Posts for 'Advertising'

Here's a good news / bad news story for TV executives closely watching millennials' video consumption habits as a harbinger of what the future may look like. The good news is that, in new research by YuMe and IPG Media Lab, TV shows are still the most popular type of video millennials are watching, cited by 37% of the group.

The bad news however, is that among women 18-24, hours of TV viewing/week was down 10% year-over-year and among men 18-24 it was down 7%. Of note, user-generated content was a close second to TV shows in popularity, cited by 33% of millennials, and ahead of movies (28%), music videos (19%) and news (13%). For low-budget UGC to be vying so closely with expensive TV programming for millennials' attention says a lot about their changing tastes.

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It turns out that football not only drives audience spikes on TV, but also online video advertising and engagement across devices. That's according to Adap.tv which this morning released select data from its video ad marketplace. Adap.tv has found that football has driven an overall 81% increase in video ad opportunities, with a 127% bump in smartphone video ads, 120% on desktops and 22% on tablets. 

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A survey of 150 media buyers by multiscreen advertising provider Mixpo has found that an estimated 22% of ad impression buys in video ads believed to be are fraudulent, with estimated 32% of them not viewable.  

The company said that it’s important for advertisers and agencies to know whether their video ads are viewable and whether it was actual people who generated the view versus bots. Media buyers know that this level of fraud is happening and that it’s an important part of their business. About 89% of those surveyed said that said measuring viewability of ads is a critical requirement and 83% ranked measuring fraud as a critical requirement.

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I'm pleased to present the 201st edition of the VideoNuze podcast with my weekly partner Colin Dixon of nScreenMedia. This week we're joined by special guest Ramesh Sitaraman, professor at University of Massachusetts, Amherst and an Akamai fellow. Ramesh and Akamai's S.S. Krishnan released an academic research paper this week studying the effectiveness of online video advertising (I wrote about it here and Colin here).

In the podcast, Ramesh adds color to his findings. Among other things, he discusses mid-rolls' high completion rates, time-of-day's low impact on completion, geographic viewership differences and abandonment of ads vs. slow-starting content.

Listen in the learn more!

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A new academic research paper on video advertising effectiveness, written in partnership with Akamai, shows among other things that mid-roll video ads have the highest average completion rate at 96.8%, followed by pre-rolls with 74.3% and post-rolls at 44.7%.

Even when controlling for other factors like an ad's length or the video itself, mid-rolls continued to have the highest completion rate. The data underscores the value of an already engaged viewer. The new research aligns with prior research from FreeWheel which also showed mid-rolls with the highest completion rates of 97% for 15-second ads and 91% for 30-second ads.

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Teads.tv, a provider of innovative video ad units, has raised $5.2 million in a Series A round by Partech Venture and Elaia Partners. As I wrote several months ago, Teads' big differentiator is that it enables premium text-based web pages to carry video ads as well. So in other words, rather than a premium publisher having to create expensive video in order to tap into the booming demand for online video ads, it can monetize existing web pages this way. the video ads only become visible when a pre-determined about of content has been consumed. Teads ads can also run in slideshows, music, video and social media.

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Adap.tv and Digiday have released their Q4 2013 state of the video industry survey results, which found strong interest in online and mobile video advertising. In particular, 86% of brands anticipate increasing their online video ad spending in 2014, by an average of 65% vs. what they spent in 2012. In addition, 91% of agencies see an increase averaging 28% vs. 2012 spending.

However, there's disagreement on how these online video ad spending increases will be funded. 42% of  agency and brand executives believe that budgets currently used for out-of-home advertising will be tapped, followed by Search (26%) and broadcast TV (21%). But when brands alone are broken out, 33% said "no other category" (implication is video spending is incremental), with broadcast TV in second (cited by 31%), display (30%) and print (19%). In a sign that plans to poach broadcast TV dollars may be over-estimated, 42% of buyers said there hasn't been any change in their spending on that media.

