VideoNuze Posts

Taboola, a large content recommendation platform, has acquired ConvertMedia, an outstream video ad provider with $50 million in annual run rate revenue and roots in display advertising. Taboola’s thumbnail recommendations at the end of text articles are found widely on major online publishers’ sites. The company provides 14-15 billion of these recommendations on a daily basis to over 1 billion unique users per month.

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At last month’s Video Ad Summit, Brenley Higgins (Director, US Media, American Express) and Greg Manago (Co-president, Mindshare Content + Entertainment) shared their insights about how audience fragmentation and convergence are changing their media and creative strategies. In the interview I did with them, they shared a number of examples of campaigns that exemplify how they’re leveraging social media generally and Facebook specifically to target audiences and engage them.

Brenley and Greg also explained some of the best practices they’ve learned including how to get viewers’ attention in a limited time window, how to build media plans that blend TV, online video and social, how to optimize talent’s involvement in new and creative ways and the important role that data is playing in influencing creative development.

Overall, it’s a fascinating 30-minute peek behind the curtain of how advertisers and agencies are adapting their strategies to succeed in the multiscreen world.  

Watch the video now (33 minutes, 13 seconds).

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At last month’s Video Ad Summit, VertaMedia’s CEO and co-founder Alex Bornyakov delivered a valuable presentation (slides here) on automated yield optimization through dynamic predictive waterfalls. As Alex pointed out, when publishers seek the highest fill rates for their inventory by adding more ad tags to their waterfalls, significant latency is introduced. This leads to poor user experiences and abandonment.

VertaMedia has pioneered solutions to this by using big data to analyze ad campaigns and streamline and automate waterfalls at the domain level. In his presentation Alex details the issues video publishers face and VertaMedia’s solution.

Watch the video now (8 minutes, 38 seconds).

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Yahoo missed many opportunities over the years, leading to its acquisition today by Verizon, but surely one of the biggest was never creating a distinct identity in video. Back in April, 2014, I highlighted the murkiness of Yahoo’s video strategy, which has only continued to get more confusing since. With major video players like YouTube, Netflix, Facebook, Hulu and others pursuing distinct strategies that deliver specific benefits to users, Yahoo’s “everything but the kitchen sink” approach to video meant it never became truly competitive in any one area.

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Major platforms like YouTube, Facebook and Snapchat offer video content providers opportunities to reach big audiences, but they also create a variety of new risks around loss of business control and monetization. At last month’s Video Ad Summit, Mike Shields from the WSJ moderated a session “Achieving Video Success in the Platform Economy,” which addressed this central tension.

The panel included Stacy Fuller (Head of Content, North America, Havas Media), Paul Kelly (Chief Partnerships Officer, AwesomenessTV), Michael Kuntz (SVP, Digital Revenue, USA TODAY Network) and Jeff Urban (President and Co-founder, Whistle Sports).

Digging into the topic, the group discussed the range of approaches YouTube, Facebook and Snapchat are using with partners and how content providers determine where to allocate their finite resources. One big discussion point was that Facebook does not accept pre-roll ads, so the challenge of making money with Facebook is even steeper. That led to another key topic of what role branded content should play when distributing on the platforms.

With platforms constantly changing their approaches, learning how to work with them is incredibly confusing for video content providers. The session gives a lot of insights into how providers and agencies are navigating this new terrain.

Watch the video now (33 minutes, 3 seconds).

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I'm pleased to present the 332nd edition of the VideoNuze podcast with my weekly partner Colin Dixon of nScreenMedia.

Earlier this week Netflix released its Q2 ’16 results, showing abysmal subscriber growth both domestically and internationally. Netflix largely blamed the downturns on rate increases that kicked in for longer-term subscribers and the media coverage of them.

In today’s podcast, Colin and I dig into what we believe is happening. As we both wrote earlier this week (here and here), competition and market saturation are playing a big role, resulting in much more fragile subscriber retention. Meanwhile Netflix may have miscalculated just how big the international opportunity really is, especially in newer markets. In particular, we’re both mystified how Netflix could have launched in 130 countries in January, and yet seen international subscriber additions decline by 36% year-over-year.

Overall, it’s an incredibly murky picture and the next few quarters will be pivotal in understanding how much growth still lies ahead for Netflix.

Listen now to learn more!

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Looking to capitalize on the growing interest in virtual reality, outstream video ad specialist Teads has introduced inRead 360, a new outstream video ad format offering 360-degree viewing and engagement.

The 360-degree format is meant to give advertisers a more immersive format that also complements premium content. Teads said that users can interact with the inRead 360 ads, viewing the creative from different angles, by moving their mobile device or clicking and dragging when online. 360-degree video, which doesn’t require a special headset, is often characterized as a step toward full virtual reality.

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Everyone knows that video viewing is exploding, but for content publishers and creators, figuring out how to monetize all that usage is an ever-present challenge. This question was the focus of our Video Ad Summit session, “Unlocking Video’s Value in the OTT Era,” which included Jarrod Dicker (Head of Ad Product and Technology, Washington Post), Nathan Guetta (VP, Product and Technology, Conde Nast Entertainment), Shaun Koiner (Chief Product Officer, Perform Media), Brian Rifkin (Co-founder and SVP, Video Sales, JW Player) and Mark Yackanich (CEO, Genesis Media), with Tom Herman (CEO, DashBid) moderating.

The panelists addressed a number of critical issues including how to deliver world-class user experiences that combine both content and advertising, why it’s critical to distribute content to as many places as possible, how to help advertisers capitalize on emerging opportunities like vertical video and other new formats, the role that data is playing in their monetization strategies and what important trends are going to play out over the next year, among other things.

It’s a dynamic discussion with lots of insights for anyone involved with content creation and monetization.

Watch the video now (34 minutes, 52 seconds).

Watch now!