert ads in the cloud, rather than in the video player. By "stitching" ads in the cloud, Unicorn obviates some of the major issues in video ad insertion today, including delays and buffering caused by the video player switching between content and ad playback. These diminish the user experience, in turn causing abandonment which hurts overall consumption and monetization.

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With the vast majority of online video views free and ad-supported, it's critical that online video advertising continues to grow and mature. At the recent VideoSchmooze event, we had a deep dive session on online video advertising featuring John Nitti, president of activation for ZenithOptimedia (who oversees $10 billion of client spending), Eric Franchi, co-founder of Undertone and Ashley Swartz, CEO and founder of Furious Minds, who moderated.

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Late last week research firm IHS and video ad platform provider Videoplaza released a new report asserting that video content providers need to become "audience architects" - mining their user data to fully capitalize on the shift to programmatic trading of video advertising. The report is based on IHS's forecasts of the Western European video ad business, but many of its conclusions are equally applicable to US-based video content providers.

IHS believes the primary driver of change is the exploding array of video-capable devices, which in Western Europe it forecasts growing from 340 million in 2008 to 1.1 billion in 2017. As video consumption away from TVs increases, and in particular moves to mobile devices, new challenges around limited ad space and lower ad loads have arisen.

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I'm pleased to present the 206th edition of the VideoNuze podcast with my weekly partner Colin Dixon of nScreenMedia.

This week we discuss 3 of our key takeaways from this past Tuesday's VideoSchmooze, which over 230 industry executives attended. The morning was jam-packed with learning and insights, which I'll continue to share in the coming weeks, along with the session videos.

First, Colin shares the observation of Craig Moffett, who was on the opening session, that many content providers are assuming Netflix/other OTT providers are not a substitute for pay-TV over time. Craig believes this is an incorrect assumption and that if content providers come to depend too heavily on digital licensing revenues from Netflix and others, they run the risk of addicting themselves, even if/when their core businesses suffer due to audiences shifting.

Next, on the mobile video session I moderated, Silvia Lovato from PBSKids Digital shared the stunning data point that 75% of its viewership from its 2-5 year-old audience now occurs on mobile devices. I believe this has incredibly profound societal implications 10, 20 and 30 years down the road, as kids learn from the earliest age to expect programming fully on-demand.

Last, we turn to Smart TVs. On the online video advertising session, John Nitti from ZenithOptimedia (who oversees $10 billion of client spending) Eric Franchi from Undertone said Smart TVs are too fragmented to be an appealing environment for advertisers for now. As more online viewing shifts to the big screen, it's imperative that advertising follow, but the separate ecosystems of each Smart TV manufacturer makes it difficult for both developers and advertisers for now. Some form of aggregation/streamlining must occur to create the scale advertising requires.

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New Q3 '13 data from FreeWheel, which was unveiled today at VideoSchmooze, indicates TV Everywhere usage has grown rapidly over the past year.  According to the company's Q3 '13 Video Monetization Report, 14.2% of total ad views in long-form content were delivered via pay-TV operators' authenticated video players, nearly triple their 5% share in Q4 '12.

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Video analytics provider BrandAds has released a survey showing that 60% of advertisers believe they can’t adequately measure the impact of their online video ad campaigns using currently available data and tools.

More than 50% of those surveyed also said that existing online video measurement tools are too expensive and create too much operational overhead. Over 80% said they must wait more than 24 hours before getting campaign data results, making it almost impossible to make real-time changes.

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According to a recently released study by the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) and Nielsen, multi-screen advertising will grow from 20% of advertisers' budgets today to nearly 50% in the next three years. While 48% of respondents said they believe multi-screen campaigns are very important in effectively delivering marketing messages, almost twice as many (88%) believe that these types of campaigns will be very important in three years. 

