VideoNuze Posts

At the Video Ad Summit, Frank Amorese, Media Director, Heineken USA and Dan Kern, SVP/Managing Director, MediaVest shared their insights on how online video and programmatic are changing their marketing mix. Keith Eadie, CMO of TubeMogul moderated.

Heineken is shifting marketing spending to digital channels, especially for its brands that target 21-29 year-olds since they’re watching less TV.  Dan and Frank discuss how they’re using data to drive their spending in video based on both reach and business outcomes.

They measure cost of video on the basis of CPM, viewability, quality of targeting and other factors. Frank also discusses how they’re measuring both sales lift and attribution. Frank and Dan also describe how they’re implementing programmatic, including vendor selection, plus lots more.

Watch the interview now (28 minutes, 40 seconds)

I'm pleased to present the 281st edition of the VideoNuze podcast with my weekly partner Colin Dixon of nScreenMedia.

Earlier this week SNL Kagan released an updated forecast of fee increases for pay-TV operators to carry broadcast and TV networks. Using that data Colin modeled what DirecTV’s programming costs would be and how they would translate into higher subscriber rates and lower margins.

No surprise, Colin’s analysis further highlights how expensive pay-TV is becoming. Colin and I discuss how this directly translates into more cord-cutting and cord-nevering given the range of inexpensive, high-quality OTT options.

All of this is happening against a backdrop of kids abandoning TV altogether. That trend was illustrated by new research from Miner and Co. Studio, which revealed that 57% of parents of kids age 2-12 say their kid prefers a device OTHER than the TV to watch video. Worse, almost half of these parents said sometimes as a punishment they take their kid’s device away and instead make their kid watch TV. We discuss the implications. (make sure to watch Miner’s video interviews too)

Listen in to learn more!

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Neeraj Khemlani, co-president of Hearst Entertainment & Syndication shared his insights on the new video landscape and how to succeed in it during his keynote interview with me at the recent Video Ad Summit. Neeraj has a great perspective on the topic given his role at Hearst and the company’s investments in video leaders like AwesomenessTV, Roku, BuzzFeed, Vice and others.

Neeraj sees this as a time of huge experimentation, with Hearst looking to place bets on brands that will resonate with younger audiences. The key here is for talent to be authentic and build their audiences. When this happens, they’re “earning” their distribution organically, rather than trying to establish it formally as in traditional media distribution models. That’s a huge shift.

Among other topics, Neeraj discusses “CosmoBody,” the company’s new SVOD service and why it’s ad-free, why news is a perfect fit for video and mobile, why having a strong editorial point of view is critical, how Facebook is changing video viewing and lots more.

Watch the interview now (33 minutes, 51 seconds)

One of the highlights of the recent Video Ad Summit was the keynote conversation with David Cohen, Chief Investment Officer at Universal McCann. David is one of the foremost digital thought-leaders in the advertising industry and oversees billions of dollars of client spending.

In the interview with me, David shared his insights across a range of topics, including how the proliferation of platforms and data is driving a much more complicated landscape, exponentially multiplying how to connect with audiences. David sees the big challenge as re-aggregating today’s fragmented audiences so advertisers can deliver messages at scale.

David says there’s no silver bullet for addressing this, but believes data and measurement are the key pathways. With advertisers demanding more flexibility, David sees the TV upfront process as becoming antiquated, with spending shifting to routes that require lower initial commitments and more room to adapt. He says there’s no “must-buy” in TV any longer, with many digital alternatives now available.

In the interview David also touches on video pricing, how measurement challenges are holding back spending, why SVOD is driving declines in linear TV ratings, why pay-TV unbundling is coming, millennials’ expectations, how programmatic is impacting cross-channel video advertising, why lack of premium inventory continues to be a challenge for online video, how UM’s own measurement solution works and how it’s organizing itself to devote more resources to campaign optimization.

We wrap up with David sharing his thoughts on 4 major video providers and what’s ahead in the next 12 months.

Watch the interview now (37 minutes, 45 seconds)

With binge-viewing becoming a mainstream activity, there’s more and more energy being devoted to understanding the behavior and how to profit from it. The latest comes from video optimizer Conviva, which has published a white paper, “Binge Watching: The New Currency of Video Economics,” detailing findings from a survey of 750 binge-viewers between the ages of 25-36.

continue reading on VideoNuze iQ

Mobile video is now up to 42% of all online video viewed and is poised to surpass 50% later this year, making it a top priority for advertisers. So our Video Ad Summit session, “Small Screens, Big Opportunities: Why Mobile Video is Skyrocketing,” was one of the most timely discussions in the day-long program.  

The session explored how mobile video fits with cross-screen strategies, why mobile video durations are shortening, why 15-second ads dominate on mobile but are changing, what role Facebook and Snapchat are playing in mobile video advertising, why there’s more data in mobile video than in desktop video, whether mobile video will move from the horizontal to the vertical format and lots more.   

The session included Mike Berkley (Head of Product, Viacom), Dan Colarusso (Executive Editor, Digital, Reuters), Rachel Pasqua (Head of Mobility, MEC North America), Frank Sinton (CEO, Beachfront Media), with Michael Sebastian (Reporter, AdAge) moderating.

Watch the session video now (30 minutes, 18 seconds)

I'm pleased to present the 280th edition of the VideoNuze podcast with my weekly partner Colin Dixon of nScreenMedia.

First up this week, we discuss binge-viewing’s soaring popularity, most recently illustrated by a new study from TiVo, which found 92% of respondents saying they had binge-viewed at some point. (TiVo defines binge-viewing as watching more than 3 episodes of a series in a day.)

No surprise, Netflix dominates, with 66% of binge-viewers saying they use the service to watch their favorite shows. Interestingly, respondents said that half of their binge-viewing occurs alone, reflecting the broader trend of how personalized and fragmented TV has become given the broad range of options.

Supporting that concept is data from Twitch, the live-streaming gaming site that Amazon acquired, showing that 21 million viewers watched its E3 coverage, more than double the level of 2 years ago. There was a peak of 840K concurrent viewers, 16 times as big as E3’s attendance. The popularity of Twitch, and soon YouTube Gaming which will be huge as well, both illustrate how live-streaming gaming is peeling audiences away from traditional TV viewing.

Listen in to learn more and happy July 4th!

Click here for previous podcasts

Click here to add the podcast feed to your RSS reader.

The VideoNuze podcast is also available in iTunes...subscribe today!