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Controversy and confusion - two words that describe native video advertising. It may be one of the industry’s latest emerging ad formats, but brands, advertisers, media executives and even the Federal Trade Commission have been in advertising purgatory over it - questioning whether native video is a real form of advertising or a publisher trick to make consumers believe an ad is actually editorial content. Couple this with the debate over the high price tag, and the looming question remains: “Is native video advertising worth investing in?”  

The answer is yes, and this article will explore why.

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We’ve all heard the adage: if content is King, then distribution is King Kong.  For years, distribution and content have been the King and King Kong of advertising: the synergistic, dynamic duo that owned the consumer relationship. But, with Verizon’s purchase of AOL and other recent industry moves, King and King Kong are joining forces with new and powerful allies.

It used to be that creators of content, such as television networks, owned the consumer relationship. Back in the day, brands looked chiefly to the television advertising upfront presentations for the demographic info they desired to drive brand awareness. Consumer focus groups filled in the rest of puzzle.

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More than two years ago, Ooyala wrote an article entitled “It’s High Time We F**ked With the Magic,” which called for the advertising industry to align behind a standard for online GRP measurement. (The article’s title refers to an oft-told industry story in which a media company exec accuses a Google exec of “f**ing with the magic” by making it easier for marketers to track their online ad spend.) Nearly thirty months later, we’ve seen some advances on the standards front, but we’re still asking the industry to dispense with the magic in measurement.

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Despite all the advances in online video in recent years, which have been wide-ranging across technologies, business models and consumption habits, most publishers' approach to mobile video continues to fail. While many feel that 2015 is the year of digital video, the industry won't have truly arrived until we're able to solve our mobile problem, and several other lingering challenges.
 
These challenges were discussed last month in JW Player's second annual JW INSIGHTS conference, which brought together video experts, influencers and partners from a cross-section of companies including Google, Popsugar and Verizon to discuss the state of the online video industry and the factors that are still holding it back from even greater growth.

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Since the MRC released its viewability guidelines just over a year ago, the industry has made significant progress addressing the standard - from display to video and now mobile. But major challenges are still evident and will continue to be until all sides of the industry can agree on a solution. With many advertisers now demanding 100 percent viewability, inconsistent measurement across vendors, and publishers not fully understanding the methodology behind their viewability numbers - whose responsibility is it to finally slay the giant that is viewability?

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Apps are everywhere. Apple's tremendous success with the App Store, quickly followed by Google Play and others, popularized a model that has resulted in apps not just on our phones, but also on game consoles, TVs, watches...even in our cars.

Yet while native mobile apps (in contrast to browser-based web apps) offer a number of advantages to brands as well as consumers, many developers and device makers seem to think the app model can simply be cloned in other industries with the same success.

They are wrong. In fact, I think that our obsession with native apps is holding back widespread OTT adoption - for both brands and consumers. Native Smart TV apps are expensive to build, hard to maintain and represent an investment of time and resources that many content providers are unwilling to tackle.

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Which episode of Game of Thrones are you on?

It's a question that would have barely made sense just a couple years ago. But now, as we take advantage of so many new devices and services for consuming TV, the very way we think about television is changing.

Game of Thrones is one of the most talked about shows on TV at the moment, and some of us are enjoying the beginning of the highly anticipated season 5. (Some of us are still trying to catch up on season 4.) The premiere alone drew 7.9 million viewers, making this the most watched episode of HBO's most watched series ever. But the story isn't just about how many people are watching; it's also about how they are watching. Game of Thrones gives us a great snapshot of the change in the way people watch TV.

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There is a tragedy of the commons brewing in the online ecosystem. While online consumers dislike online ads enough to deploy ad blockers at an exponential rate, the vast majority of publishers rely on ads to bring content to these same users for free. If ad blocking software adoption continues to grow, what will the true cost be for each party?

We all get it - ads can detract from the user's experience. Tivo and DVRs gave television viewers a way to circumvent advertising through "ad zapping." As consumer behaviors shift to online, ad blockers have now given internet users a similar option. They simply stop requests to specified ad servers or restrict certain page elements from loading onto sites. Unless an ad meets certain criteria or the publisher pays for their site to be "whitelisted," the ad is blocked from the end-user.  This includes pre-roll, mid-rolls, interstitials and any ads that are deemed non-static.

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