One of the biggest issues for multi-screen advertising is measurement due to a huge gap between existing measurement approaches and how respondents would prefer to measure integrated multi-screen campaigns. 71% of survey respondents said they use a variety of metrics specific to individual screens, but 73% said they would prefer to use just one set of metrics across all screens.

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The all important holiday shopping season is about to kick off for retailers, and as always, consumers will be deluged with offers. This year, to distinguish its promotions and drive sales, Toys R Us is using a video ad solution dubbed "Black Friday Booster" from video ad tech provider Eyeview to deliver personalized deals to individual customers. On Friday, Oren Harnevo, Eyeview's CEO and co-founder, shared more about Black Friday Booster and how local retailers benefit.

Black Friday Booster builds on Eyeview's core capability of personalizing video ads at scale. To create the Toys R Us campaigns, Eyeview uses 3rd party data from various sources, offline purchase data from providers like Neustar and Datalogix, plus its own local geographic data to configure specific ads for viewers. The ads not only contain the promotional offers, but the specific location of closest store(s). Oren said other retailers will also be using the Black Friday Booster solution this holiday season but he wasn't able to share specific names.

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Here's a good news / bad news story for TV executives closely watching millennials' video consumption habits as a harbinger of what the future may look like. The good news is that, in new research by YuMe and IPG Media Lab, TV shows are still the most popular type of video millennials are watching, cited by 37% of the group.

The bad news however, is that among women 18-24, hours of TV viewing/week was down 10% year-over-year and among men 18-24 it was down 7%. Of note, user-generated content was a close second to TV shows in popularity, cited by 33% of millennials, and ahead of movies (28%), music videos (19%) and news (13%). For low-budget UGC to be vying so closely with expensive TV programming for millennials' attention says a lot about their changing tastes.

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It turns out that football not only drives audience spikes on TV, but also online video advertising and engagement across devices. That's according to Adap.tv which this morning released select data from its video ad marketplace. Adap.tv has found that football has driven an overall 81% increase in video ad opportunities, with a 127% bump in smartphone video ads, 120% on desktops and 22% on tablets. 

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A survey of 150 media buyers by multiscreen advertising provider Mixpo has found that an estimated 22% of ad impression buys in video ads believed to be are fraudulent, with estimated 32% of them not viewable.  

The company said that it’s important for advertisers and agencies to know whether their video ads are viewable and whether it was actual people who generated the view versus bots. Media buyers know that this level of fraud is happening and that it’s an important part of their business. About 89% of those surveyed said that said measuring viewability of ads is a critical requirement and 83% ranked measuring fraud as a critical requirement.

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I'm pleased to present the 201st edition of the VideoNuze podcast with my weekly partner Colin Dixon of nScreenMedia. This week we're joined by special guest Ramesh Sitaraman, professor at University of Massachusetts, Amherst and an Akamai fellow. Ramesh and Akamai's S.S. Krishnan released an academic research paper this week studying the effectiveness of online video advertising (I wrote about it here and Colin here).

In the podcast, Ramesh adds color to his findings. Among other things, he discusses mid-rolls' high completion rates, time-of-day's low impact on completion, geographic viewership differences and abandonment of ads vs. slow-starting content.

Listen in the learn more!

Click here to listen to the podcast (17 minutes, 55 seconds)

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A new academic research paper on video advertising effectiveness, written in partnership with Akamai, shows among other things that mid-roll video ads have the highest average completion rate at 96.8%, followed by pre-rolls with 74.3% and post-rolls at 44.7%.

Even when controlling for other factors like an ad's length or the video itself, mid-rolls continued to have the highest completion rate. The data underscores the value of an already engaged viewer. The new research aligns with prior research from FreeWheel which also showed mid-rolls with the highest completion rates of 97% for 15-second ads and 91% for 30-second ads.

