Last year, Hulu began asking a different question – what if it served an ad when viewers stopped watching?

In January, it launched a new ad format, “Pause Ad“, and the first results from tests with Coca-Cola and P&G’s Charmin toilet paper are in…

“We’ve seen a 68% increase in brand lift associated with those campaigns, which is 5X the industry benchmark for similar types of ad executions,” says Jeremy Helfand, the long-time Adobe exec who has been Hulu’s VP of ad platforms since 2018, in this video interview with Beet.TV.

For Hulu, the launch was about embracing under-exploited behavior already evident on the platform.

“Our viewers at Hulu pause on content over 30 million times a day,” Helfand says. “If they’re pausing in order to get up to go to the bathroom or to answer the phone or get something to drink out of the refrigerator, we think that that’s a much better opportunity to introduce a brand message in an advertisement as opposed to stopping their content storytelling experience and introducing an ad.”

In other words, if you are leaving Modern Family for the bathroom, you may be primed to know about toilet paper. If you are pausing Futurama to head to the fridge, have you considered a soda?

“If they’re not using it in order to scrub forward or backwards on the content, we then will introduce the pause ad,” Helfand says. “The pause ad is an overlay that sits over top of the content so it’s translucent and you still see the content behind you

“It’ll persist on the screen with some sort of catchy, great visual and message, and it’ll stay there until the viewer returns to wanting to watch content again.

“Viewers love it because it’s not disruptive to their storytelling experience. It’s relevant to the situation that they’re in, and they really appreciate the fact that we have used a unique way to help connect them with a brand without disrupting the storytelling experience and the journey that they’re having with the content.”

For Helfand, Pause Ad is one expression of Hulu’s goal to deliver “viewer-first advertising”.

The company has reduced ad load and has radically capped the frequency with which viewers are exposed to brands, doubling the variety of ads they see per hour of content.

This video is from a series leading up to, and covering, the Xandr Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara.  This Beet.TV series is sponsored by Xandr.   Please visit this page to find more videos from the series. 

With almost 25% of its content viewed “in some sort of binge mode,” meaning three or more episodes at a given time, “There’s a tremendous opportunity to help brands align their messaging with the experience that the viewer’s having,” Helfand says. The new binge advertising experience “rewards the viewer for this natural experience, this natural behavior that’s how happening in streaming television.”

The binge advertising experience format will be beta tested in the third quarter and be fully available by the end of 2019, according to Helfand.

Among other new offerings, Hulu, which claims to have the lightest ad load in TV, will be instituting a daily frequency cap of four ads per day. It’s in addition to Hulu’s hourly frequency cap of two ads per 60 minutes of content.

“We know a number of our viewers are watching several hours of TV in a given day, and so adding this frequency management capability allows us to deliver a better overall experience for the viewer and a better ROI for the brand,” says Helfand.

At its presentation at The Hulu Theater at Madison Square Garden in Manhattan, Hulu said it has increased its total customer base to more than 28 million, with 26.8 million monthly paid subscribers and 1.3 million promotional accounts.

Hulu continues to fine-tune its various ad format offerings, which Helfand groups into four areas:

Transactional: Wherein viewers can interact with ads “while minimizing the intrusion to the storytelling journey.” With single click of remote, viewers can opt to have a second-screen experience with an advertiser.

Choice-Based: This gives viewers an opportunity to choose the type of advertising “or the journey they’re taking with an advertiser.”

Integrated Storytelling: To better co-mingle brands with content, one option is product placement “or it could be something like allowing the brand to be part of the overall content journey that’s happening while the viewer is watching.”

Situational: “It’s the idea that there are natural behaviors that are happening in streaming television today that represent a tremendous opportunity for the brand to really align their message with the behavior that’s happening. Binge is a great example of that.” Another example is Hulu’s “pause ad” that debuted in early 2019.

On the content side, Hulu announced that Marvel Television will bring two new live-action series to Hulu. Marvel’s Ghost Rider and Marvel’s Helstrom will debut on Hulu in 2020. Along with other partnerships and programs, Hulu will partner with Vox Media Studios, David Chang’s Majordomo Media and Chrissy Teigen’s Suit & Thai Productions to develop and produce a slate of premium food-centric programming.

“Monetization is certainly front and center,” Jeremy Helfand, VP, M&E Industry Solutions, Adobe, and VP, Adobe Primetime, says in this interview with Beet.TV at the annual NAB Show.