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In another sign of how TV and online video are continuing to converge, LiveRail is announcing this morning support for TV-style advertising pods in online video streams, using real-time bidding. The new feature means that content providers can programmatically sell and insert multiple ads in a given ad break, increasing monetization opportunities for long-form content absent additional users or viewership.

While preserving a positive user experience is critical, the reality is that as content providers have continued to push long-form programs online, the hunt for additional revenues has only intensified. According to recent research from FreeWheel, long-form ad loads were up 12% in Q2 '13 year-over-year to nearly 12 ads per 20-minute or longer stream. However, the increase doesn't appear to be affecting the viewer experience yet, as completion rates for mid-roll ads (the most likely place to insert ad pods with multiple ads) stood at 97% for 15-second ads and 91% for 30-second ads.

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With 3.7 billion video ads served, the combined AOL-Adap.tv has landed atop comScore's September 2013 U.S. Online Video Rankings. (see chart below) It's the first time that AOL has outranked Google (primarily YouTube), which dropped to second with 3.2 billion video ads served. On its own in August, Adap.tv served over 2.5 billion video ads. AOL-Adap.tv was also tops in total ad minutes in September with over 1.6 billion, followed by BrightRoll with nearly 1.3 billion.

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Ad tech provider Mixpo has hired ad industry veteran and long-time board member Jeff Lanctot as its new CEO. Lanctot takes over the role from co-founder Anupam Gupta who remains on the board. Lanctot was most recently Chief Media Officer at digital agency Razorfish, and previously served as GM and Chief Strategy Officer. Prior he was at aQuantive and Microsoft Advertising.

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The IAB has released its Internet advertising report (based on an industry survey conducted by PwC) for the first months of 2013, revealing a 17.8% increase in total online advertising to $20.7 billion in 1st half 2013. Online video's share was $1.3 billion, up 30% from the $1B it totaled in 1st half 2012.

The 30% growth was the highest of all categories of online advertising except mobile, which grew to $3 billion in 1st half 2013, up a blistering 145% from the 1st half of '12 and almost 4x from the $636 million it generated in 1st half of '11.

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Multiscreen video ad solution provider Mixpo is introducing today VideoVerify, a new video ad verification tool to combat fraud and substantiate video ad quality. VideoVerify assesses, in real-time, the quality of non-premium, long-tail video ad inventory on video ad exchanges. Based on data that VideoVerify provides, media buyers can block suspicious sites, or conversely, increase exposure on well-performing sites.

VideoVerify works by comparing current ad behaviors against a database of benchmarks Mixpo has built from hundreds of billions of video ad impression records over the past few years. The database includes in-stream, in-banner and in-app ad formats. Mixpo noted that this big data analysis has only recently become possible, and is enabled using Amazon's Redshift cloud-based data warehouse service.

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I'm pleased to present the 197th edition of the VideoNuze podcast with my weekly partner Colin Dixon of nScreenMedia. At Advertising Week this week in NYC, the dominant theme I heard about was programmatic video advertising. Though it's an important and growing part of the larger video advertising space, it's still early days, so even the very definition of "programmatic" doesn't seem to have clear consensus.

In this week's podcast I explain the 3 main elements of programmatic as I understand them: automating certain buy/sell processes, using data to improve targeting and optimize yield/ROI, and using dynamic pricing models like real-time bidding. Depending on who you talk to, programmatic can refer to one or more of these elements.

One of the key topics of the week was how programmatic can be used by "premium" video content providers/publishers. In the podcast I also discuss this in-depth. I'm personally continuing to get my head around programmatic, so if I've misstated or mischaracterized anything, let me know and/or leave a comment!

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Jun Group, the incentivized video ad provider, has shared a new infographic with a few interesting nuggets of data, indicating, among other things, that mobile video ads are getting longer and are also more engaging than video ads delivered online. Based on 10.2 million mobile and online video views in Q1 and Q2 2013, Jun Group found that 54% of mobile ads are now 30 seconds, 10% are 60 seconds and a surprising 32% are 90 seconds (personally I'm glad I haven't experienced one of these yet).

