The form factor is getting a big boost from brand marketers during the pandemic, says Alison Levin of Roku, VP of Ads & Strategy at Roku in this interview with Beet.TV
She explains that brands are seeking to provide direct feedback on store locations and other personal messaging to their consumers. Sponsorships with give-aways are also becoming popular with brands.
Levin details how the suspension of live sports programming has transitioned many “heavy sports” linear consumer to streaming and how the use of “day parts” is dramatically changing. All this is changing TV buying dynamics.
And she provides an update on the integration with dataxu which Roku acquired last year.
]]>“The pricing for video right now is predominantly CPM,” Tal Chalozin, CEO of Innovid, which helps turn video ad spots in to interactive ad spots, tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “However, a lot of people are now judging this investment by the ROI that they’re getting.”
Chalozin’s company helps introduce clickable, hoverable, swipeable and expandable elements in to video advertising, so that users can dive in to ad content – and advertisers can turn on viewers. In this world, the time viewers spend inside a video is becoming part of the currency.
“On a regular video with no interactive elements on top of it, you can only spend at most 30 seconds,” Chalozin says. “But, f you are Netflix and the consumer is interested in the latest show, you can spend more time. This is the biggest KPI we see brands measuring.”
This video is part of series of Beet videos produced at DMEXCO, presented by FreeWheel. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>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.
The BBC has been using TouchCast on iPad since this summer on a range of stories from Ebola and the Scottish referendum to architecture and cats
“(WSJ) is about to roll out TouchCast on a regular basis,” Schonfeld tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “There’s a talented crew making WSJ interactive videos.
“It’s going to be a completely new form of video for them. They’re being super-creative. Most of their pieces are in the studio. Sarah Murray does stand-ups in the newsroom. They figured out a way to really rapidly do interactive videos about breaking news.”
As well as using its production suite, customers integrate with TouchCast’s player software. Founded a couple of years ago, TouchCast may be geared toward interactive editorial today – but it’s easy to imagine advertisers taking interest, too. “Our engagement is through the roof,” Schonfeld adds. “More than 50% of people who view these TouchCasts are actually clicking on at least one element – that’s unheard of.”
]]>Video ad tech outfit Innovid helps advertisers create video ads with “calls to action”. “You can open a microsite inside the video,” CEO Tal Chalozin tells Beet.TV.
And Chalozin reckons the widgets, bells, whistles and clickable things Innovid embeds inside mere video ads multiply viewer engagement.
“Just regular pre-roll with no interactive elements, the average is sub-1% engagement rates,” he says. “Just by telling the story in a nice, polished way, 3% to 5% of the people will end up click. It gets up to 20%.”
Of those numbers, tablet users display highest engagement rates, whilst connected TV viewers stay watching ads for longer, the Chalozin adds.
Chalozin was interviewed by TouchCast co-founder Erick Schonfield at Beet.TV’s annual executive retreat in Vieques, Puerto Rico.
]]>One easy way to uncover viewability may be for advertisers to use interactive ads that demand engagement, rather than pre-roll ads which are passive, suggests US GM Jim Daily of video and social ad tech firm Ebuzzing.
“The majority of the video dollars are going to pre-roll,” Daily says. “If you give the consumer a op to engage with advertisements, they will or will not. Our clients should only pay for the consumers that say ‘Yes, please advertise to me’. All our ad units are all user-initiated… expand to full-screen.”
Previous research has shown ads engaged with by users yield brand uplift over passive ads.
Ebuzzing was co-founded by French web entrepreneur Pierre Chapaz, who previously sold Kelkoo to Yahoo.
Daily spoke with us at Beet.TV’s executive retreat at Vieques, Puerto Rico.
]]>New York-headquartered Tremor offers advertisers its service that improves short online video pre-roll ads, which typically get shovelled from linear TV ad slots, with interactive rollovers and other enhancements.
“We saw an 8% lift between people who just watch the ad and increase intent to purchase, versus people who watched it and engaged with it,” Tremor’s market strategy head Doron Wesly tells Beet.TV at the Consumer Electronics Show.
Wesly says typical intent to purchase amongst viewers of TV ads for national brands comes in around 2%.
“We want to see if there’s a honeymoon phase or if it’s something we can sustain with technology. So far, it’s been relatively stable,” he adds.