He likens the shift in focus from audience fragmentation to broadcasters exercising a new muscle. “They need to think more like retailers, understanding who their audiences are,” says Helfand.

This involves having a business model that supports advertising not only of a digital nature but “converged advertising across both linear and digital,” he adds.

With the recent addition of video demand-side platform TubeMogul to its various cloud offerings, Adobe is looking to connect the buy and sell sides for “a common definition of audience to increase the value of advertising,” regardless of what screen it’s delivered to.

More recently, Adobe and video monetization technology and services provider Ooyala formed a partnership that will enable Ooyala to “leverage the playback and ad insertion capabilities of Adobe Primetime to help enhance their suite of products,” Helfand explains.

“Pairing our IVP solutions with Adobe gives even more insight into analytics and measurement, building common data sets across every function of video all with a single goal. To grow your business,” Ooyala Co-founder and SVP of Products and Solutions, Belsasar Lepe, said in a statement announcing the partnership.

Adobe’s latest report on digital video shows that “TV everywhere” has doubled in size over the last two years. “What’s really interesting is as we watch consumption of that content, TV is coming back into the living room,” Hefland says.

The highest concentration of daytime consumption is happening on mobile devices, but from 4-9 p.m. connected TV devices are dominant, according to the Adobe report.

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the 2017 NAB Show in Las Vegas. The series is sponsored by Ooyala. For more coverage of NAB, please visit this page.

With consumption rising, Adobe Primetime has extended its services to broadcasters to include a range of advertising optimization solutions including the one recently announced with Videology.  Personalization has become increasingly important and that has lead to an integration with the Adobe Marketing Cloud, he adds.

We spoke with Helfand last week during International CES.   Beet.TV’s coverage of CES is sponsored by Adobe.

That includes higher speed video starts, which means videos are launching four times faster. “We want to make sure consumers can engage with content and that Primetime is delivering the most efficient delivery playback,” he tells us. In addition, Adobe can now authenticate two million users per minute. “If users want to tune into a sporting event of a premiere of episodic content, we can deliver that very effectively and reliably,” Helfand says. “Over the top services are growing in popularity and services like HBO are pushing the innovation and experience for viewers,” he says. The benefit of those positive experiences in streaming is that it lifts the industry. Media companies like Sony and MLB are also moving the industry forward in over-the-top, he adds.

Over-the-top also got a boost from CBS’ expansion of its streaming service.

We interviewed Helfand at the NAB Show. Beet.TV’s coverage of the show was sponsored by Akamai.  Please find more coverage from Las Vegas here.

“Being able to provide dynamic ad insertion and effectively measure that channel is a tremendous opportunity for brands,” he says. That’s why Nielsen and Adobe have paired up on a measurement initiative for digital media content, called Nielsen Digital Content Ratings, slated to launch in 2015.

The cross-platform system marries Nielsen’s census-based data with Adobe’s online TV platform and analytics to create a composite view of audiences across digital devices. “It eliminates a friction point. It allows you to get to new devices quicker and for site-side analytics and measurement for transacting ads in a single measurement capability,” he says.

We interviewed Helfand at the TV of Tomorrow conference in Manhattan last week.

“We saw about a 250% increase in TV Everywhere streams this past quarter over the previous year,” says Adobe’s Primetime VP Jeremy Helfand.

“Live sports has been a catalyst. That type of content has been an inflection point for how consumers should be experiencing television. Sports content grew six-fold this past quarter over the previous year.”

Helfand’s numbers come from Adobe’s US Digital Video Benchmark, which measures TV Everywhere consumption, for 21 2014.

We spoke with him at a the TV of Tomorrow conference.  Disclaimer:  Adobe Primetime sponsored our coverage of the event.

Adobe is teaming with Microsoft Azure to deliver the content.

We recently spoke with Jeremy Helfand, VP for Adobe Primetime, about progress with the Primetime.  We have republished that video today.

The amount of authenticated content grew this year too, increasing by 240% compared to a year ago, due to more apps and more consumer awareness, Helfand says. Tablet viewing too has risen by 150% this year over 2012. Challenges remain and they include making sure programming is available across all platforms, ensuring ease of discovery of content and rolling out dynamic ad insertion broadly, Helfand says. Adobe has been working with Turner to insert ads into live linear content.

For more insight into TV Everywhere’s opportunities and challenges, check out this video interview. We spoke with Helfand in New York at the TVOT conference.