Posts for 'Advertising'

Forrester has updated its forecast for the real-time bidding (RTB) segment of the online video advertising market, calling for a 71% increase in 2013 spending to $686M and another 66% increase in 2014 to $1.14 billion (see chart below). Forrester sees the increase in RTB spending accounting for 44% of the overall growth in online video advertising between 2012 and 2014. The forecast is part of a commissioned report for SpotXchange, available here.

Forrester points to 4 drivers of RTB's rapid growth: more diverse pricing mechanisms that will increase RTB's appeal, especially for premium publishers; greater acceptance of RTB for mid-flight optimization; media buyers' desire to compliment traditional reach and frequency campaigns with targeted, engagement-oriented RTB campaigns; and automated RTB buying (and programmatic in general) that will reduce friction in the complicated online video market.

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A new survey of local TV stations by video marketing platform provider Mixpo has found that between 58%-70% of local TV stations' online tune-in campaign budgets (depending on market size) are allocated to online video ads. Fully 85% of local stations intend to use online video advertising for tune-in campaigns in 2013.

Keeping this in perspective though, online advertising still only represents 14%-24% of local stations' tune-in ad spending, with stalwarts radio and cable still leading. However, online advertising already has strong buy-in from stations, with between 86%-100% reporting that they'll use it in 2013. And online advertising is poised to get a greater share of stations' ad budgets, as between 36%-57% of stations said they intend to increase online ad budgets. Video advertising would be a clear beneficiary of such moves.

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Teads.tv, a French ad tech provider, has an interesting solution to the scarcity of premium video ad inventory: enable premium text-based web pages to carry video ads as well. In-page video ads and rich media units have been around for a while for a similar purpose, but Teads.tv's "InRead" unit is a different approach that I believe nicely balances advertiser concerns about viewability and performance with publisher/user concerns about experience.

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Early bird discounted registration is now open for the VideoNuze 2013 Online Video Advertising Summit on Tuesday, June 4th in NYC. This will be the 3rd VideoNuze Ad Summit; last year, 350+ executives from around the video ecosystem of content providers, agencies, brands, technology companies and others attended.

I'm especially delighted to announce that 13 industry-leading companies are on board as sponsors. These include Premier Partners Adap.TV, Akamai, Auditude (Adobe), TubeMogul, ValueClick and YuMe; Headline Partners Altitude Digital, BlackArrow, Collective, Innovid, LiveRail and Videology, plus Branding Partner EXPO. All of these companies play critical roles in the dynamic online video advertising world and I am incredibly grateful that they've decided to be a part of the Ad Summit.

This year's Ad Summit will occur just after the Digital Content NewFronts and during the traditional TV upfronts. It's a time of year when advertisers and media buyers are scrutinizing their choices and deciding how best to reach their target audiences with tens of billions of dollars of spending. These decisions are more complicated than ever as audiences are fragmenting, content choices proliferating, and viewing devices multiplying. The opportunities to reach and engage audiences are more numerous than ever.

And this is why I believe the Ad Summit is so valuable. It's an immersive day of learning and networking with industry leaders from around the ecosystem. Through a series of presentations, panels, fireside chats and demo's, attendees gain strategic insights, useful data and practical lessons. For anyone who needs to understand the online video ad business and the broader tectonic shifts underway in video, it's a must-attend event.  I'll be sharing more about our amazing group of speakers and sessions in the coming weeks.

I hope to see you on June 4th!

U.K. based online video ad technology provider Videoplaza is unveiling Karbon 2, the next generation of its sell side ad management platform today. In addition, the company is launching Karbon Data Alliance, a network of data partners that enable Videoplaza content publisher customers to better analyze their audiences and create targeted monetizable segments. Karbon Data Alliance includes data management partners Nugg.Ad, Meetrics, Enreach, Eyota, Bluekai and others TBD.

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Late last week, VINDICO, the big online video ad serving company, launched a new product called Adtricity, which is meant to standardize quality rankings for both video advertisers and content publishers. Matt Timothy, VINDICO's president, explained to me his belief that in order for online video advertising to continue scaling, both the buy and the sell sides of the ecosystem need stronger measurement of both viewability and verification.

Matt cites the explosion of ad networks that VINDICO works with, numbering 128 in 2012 (up from 50 in 2010) as a key reason for Adtricity's development. Because networks can be under pressure to deliver on their commitments, this can lead to ad placements that aren't quite what the advertiser thought it was getting, though they still contribute to delivery goals. Matt thinks of Adtricity as turning a "flood light" on the market, which will help all sides achieve better quality.

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Native advertising, which refers to branded content or ad messages that are cohesively integrated directly into web sites, are getting lots of attention these days as an alternative to pre-roll video advertising. A study released by Sharethrough and Nielsen today is putting some brand lift performance numbers behind the debate.