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Teads.tv, a provider of innovative video ad units, has raised $5.2 million in a Series A round by Partech Venture and Elaia Partners. As I wrote several months ago, Teads' big differentiator is that it enables premium text-based web pages to carry video ads as well. So in other words, rather than a premium publisher having to create expensive video in order to tap into the booming demand for online video ads, it can monetize existing web pages this way. the video ads only become visible when a pre-determined about of content has been consumed. Teads ads can also run in slideshows, music, video and social media.

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Adap.tv and Digiday have released their Q4 2013 state of the video industry survey results, which found strong interest in online and mobile video advertising. In particular, 86% of brands anticipate increasing their online video ad spending in 2014, by an average of 65% vs. what they spent in 2012. In addition, 91% of agencies see an increase averaging 28% vs. 2012 spending.

However, there's disagreement on how these online video ad spending increases will be funded. 42% of  agency and brand executives believe that budgets currently used for out-of-home advertising will be tapped, followed by Search (26%) and broadcast TV (21%). But when brands alone are broken out, 33% said "no other category" (implication is video spending is incremental), with broadcast TV in second (cited by 31%), display (30%) and print (19%). In a sign that plans to poach broadcast TV dollars may be over-estimated, 42% of buyers said there hasn't been any change in their spending on that media.

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In another sign of how TV and online video are continuing to converge, LiveRail is announcing this morning support for TV-style advertising pods in online video streams, using real-time bidding. The new feature means that content providers can programmatically sell and insert multiple ads in a given ad break, increasing monetization opportunities for long-form content absent additional users or viewership.

While preserving a positive user experience is critical, the reality is that as content providers have continued to push long-form programs online, the hunt for additional revenues has only intensified. According to recent research from FreeWheel, long-form ad loads were up 12% in Q2 '13 year-over-year to nearly 12 ads per 20-minute or longer stream. However, the increase doesn't appear to be affecting the viewer experience yet, as completion rates for mid-roll ads (the most likely place to insert ad pods with multiple ads) stood at 97% for 15-second ads and 91% for 30-second ads.

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With 3.7 billion video ads served, the combined AOL-Adap.tv has landed atop comScore's September 2013 U.S. Online Video Rankings. (see chart below) It's the first time that AOL has outranked Google (primarily YouTube), which dropped to second with 3.2 billion video ads served. On its own in August, Adap.tv served over 2.5 billion video ads. AOL-Adap.tv was also tops in total ad minutes in September with over 1.6 billion, followed by BrightRoll with nearly 1.3 billion.

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Ad tech provider Mixpo has hired ad industry veteran and long-time board member Jeff Lanctot as its new CEO. Lanctot takes over the role from co-founder Anupam Gupta who remains on the board. Lanctot was most recently Chief Media Officer at digital agency Razorfish, and previously served as GM and Chief Strategy Officer. Prior he was at aQuantive and Microsoft Advertising.

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The IAB has released its Internet advertising report (based on an industry survey conducted by PwC) for the first months of 2013, revealing a 17.8% increase in total online advertising to $20.7 billion in 1st half 2013. Online video's share was $1.3 billion, up 30% from the $1B it totaled in 1st half 2012.

The 30% growth was the highest of all categories of online advertising except mobile, which grew to $3 billion in 1st half 2013, up a blistering 145% from the 1st half of '12 and almost 4x from the $636 million it generated in 1st half of '11.

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Multiscreen video ad solution provider Mixpo is introducing today VideoVerify, a new video ad verification tool to combat fraud and substantiate video ad quality. VideoVerify assesses, in real-time, the quality of non-premium, long-tail video ad inventory on video ad exchanges. Based on data that VideoVerify provides, media buyers can block suspicious sites, or conversely, increase exposure on well-performing sites.

VideoVerify works by comparing current ad behaviors against a database of benchmarks Mixpo has built from hundreds of billions of video ad impression records over the past few years. The database includes in-stream, in-banner and in-app ad formats. Mixpo noted that this big data analysis has only recently become possible, and is enabled using Amazon's Redshift cloud-based data warehouse service.

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