]]>This week, Schonfeld tells Beet.TV the startup has clocked over 100,000 app downloads and is making in-roads in to the education market. Next, however, could be media companies.
“We’re in a pilot right now with a large media company,” Schonfeld says in this video interview. “And (we’re) talking to media companies across the board about how do you introduce this to their newsroom so we see not just consumer, user-generated TouchCasts, which is our entry to the market, but also large media companies creating TouchCasts.”
With TouchCast, text-heavy online news publishers could present a package primarily in video, with web articles zoomed in by touching an embedded page thumbnail. Vice versa, broadcasters could augment their wares with related pages, maps or polls, right in the video player.
For them, such usage could go hand-in-hand with another planned TouchCast development. “We’re working on a PC version which is going to come out later this year,” Schonfeld tells Beet.TV. “That has the same UI and key new features – the ability to import video, multi-camera support and live video streaming right on top of your TouchCast.
“We see that as a tool for media companies and others to produce more robust TouchCasts.” Schonfeld says the outfit will license its authoring tool and player for money.
]]>Consumer research conducted by Millward Brown suggests this can be solved by bolting on interactive online elements over re-purposed TV spots.
“Just the visual presence alone of these interactive elements could increase consumer engagement with a repurposed video, even if they don’t interact with the ad,” the group’s chief analyst Juan Lindstrom told a round-table convened by multi-screen video ad firm YuMe.
Viewers exposed to interactive versions were 11% more likely to take an action on the advertised product than those who saw the TV ad without any bolt-on, research says.
The same pattern goes for when advertisers add interactive visual elements that play over a web page, beyond a video’s window frame, Lindstrom said: “People found them more involving, more unique, more interesting.”
According to YuMe client services VP Travis Hockersmith: “Interactive elements are absolutely a good thing to add across the board – for those who are going to interact and even for those who aren’t.
You can download the research study here. This video is part of a series from YuMe Research Roadshow created by Beet.TV under a sponsorship arrangement.
]]>“Eighty percent of the interactive video being served … is run through our servers… used by our tool, iRoll, which stands for interactive pre-roll,” Netter tells Beet.TV in this video interview. The outfit helps agencies jazz up their pre-roll ads for user engagement and passes them on to big video destinations like YouTube and Hulu.
“Once we established the concept of interactivity within video, which is becoming standard today, we were looking for where is next frontier. Obviously, its multi-screen.”
Netter tells us making video ads interactive for the web is one thing – but ensuring engaging video ads can work across the booming plethora of devices at scale is tricky. “This is becoming very, very fragmented … it’s a lot of execution issues.”
Last week, Innovid and TubeMogul rereleased this report showing consumers claim higher brand awareness, message recall and purchase intent for products marketed using interactive ads compared with standard pre-rolls.
]]>During this nine-minute-long TechTalk session at Cannes Lions presented by Tremor Video, four execs talked about their vision.
Music video and TV commercial director Brad Hasse showed a short he created with Tremor that works seamlessly as both a linear pre-roll and an interactive plaything with multiple forking narratives.
“Ninety-nine percent of the time, companies will come to (Tremor) with a 15-second or 30-second-second pre-roll, hand it to them and say ‘Can you retrofit this and make it interactive?’,” Hasse said.
“The whole point is to get someone to engage longer. With a little bit of foresight, you can have it utilised in more mediums than just one.” Tremor’s senior creative director David Sanderson added: “You don’t have to be tied to the 15- or 30-second spot.”
Brooklyn creative studio m ss ng p eces CEO Ari Kuschnir said the current gap between pre-roll and interaction is too wide: “Right now, people have that choice, five seconds in, to skip the ad – that’s the interactive choice – to not watch it.” Instead, he favours “narrative choice”.
“(In the future), what was the pre-roll of 30 seconds and people are watching five and skipping maybe becomes, after five seconds,you have that first choice – and you see that affected the narrative … and then you find yourself spending two minutes on (the video).”
Advertising groups seem to agree. Starcom Mediavest Group’s experience design president Jonathan Hoffman told the event: “Being able to look for some kind of deeper connection is always where we start. Interactivity, for me, is always built in to experience.”
The session was moderated by Adweek editorial director James Cooper. It was programmed by MediaLink.
Disclaimer: Our coverage of the Tremor Video Tech Talk panel was sponsored by Tremor.
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