Using Nielsen's Online Brand Effect tool to measure viewer response, the native advertising technology specialist found that five campaigns it studied produced higher brand lift from native advertising exposure than from pre-roll video impressions. In a campaign for the soft drink brand Jarritos, exposure to native ad content elevated favorable brand perceptions by 82%, compared with 2.1% lift among those who saw pre-roll ads. In another for a CPG brand, native ads drove a 42.2% brand lift vs. none for pre-roll ads. (see infographic below)

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I'm pleased to present the 170th edition of the VideoNuze podcast with my weekly partner Colin Dixon of nScreenMedia. First up today, Colin does a little trash talking of Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes. At a Deutsche Bank conference earlier this week, Bewkes said “We don’t think the multichannel bundle is becoming less of a good deal, we think it’s getting to be a better deal and we think it’s getting to be a better deal in the opinion of consumers,” Colin thinks this statement is complete baloney and cites specific research refuting Bewkes' assertions (more detail here).

We then shift gears to talk about online and mobile video advertising. It was a busy week on that front (more of what VideoNuze wrote is here). One that really caught my eye and I wrote about was from Extreme Reach. The company announced an innovative cross-media reporting suite that maps actual TV and online video ad impressions along with conversions. To my knowledge it's the first time such reporting has been possible, enabling buyers to have unprecedented insight into campaign ROI.

Listen in to learn more!

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Another milestone today in advertisers' ongoing quest for clearer insights into how their TV and online video ads perform together: Extreme Reach, a company that until now has mainly focused on distributing TV ad creative to local TV stations, is announcing a suite of cross-media reports that integrate performance metrics from actual TV and online video campaigns. As a result, agencies and advertisers are able to optimize spending in each media and can understand how different permutations of spending and creative drive different results.

As viewers fragment their behavior over connected and mobile devices, the ability to measure ad performance across screens is becoming an increasingly urgent problem for advertisers. Because metrics for online video campaigns are silo'd from TV ad reporting, it is virtually impossible for media buyers to truly understand how the two sets of campaigns worked together.

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TubeMogul announced today that it will be offering real-time buying for mobile video ads on smartphones and tablets across public and private exchanges that generated over 94 million daily streams in February. TubeMogul believes this is the greatest reach of mobile video streams assembled to date, enabling buyers to centrally tap into the exploding world of mobile video usage. Top sites are routinely citing mobile usage as now accounting for between 25-50% of their video streams.

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Innovid has raised an $11 million series C round from existing investors Sequioa Capital, Genesis Partners and T-Ventures, along with new investor Vintage Investment Partners. With the new round, the company has raised $27.6 million to date. Innovid CEO and co-founder Zvika Netter told me the company experienced a very strong Q3 and Q4 in 2012, contributing to 450% year-over-year growth. The new financing will help the company expand its ad platform beyond online, mobile and tablet to also reach connected TVs, game consoles, VOD and broadcast.

Innovid's technology platform allows advertisers to integrate interactive elements into their pre-roll video ads, increasingly the likelihood of engagement and improving ROI. As Innovid's iRoll gallery shows, these can include social sharing, links to mini-sites, special offers/commerce, supplementary content, etc. Interactivity is added to the ads easily through the iRoll Studio. Innovid also offers ad serving and advanced analytics that track exactly how users engage with the interactive elements.

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With more people accessing web content through smartphones and tablets, advertisers want to make sure rich media ads, including video, play nicely across all types of screens. But a survey released today by Jivox shows ad agencies are frustrated with producing rich media ads for an increasingly complex device universe.

Jivox’s Q1 survey of more than 100 ad agencies (e.g. BBDO, Digitas, Mindshare, Starcom, Razorfish, MediaVest and others), released this morning, found 88% of respondents are “somewhat” or “very” stressed about authoring rich media ads that often include video elements. Another 15% don’t even try.

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Please save the date for the 3rd annual VideoNuze Online Video Advertising Summit on Tues., June 4th in NYC.

Once again, the Video Ad Summit will be a high-impact day of learning and networking for executives at brands, agencies, video content providers, technology companies and others in the online video ecosystem. Last year over 350 industry executives attended, with 40+ speakers.

The volume of video coming online these days is unprecedented. Consumers have more content choices and more devices to watch them on than ever - helping drive viewership to record levels. And the reality is that the vast majority of today's online video is free and ad-supported, making it essential that the advertising model continue to develop and mature.

The good news is that there's tons of innovation happening, which is helping accelerate advertisers' online video spending. But huge challenges still remain. And that's where the Video Ad Summit comes in. Through a fast-paced program of thought-leader keynotes, panel discussions, fireside chats, case studies, presentations and demoes, attendees can expect to take away actionable insights and develop new relationships.

