The startup counts broadcasters and newspapers amongst early adopters on the editorial side. “Their people on the advertising side want access to TouchCast as well because they see the engagement rates that we’re getting,” Schonfeld tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “We’re developing an advertising unit that we call a TouchAd.”
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TouchCast lets video producers embed interactive web elements including images, maps, web pages and other videos inside digital video, each expanding when clicked on by viewers, opening up possibilities for immersive storytelling. Schonfeld has told Beet.TV half of users click on elements in TouchCasts – something which may interest advertisers disappointed at traditional video pre-roll performance.
“People are also using it for corporate training videos – many large corps are interested in TouchCast as an internal communications tools,” Schonfeld added.
]]>Now it is opening up its platform in a bid to recognize the many, many ad tech vendors in the video chain and to ramp up the number of ads it can power.
“The best solution will not come 100% from us,” says CEO Zvika Netter of the revamped Innovid Atom platform. “You can choose your own vendor.
“We’re not saying ‘we’re the best at developing everything’ – were going toward a partnership model. That means realising all our APIs and allowing other vendors to interact with our system. We’re also going open the system potentially to competitors to run their product across the platform.”
Examples include allowing agencies to bring other third-party ad verification platforms to bear on ads served by Innovid. Next up, is integrating cross-platform management tools, Netter says.
Netter was speaking to Beet.TV at the BrightRoll Video Summit. You can find more coverage of the BrightRoll summit here.
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More marketers are taking advantage of interactive video ads. When Innovid launched in 2007, the first brands to jump on board were in automotive and entertainment. “Entertainment brands usually have the assets you want to interact with,” he says. But now, a wider range of marketers are leaning on interactive video spots, such as State Farm, Hilton and Visa. “We are getting more brands [beyond] the common entertainment ones to use it…It all starts from a brand saying, ‘I believe in that, I have a story to tell.'”
Beet.TV spoke to Chalozin in New York at the Beet.TV summit on cross-platform monetization hosted by Starcom MediaVest Group and sponsored by Dailymotion.
]]>It announced IPTV firms Amino and AirTies will adopt Opera’s software on their devices, giving Opera greater traction for its ambitions to break in to interactive TV. And the firm also announced it is basing the latest version of its browser software development kit on Google’s new browser rendering engine.
“We are the first company to launch a commercial-grade product based on the Blink/Chromium SDK,” Opera TV SVP Aneesh Rajaram tells Beet.TV in this video interview at IBC. “We’re the first company to make this in to a TV-grade product.”
For Opera, all this effort taking its traditional desktop and mobile browser to TV is to unleash monetization opportunities through new-wave browser contexts, an app store and its ad platform.
“In the future, we will have the opportunity to recognize what the user is watching,” Rajaram says. “We will know which ad is playing. Since we have the web engine running on the TV, we can serve the ad relevant to when the 30-second spot is playing.”
The effect would be to let viewers hyperlink from the classical 30-second TV ad to a directly related web campaign.
]]>CEO Scott Reese tells Beet.TV in this video interview blurbIQ‘s technology, which adds games and other engagement features in to video ad inventory, plugs in to LiveRail’s video ad management and tracking service, which represents a large number of videos on the web.
“We are able to leverage the inventory that LiveRail represents,” Reese says. “The brand decides they want to behavioral-target certain people – we load up those parameters in to LiveRail, LiveRail hits all the publishers based on those parameters.”
Having introduced interactive engagement to video ads, blurbIQ now wants to do the same for photographs.
“Images are static right now,” Reese adds. “We’ve come up with a technology that allows us to scratch off a static image in editorial content… the consumer can perhaps peel off a dog-ear which unlocks a whole addition layer of interactivity. You can unlock additional images or video that plays within the image.”
Watch the video for more insights.
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“The task for creative teams is to become more involved with the creative upfront so they know there will be different treatments [for digital and TV],” he says. “If you do that from the beginning you aren’t retrofitting interactive assets on top of your TV spots.”
He urges creative teams to view digital video as an interactive medium and to build for that accordingly. “We look at coupling the creative assets with what the media team’s KPIs are to build a product that can support those visions and get the best results for the brand.” If a digital video ad is a repurposed TV spot, it often fares better with interactive elements in it, such as the chance to watch additional videos or longer videos. “The idea is to engage viewers and get them to hang out and learn more about the brand.”
Sanderson was a participant in a panel at Cannes Lion hosted by Tremor Video.
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