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Even as technology-based programmatic video advertising gains momentum, real-world, human relationships are still crucial. That was the message at an innovative event that LiveRail hosted Tuesday afternoon in NYC during Advertising Week. The company, which focuses exclusively on publisher side programmatic video ad management, held a "speed-dating" event to help forge new relationships between buyers and sellers.

I attended part of the event (observing only) and was impressed with the buzz and energy in the room. There were 80+ attendees, including 22 premium publishers, with each having a table-top around the perimeter of the room. Publishers included Conde Nast, ESPN, CBS Interactive, MLB.com, Scripps, Viacom, Univision, BET and others.

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Video ad tech provider Videology is unveiling "Revenue Engine" today, a new product for video publishers to drive premium programmatic ad revenues. Scott Ferber, Videology's chairman and CEO, told me last week that although the vast majority of Videology's business is servicing the demand side (agencies and advertisers), it is expanding its supply side technology offerings to help video publishers gain equal footing in the booming online video ad market.

In our discussion Scott emphasized one particular feature of Revenue Engine - the ability for publishers to do scenario modeling of different variables in order to gain recommendations for optimal inventory pricing. The system works by including available inventory, prior performance data, buy-side criteria and other factors such as minimum pricing requirements.

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AOL held its first "Programmatic Upfront" tonight, bringing together a packed house of agencies and brands to hear multiple executives and guest speakers pound home a double message that data and automation are poised to revolutionize advertising, just as they have done on Wall Street. From a purely news standpoint, AOL announced 3 specific things:

1. Clients will be able to buy reserved premium AOL inventory programmatically through the company's AdLearn Open Platform (AOP) beginning January 1, 2014.

2. Major agencies including Accuen, Amnet, Havas Media, Horizon Media and Magna Global have all made programmatic commitments for 2014 (sizes not disclosed), with DigitasLBi, Razorfish and VivaKi considering.

3. New features in AOP including real-time bidding through private marketplaces, cross-screen inventory buying with frequency and optimization, and availability of all ad units for programmatic buying.

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Jivox has announced that its interactive video ad platform Jivox IQ now supports content marketing and data driven feeds, both of which can dynamically update ads in real-time. As Diaz Nesamoney explained to me, both are meant to deliver ads that are more timely and relevant to users, across different ad formats and on multiple devices.

Diaz noted that content marketing, which has become a huge industry theme, blurs the line between ads and editorial. With Jivox's new content marketing features, advertisers are able to update their ads/content continuously while their campaigns are underway. The benefit is that ads can change without the traditional step of changing tags. These updated content streams work in 45+ different ad units, such as pre-rolls, display, mobile, etc. 

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SpotXchange has announced its publisher-side programmatic video ad platform today. Mike Shehan, SpotXchange's CEO told me that key differentiators are strong transparency, improved yield management and deal management controls. Mike said that video syndicator NDN (#6 ranked property by comScore in July) has been using the platform exclusively since the summer and has seen a big boost in its yields.

With the SpotXchange platform, publishers are able to expose and manage select inventory to all demand-side sources such as ad networks, demand side platforms (DSPs), agency trading desks and the SpotXchange marketplace. Mike said numerous features are aimed at alleviating publishers' traditional concerns that programmatic creates possible channel conflict with direct sales efforts.

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Startup BrandAds is announcing availability of its BrandAds Bridge product this morning, aiming to provide universal, real-time video advertising analytics. As Avi Brown, co-founder and CEO of BrandAds told me last week, the company is looking to solve the problem of ad buyers having to use multiple analytics solutions, with each one tied to a particular ad buying platform. Ultimately these need to be synched up in order for a buyer to understand a campaign's total results.

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