VideoNuze Posts

Collective has released its Video Metrics Report 2012, delivering 6 profiles of online video viewers who are female and heavy buyers of certain types of consumer packaged goods. The 6 profiles are for buyers of diet foods, organic products, beauty products, household products, baby care products and carbonated beverages. For each profile, Collective shares index figures for age, income, occupation, product preferences and TV consumption. Collective also offers marketers specific tips for how to reach these 6 profile groups with online video advertising.

Collective generated the profiles by analyzing hundreds of millions of video impressions along with its Audience Cloud profile database and Personifi purchaser data. The insights are valuable for brands that are seeking to reach certain types of potential buyers using online video advertising, in conjunction with TV ads.

HealthiNation, which produces and syndicates health and lifestyle video across multiple platforms, is getting a big boost to its library via an exclusive distribution deal with PumpOne, which has the largest collection of fitness and workout videos and images. PumpOne offers content such as step-by-step workout plans and hour-long exercise classes yoga, bootcamp and other areas.

HealthiNation separately announced that Seth Solomons has joined its board of directors. Solomons is currently Global CEO of CRM365, a CRM agency that's part of Publicis' VivaKi unit, and is also the former global CMO of Digitas.

It's no secret that billions of videos and photos are created and uploaded to sites like YouTube, Vimeo, flickr, Facebook and others every day. The proliferation of digital capture devices and online hosting sites has triggered an explosion of digital creativity. What's been missing however, is an economy around these digital content assets - a simple way for content creators to list and license their videos and photos, with a corresponding mechanism for buyers to discover and buy those they desire. This massive opportunity is what Paya (pronounced "pay-ya"), being introduced today by T3Media, is addressing.

As Craigslist and eBay did mainly for physical goods and services, Paya is trying to put the necessary structure around digital assets to create a thriving marketplace. A couple of weeks ago, T3Media's CEO and Founder Kevin Schaff and VP of Marketing Dan Weiner walked me through how Paya works. I think it's one of the most impressive, well thought out ideas I've seen in a while.

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Video recommendations provider Taboola has announced a $10 million Series C financing this morning led by Marker LLC. With the new round, total capital raised to date is $24 million. Proceeds will be used for international expansion and product development.

Taboola's EngageRank now delivers 500 million recommendations per day to 130 million monthly users for publishers such as WSJ, NY Times, CNN, The Hollywood Reporter, USA Today and others. Monthly users have doubled since last November, when Taboola had 64 million users in the U.S. User growth likely reflects increased penetration with U.S. publishers, and also international growth in countries such as Germany (where Taboola recently announced a deal with OMS, a consortium of 30 newspapers), England, Israel, Brazil, France and Poland.

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Interviewed by the NY Times' Amy Chozick at last week's VideoNuze Online Video Advertising Summit, News Corp.'s Chief Digital Officer Jon Miller summed up his view of the future of TV by saying that "TV is an app." Jon believes that watching programs will become "screen agnostic" with consumers expecting consistency in experience and choices.

That said, Jon doesn't anticipate a proliferation of successful TV apps at the scale of what we've seen in the tablet/smartphone world; rather he envisions a hierarchy of just a few aggregators (e.g. Hulu, Netflix, HBO, etc.) leading the way. He also doesn't envision an a la carte future any time soon. Although consumers say they value lots of choices, Jon points to examples where this actually leads to consumer fatigue.

Watch the interview

While the quantity and quality of mobile apps keeps expanding, there's one corner of the ecosystem that has lagged: high-quality video apps. Once you get beyond apps like HBO Go, Netflix, WatchESPN, Hulu Plus, Xfinity and a handful of others, the choice and quality drops off pretty quickly. That's because great video apps are expensive to build and to maintain, especially since the number of mobile device platforms keeps multiplying.

This is the problem that Beachfront Media, which has built the video aggregator MeFeedia, is trying to solve with a new mobile video app development platform it announced called Beachfront Builder, which launches in private beta next Thursday. With Beachfront Builder, content providers are able to quickly build video apps for iOS, Android and Kindle Fire, with others coming soon.

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One of the things I was listening hard for throughout the sessions at this past Tuesday's VideoNuze Online Video Advertising Summit was whether speakers and attendees believe a convergence is coming between TV advertising and online video advertising models. To date the two have been siloed with different user experiences, back-end technologies, measurement systems (or lack thereof), ad loads, etc. In fact, the most frequent touch point between the two may well be on the creative side, where many of today's pre-roll ads remain re-purposed TV spots.

Yet with premium video proliferating online and connected devices like the iPad, Xbox and Smart TVs driving more consumption of entertainment, the formerly bright line distinguishing a viewer's online video experience from their TV experience is becoming increasingly blurry. For viewers this causes confusion around what degree and type of advertising to expect when they watch. And for content providers it likely means monetization is not being fully optimized across platforms.

At the heart of the issue, I believe, is whether video advertising should continue to be impression-based, as it always has been with TV, or engagement-based, as online has become, primarily due to the rise of search as online's dominant category.

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Today's VideoNuze 2012 Online Video Advertising Summit was a huge success, with hundreds of attendees joining for an immersive day of learning and networking. There are tons of tweets at #VideoAdSummit as well as various posts around the web.

All of the sessions were video-recorded and I'll be posting them in the coming weeks, as they're edited and available. In addition, I'll be posting all of the speakers' presentations. I'm re-grouping on Wednesday and will be begin posting highlights on Thursday.