Posts for 'Advertising'

Real-time video ad technology platform LiveRail is unveiling the "Video Brand Safety Alliance" this morning in partnership with AdSafe Media, Affine, comScore validated Campaign Essentials, DoubleVerify, Proximic and TRUSTe. As Mark Trefgarne, LiveRail's CEO and co-founder explained to me last week, the goal of the alliance is to offer advertisers, agencies, publishers and video ad networks a higher degree of insight and safety for their in-stream video ads.

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Adobe is raising the curtain on Project "Primetime" this morning, an integrated video platform positioned to be a single workflow for premium video providers deploying across multiple devices. Primetime combines Adobe's traditional streaming and publishing technologies with video ad management from Auditiude (acquired last November) and analytics/optimization from Omniture (acquired in Oct. '09). Primetime will rollout throughout 2012, but today Adobe is making available the first piece - "Primetime Highlights," a web-based video clip editor integrated with Auditude so that media companies can quickly create and publish ad-supported clips from live events.

As Ashley Still, Adobe's director of product management, video solutions, explained to me last week, Primetime's key goal is to enable premium video providers to deliver the highest-quality "TV-like" experiences with seamless, dynamic ad insertion into linear/live/on-demand streams on any connected device. Adobe believes that today's content and ad delivery model, which often requires multiple workflows and products to interoperate, will not allow premium online and mobile video to effectively scale and monetize.

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Five of the top 10 online video destinations - AOL, Hulu, Microsoft, Yahoo and YouTube - are joining with ad agency Digitas to launch the first-ever "Digital Content NewFronts" (DCNF). The DCNF's goal is to "shape a new and practical marketplace for connecting the wealth of native digital content with brand marketers and their media and marketing agencies." From April 19th to May 2nd, each of the 6 companies will host a day-long event in NYC showcasing their programming and ad opportunities. The DCNF actually builds on the 1-day NewFront event Digitas has been holding for the last 3 years.

I think the combined approach of the DCNF is the right idea at the right time. Given the wealth of premium original online video that each of the 5 destinations is pursuing - all of which is ad-supported - the DCNF could become an important catalyst in educating advertisers and agencies about these new opportunities and therefore why they should shift some of their spending. As I've recently written, a bevy of Hollywood A-listers and others are getting involved in original online video productions, helping create a "virtuous cycle" of anticipated growth.

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Visible Measures is announcing this morning that the Media Rating Council (MRC), which certifies media measurement services, has accredited a number of the company's metrics, including its "TrueReach Views," a metric that spans paid, owned and earned media. Brian Shin, Visible Measures' founder and CEO, told me last week that it's the first time a metric has been accredited that covers all of the ways a brand's video campaign can now be propagated online.

Brian noted that the accreditation is also unusual for the MRC because it typically audits metrics that are tied to conventional ad serving. Conversely, in the case of TrueReach, MRC took account of social activity for the first time, requiring it to verify that Visible Measures' technology and methodologies accurately reflected viral distribution properly. Brian said that MRC did sample testing and vetted its documentation as part of the accreditation process.

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The tone of last week's Cross-Platform Video Measurement Summit in NYC, was set upfront, as first speaker Patti Wakeling, Unilever's Global Media Insights Director, plainly stated that a "measurement crisis" is upon the research industry. Noting the wide diversity of devices that now deliver video, and rapidly changing consumer behaviors, Ms. Wakeling concluded that "consumers are way ahead of the research community."

These simple truths are no doubt what packed 300+ attendees into the Time Life Auditorium for an afternoon of discussion about how confusing the video landscape has become for traditional TV advertising and what the ecosystem - advertisers, agencies, content providers and measurement service providers - should be doing to address the situation.

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Online video and social media have become Super Bowl advertisers' new best friends, extending the ROI of expensive game buys to new levels. Helping quantify the impact, a new study by Kantar Video reveals that over $11.1 million in "earned media" (essentially incremental free online views) has been generated by all Super Bowl advertisers in the first 3 days following the game, from over 148 million total views. Viewership of this year's Super Bowl ads is up 267% vs. last year.

The top 10 ads alone accounted for $8.6 million of the total, providing an average of $862K in earned media per ad, or about a quarter of the $3.5 million each ad cost to run during the game. Viewership of the top 10 ads for the first 3 days is over 95 million views. Honda's Ferris Bueller spoof, "Matthew's Day Off," has gained the most earned media, approximately $2.3 million, from over 14.7 million online views.

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A+E Networks will use FreeWheel's Monetization Rights Management system to manage video ads running against its content consumed on Apple iOS mobile devices, the companies announced this morning. A+E will be able to deploy video ads on its own mobile properties as well as those of third-party syndication partners. FreeWheel gives A+E the ability to manage ad sales rights, forecast inventory, determine ad loads in specific commercial breaks, and monitor performance, among other things.

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The 2012 presidential election is already in full swing, and in early primary states that's meant a barrage of TV ads from well-funded candidates. But with viewer behaviors shifting away from traditional TV, the Internet has become an increasingly important way of reaching voters. And with online video usage surging, the latest battleground is how to leverage this new medium to their advantage. Enter the new "Jivox Political Ad Kit," an interactive, multi-screen, social media-enabled product from video ad technology provider Jivox.

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There's little subtlety in Adap.tv's current placeholder web site that asks the question, "What does it take to destroy the inefficiencies in TV and video advertising?" Unlike other online video ad technology providers who are positioning themselves to complement the current TV ad buying process, Adap.tv is looking to blow up the traditional approach, replacing it with what CEO/founder Amir Ashkenazi's calls a "programmatic" technology-based alternative. Last week I caught up with Amir to learn more about Adap.tv's mission, and also how it landed as the number 2 video ad provider (just behind Hulu) in comScore's December, '11 ranking, with over 1.1 billion ads served.

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