If your business's success is tied to the ever-growing influence of online video and online video advertising specifically, the Video Ad Summit will once again be a must-attend event.

Premier sponsors of the Video Ad Summit include Adap.tv, Adobe and TubeMogul, along with Headline sponsors Altitude Digital, Collective, LiveRail and Videology.  Additional sponsorship opportunities are still available. Please contact me to learn more.

Early bird, discounted registration will be available shortly.

upLynk, which provides a single HD adaptive streaming format, has extended its technology solution to also incorporate native video ad insertion. Whereas traditional video ad insertion requires logic in the video player upLynk moves it all to the server. By integrating the ads with the content this way, upLynk is able to deliver a single continuous adaptive stream to the player. By reducing the player's workload, viewers get a smoother, buffer-free video experience. This in turn builds viewer loyalty and view times, which are critical to ad monetization.

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I'm pleased to present the 168th edition of the VideoNuze podcast with my weekly partner Colin Dixon of nScreenMedia. Today we start by discussing Akamai's new Ad Integration Services, which enables cloud-based video ad insertion, in partnership with mDialog.

This approach has multiple benefits including improving the user experience which extends view times. Colin notes that recent data from Conviva, for example, shows that a 1% increase in buffering results in 8 minutes of lost viewing time, which in turn means a loss of 2 ad breaks. Conviva estimates in 2012 this adds up to $2.2 billion in lost ad revenue globally, and by 2017, it could be $20 billion. Clearly improving the viewer experience has a significant payoff.

We then transition to talking about improvements in video discovery. Colin shares takeaways from his interview this week with Jeremy Toeman, CEO of Dijit (Next Guide), which recently acquired Miso. And I share observations on the new web version of Fanhattan, which launched in beta yesterday.

Listen in to learn more!

Click here to listen to the podcast (19 minutes, 50 seconds)

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

In an interview at NATPE, Chase Norlin, CEO of AlphaBird, shared details of how the company helps content providers acquire and monetize audiences. Chase explains that whereas most ad tech companies are focused on the buy side of the advertising equation, AlphaBird is solely focused on the publisher side. Through a series of 5 acquisitions, AlphaBird has built a suite of solutions that span video, search and display (it's most recent acquisition, of Australia's Volt Media, was announced last week).

Chase details the company's thesis that the web is moving from text to rich media to video. However, the biggest challenge that video providers have today is in building their audiences, and then monetizing them. This reflects Chase's belief that video is still in the early days, and he anticipates lots of consolidation down the road. Advertisers will continue to be drawn to online video as it provides an unprecedented level of targeting and ROI.

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In a bid to re-architect and improve upon how online video ads are inserted, this morning Akamai is announcing Ad Integration Services. With Ad Integration Services, online video ads are dynamically inserted in the cloud and delivered using Akamai's Sola Sphere delivery network, eliminating the typical client-side process of the video player calling for the ads.

As Kurt Michel, director of product marketing for media solutions, explained to me last week, the traditional process often diminishes the user experience. That's because the content itself and the ad are competing for last-mile bandwidth as the video player transitions from the former to the latter.  This contention can lead to delays, which in turn leads to viewer abandonment (if you've ever waited for an ad to play you know about this).

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At NATPE, Greg Smith, GM of VideoHub, a unit of Tremor Video, shared observations on the online video advertising market and how VideoHub is differentiating itself. Some of the highlights of what Greg is seeing:

- Segmentation among ad buyers - some that want a full-service model, like the one Tremor Video offers, and some that want a lower-cost, self-service model like what VideoHub offers

- Strong interest in real-time bidding and ongoing desire by publishers and advertisers to figure out how to value inventory

- An explosion in online original video programming that will be monetized through advertising

And more.

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Video ad technology provider Videology has released its Q4 '12 U.S. video infographic, continuing to break down into fine detail which industries are using online video advertising, how/who their campaigns target and performance. The data is based on nearly 2.4 billion video ad impressions Videology served in Q4, and it offers extremely rich insights for anyone looking for a deeper dive into the surging online video ad market.

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FreeWheel has released its full year and Q4 2012 video monetization report, showing that video ad loads and ad completion rates hit their all-time highs since the first report in 2010. From Q4 '11 to Q4 '12, ads per video in long-form content (20+ minutes) were up from 6.92 to 9.4; in mid-form (5-20 minutes) were up from 1.22 to 1.27 and for short-form (under 5 minutes) were up from .54 to .66.

Despite the increase in ad loads, their completion rates were up across the board as well in Q4 '12 vs. a year earlier as well: long-form up from 88% to 93%, mid-form up from 68% to 81% and short-form up from 54% to 68%. (see both charts below) For now at least, consumers continue to show a strong willingness to sit through ads in order to view free, professional content, on which the FreeWheel report is based.

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