• Extreme Reach Updates Positioning as an Enterprise Platform for TV/Video Ad Workflows

    Seeking to build on its market momentum, Extreme Reach is raising its industry profile through an extensive brand refresh and updated positioning as an enterprise solution for TV and video ad workflows. Extreme Reach has long operated relatively quietly, but industry veteran Melinda McLaughlin, who joined the company late last year, is on a mission to educate the industry about the company’s extensive cross-screen capabilities. Melinda brought me up to speed on the brand refresh and positioning last week.

    Like all ad tech providers, Extreme Reach is operating in an environment that is getting increasingly complex for both advertisers and content providers. As Melinda explained, ads that were once made for TV exclusively are now commonly used in online, mobile, social and owned channels as well. Activating and managing a multi-screen campaign has become a massively complicated undertaking for advertisers and agencies that often involves numerous technologies and multiple teams that are rarely fully aligned.

    With all of these inefficiencies, Melinda notes that after an advertiser invests heavily in creating a beautiful ad, it still may not even show up where it’s supposed to, nor at the required time, due to disconnected workflows. And once activated, the ad might run where talent rights aren’t secured or for durations that aren’t well-tracked, in turn risking significant financial penalties.

    Extreme Reach addresses all of these issues with a single cloud platform that ingests ads, provides them to the correct delivery destination, tracks and manages the talent rights, and provides unified analytics through a single dashboard. The idea is to radically simplify how ads are managed, delivered and measured across all screens. Melinda characterized the platform as “technology for real people” with a focus on ease of use and pragmatism. The company’s new logo and tagline of “Altogether Now” are meant to convey speed, savings, harmony and control.


     

    With its enterprise positioning, Extreme Reach is primarily targeting senior executives at advertisers who have oversight of ad operations, procurement, finance and/or workflows. These are people who are likely managing all of the company’s multiple agencies (e.g. creative, media, digital, etc.) and are feeling the pain of an increasingly complex world. Extreme Reach already has over 75K active users, with tens of thousands of video destinations and TV stations receiving ads from among the 2.7 million assets already stored in its library. So, as Melinda noted, it has a very strong track record of success to share with prospects.

    A great example of how Extreme Reach is innovating to streamline cross-screen ad operations is its new “Video Embed Tag” which creates YouTube-style links that enable easy sharing and tracking of video ads stored in the Extreme Reach library on social media and advertisers’ owned sites. Dan Brackett, Extreme Reach’s CTO, told me that the Video Embed Tag builds on the recently-released TRUST Tag that manages talent and rights compliance in ad campaigns. By embedding instead of downloading, all future updates and deactivations happen automatically.

    Melinda observed that media planning is a thousand times harder than it used to be given the fragmentation of audiences and screens. So in order to improve the odds that media plans are executed properly and campaigns achieve their objectives, it is more important than ever that operations be streamlined. This involves a lot of sophisticated, yet easy-to-use technology, which Extreme Reach is focused on delivering to the industry.