Posts for 'Wurl'

This week we’re delighted to interview Wurl’s CEO Ron Gutman who discusses the company’s new AI-powered BrandDiscovery product that allows ads to be aligned with content in real time.

Ron explains the eight key emotional reactions to specific scenes in entertainment programming, and how ads that are consistent with these emotions deliver far higher conversion. He also details the critical role AI plays in enabling improved personalization and targeting. The discussion further demonstrates how units of advertising are going to become ever more valuable as technology enriches them.

Listen to the podcast to learn more (33 minutes, 10 seconds)

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The following video was recorded at VideoNuze’s Connected TV Advertising PREVIEW: 2024 virtual on February 28, 2024.

Why Premium Streaming Video is Increasingly Ad-Supported
All across the streaming landscape, premium video is increasingly supported by advertising, in both free and hybrid subscription services. This session will explore the range of different reasons behind this evolution and what it means for the industry and viewers going forward.

Dave Bernath – VP, Sales & Partnerships, North America, Wurl
Bill Condon – VP, Enterprise Sales & Partnerships, Xumo
Erick Opeka – President and Chief Strategy Officer, Cineverse
Tejas Shah – SVP, Commercial Strategy and Analytics, FilmRise
Jen Soch – Executive Director, Channel Solutions, GroupM
Colin Dixon – Chief Analyst and Founder, nScreenMedia (moderator)

The following video was recorded at VideoNuze’s third annual Connected TV Advertising PREVIEW: 2023 virtual on February 28, 2023.

Is CTV’s Future at the Bottom of the Funnel?
With linear TV’s decline, CTV ad spending has surged as advertisers “follow the eyeballs” in order to achieve their reach and frequency objectives. But rather than CTV being viewed solely as a “top of funnel” branding channel, its biggest opportunity may be as a “full funnel” or even “lower funnel” opportunity. This would unlock performance-oriented advertising budgets that are based on high impact targeting and measurement, much the same as the successful playbook Google has run in search and Facebook has run in social. Learn how and when CTV may evolve into full funnel and what this means for all market participants.

Sean Doherty, Jr. – Co-Founder and COO, Wurl
Eric Smith – US Head of Verticals, Auto, Tech, Gaming & Entertainment, Roku
Jen Soch – Executive Director, Channel Solutions, GroupM
Olga Weinraub – Senior Director, Enterprise Marketing Partnerships, Cox Automotive
Colin Dixon – Chief Analyst and Founder, nScreenMedia (moderator)

Last week brought another step forward in the evolution of streaming and connected TV advertising’s evolution to becoming a full-funnel marketing solution with the launch of Wurl Perform from Wurl, which powers the distribution of 1,200+ streaming channels in 50+ countries. As VideoNuze readers know, I have been steadily beating the drum for how, and why, streaming and CTV advertising need to evolve beyond mainly reach and frequency KPIs, to also enable advertisers to pursue lower-funnel KPIs.

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Wurl’s CEO Sean Doherty explains why he’s super optimistic about ad-supported streaming in a 10-minute video interview below. Wurl powers distribution for almost 900 ad-supported streaming channels, with active users up 45% in Q1 and ad impressions up 428% from Q1 ’20 to Q1 ’21. The company added 30 new employees so far in 2021 and is looking to double its headcount this year.

One of the main reasons Sean is so bullish on streaming is the changing behavior of younger viewers who expect unconstrained access to their chosen content. Traditional TV and advertisers need to be more in synch with these expectations. To break through, AVOD services need to provide compelling content and improve their monetization.

Hear more from Sean at VideoNuze’s CTV Ad Summit virtual on June 9th and 10th, on the session “FAST + AVOD = Big Opportunity,” with A+E Networks, Tubi and Digitas. Registration is complimentary and you can win a Roku TV and Streaming Soundbar.

Watch the interview now!

Last Thursday’s Q4 and 2020 earnings reports from The Trade Desk and Roku provide further evidence of connected TV advertising’s surge and also viewers’ significant adoption of streaming video. Because the two companies are heavily invested in connected TV advertising and provide lots of thoughtful insights on their earnings calls (transcripts here and here), their results and sentiments are valuable in gauging the state of the market. Together they provide a holistic picture of the market since The Trade Desk operates on the demand side and Roku on the supply side (primarily).

For some time, The Trade Desk has talked about the rising importance of CTV advertising on its overall business, which continued this quarter with the pandemic accelerating key trends. Founder and CEO Jeff Green said that advertisers’ CTV spending on the platform more than doubled in 2020 (total spend, including CTV, was $4.2 billion with Q4 revenue up 48% to $320 million). Green said “more than 1,000 brands spend at least $100,000 on CTV on our platform” and that “those brands spending more than $1 million on our platform in 2020 more than doubled from a year ago.”

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Wurl posted record results in 2020, powering free streaming linear TV channels to a variety of popular connected TVs (what Wurl calls its “Wurl Network”). Wurl launched 539 channels in 2020, including 220 in Q4 alone. It now delivers over 700 channels from approximately 150 different content producers and TV networks.

Wurl’s channel model demonstrates that despite all of the attention paid to SVOD viewership (e.g. Netflix, Amazon, Disney+, etc.), consumption isn’t monolithic; in fact viewers often still crave free, lean-back, programmed TV experiences where they can press play once and then sit back and enjoy. Industry analysts have sometimes called these channels “virtual linear” or “free ad-supported TV” (FAST).

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In all the virus craziness of the past few days, I didn’t have an opportunity to share an update on WURL, which last week announced key growth metrics for its first full year of operations. WURL is benefiting from all of the key trends around connected TVs (CTVs), CTV advertising, programmatic, direct-to-consumer and cord-cutting.

WURL offers a solution to ad-supported video providers and producers to efficiently deliver their live, linear and VOD content onto all of the most popular CTV devices. This is critical because, as has been said a million times in recent years, content providers are not technology companies. With the rare exception of behemoths like Netflix, Disney and Amazon, the vast majority of content providers don’t have the specific technology expertise in-house to navigate each CTV device’s detailed specs for stream formats, close captions, metadata and other things.

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Net2TV has announced this morning that its 18 branded OTT programs will be added to ARRIS Market, a platform for cable operators to combine OTT and traditional linear programming. Arris Market was announced this past July, and is powered by Wurl, which offers an API and hosted HTML5 apps. ARRIS has not yet announced any ARRIS Market deployments.

The significance of the news - and the ARRIS' Market initiative in general - is that cable operators are increasingly being presented with options to incorporate access to OTT content into their overall value proposition. This is an opportunity for operators to capitalize on viewers' ongoing shift from linear TV viewing to OTT viewing.

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