But video has become a quest for higher CPMs for many a publishers, and may finally be about to take off, according to startups aiming to help publishers produce clips more easily and cheaply.
Wibbitz is one of several companies using artificial intelligence and natural language processing to summarize publishers’ text stories and automatically produce videos for them using material from agencies like Reuters and Getty.
The aim is to help publishers produce news video to complement their articles.
“Video has become the driver in online monetization,” Zohar Dayan, Wibbitz CEO, tells Beet.TV in this video interview, which was produced and edited manually, by Beet.TV’s very human Andy Plesser. “Publishers are striving to get more of this video content.
“The system brings you at least 85% of the way there, enabling the editor with easy tools, to get that video to the 100% mark.”
What do publishers give up for video produced easier than ever? A share of revenue earned from 15-second pre-roll ads. Publishers including Hearst, Aol, USA Today have come aboard as customers. The likes of Time Inc, Huffington Post, MSN and The Week are using platforms by similar vendors.
In newsrooms, the key change is around who is responsible for making video. “They give the Wibbitz tool to their desk editors and not their video team,” Dayan says.
]]>So far, the tech has revolutionized web ads, next up is video.
“Programmatic has been huge in display, programmatic is a bit different in video,” according to video ad tech vendor Tremor Video’s CEO Bill Day. “There’s more of a balance between the buyer and seller.”
Whilst programmatic grew up in display ads with so-called “real-time bidding”, technology that automates the buying of ads in open networks, in the video world so-called “private marketplaces” are helping both sides constrain and control what they do with each other. But that’s not the rule, Day says.
“Ever”y client will want to leverage multiple toolsets to achieve that campaign,” he says. That’s always been the case on the buy side. The feeling has been that video publishers want private marketplaces.
“We’ve been surprised by the breadth of demand even from bigger-name players for open RTB solutions as well, as part of the mix.”
Day says Tremor will wind up helping clients in over-the-top TV video, VOD and linear TV advertising.
]]>According to the company: “Based on conversations with clients who tested our product over the past few months, we’ve consistently heard our video buying solution achieves greater audience reach at a fraction of the cost of competitors’ solutions. Buyers have shared they’ve experienced:
Speaking to Beet.TV at DMEXCO in Cologne in this video interview, the company’s strategic development VP for EMEA, Nigel Gilbert, said: “We’ve had it in a testing phase, now we’re going to roll it out in a general release for all our clients globally.
“Our origins were in display, but then we released mobile a year or two ago. Video is now in the exact same workflow. You have a fully-scaled buying platform accessing something over 250 billion impressions a year across all three formats.”
Here the company’s product announcement.
This video is part of a series about programmatic video presented by SpotX. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>UK satellite TV platform Sky’s AdSmart technology leverages household data the provider already holds about subscribers, and uses its broadband lines to send customised ads to customers’ TV set-top boxes.
“We are further had in some aspects than other European countries,” according to Mediaocean client services Stuart Smith, whose company helps ad agencies combine data sets to target video ads.
“Sky are leading ahead. They’ve got the set-top boxes, they’ve got the data, they’re doing that right now. It’s brought new advertisers in to TV. There are advertisers in local arts of the UK who wouldn’t necessarily have advertised on television who can now target the remote part of Brighton that buys certain cars.”
Sky spent several years refining its targeting initiative in to AdSmart, but rivals are playing catch-up.
“Other companies such as Virgin, I know they’re doing something but these things take time,” Smith adds. “And then you’ve got ITV, which is a massive part of UK television, where there is no set-top box data.”
here is a need for the UK TV industry to sell programmatically, Smith reckons: “Ninety-six percent of linear TV spots achieve a one or less rating. So there’s room for greater automation.”
This video is part of a series from DMEXCO, presented by Mediaocean. Please visit this page for our other videos.
]]>According to year-over-year changes noted in FreeWheel’s Q2 2015 Video Monetization Report, which is subtitled “The New Primetime is Anytime”, video views were are 25%, whilst video ad views at up 32%. Highlights:
Speaking with Beet.TV in this video interview, FreeWheel’s advisory director Brian Dutt went in to further detail:
This interview is part of a series of videos leading up to the DMEXCO conference in Cologne. The series is presented by 4C Insights + Teletrax.
]]>What is true[X]’s big idea? Rewarding viewers for interacting with good ads by showing them fewer ads overall, says co-founder Joe Marchese, in this video interview with Beet.TV. Marchese is now President, Advanced Advertising at Fox Networks Group
“If, in one session, it could do the work of 20 exposures, why couldn’t we reduce the ad load by 20?,” Marchese says. “Why couldn’t everybody win? Consumers get less ads, publishers get rewarded for quality and advertisers get a return?”
“You could be watching Brooklyn Nine-Nine on Fox.com – you click play and it says ‘we’re going to give you a choice’ – you can actively engage with this ad … when they’re done, they can go back in to the show and watch it without commercials.”
“Ad load” is a thorny question – too many and viewers may switch away, too few and broadcasters may not get their pay day. For Marchese, the answer is simple: “More ads, more avoidance. Every ad model built for the internet is built for tonnage – billions and trillions of impressions. The goal is to generate as many page views as possible, not the longest engagement. There has to be a model that favors quality over quantity.”
The true[X]’s platform now being used by Fox, Viacom, CBS and AT&T.
Marchese’s close relationship with 21 Century Fox’s James Murdoch incoming CEO is discussed in this article by Emily Steel in The New York Times.
Disclosure: true[X] is a sponsor of Beet.TV’s coverage of Cannes Lions.
]]>“Standards like the RTB spec and the exchanges need to wake up start adding more metadata to these requests to enrich that buy for the brand,” according to Coull product VP Nick Forsberg.
His company analyzes videos to deeply understand the content and context contained within their frames, making that information available as more refined data against which to buy video ads.
“A lot of tech vendors in the world doing post- analysis are still very behind in terms of the moment we need to say, ‘Yes it’s okay to show an ad’.”
Coull of Bristol, England, in April unveiled a software development kit allowing mobile publishers to have access to video advertising.
We interviewed him as part of the series The Road to Cannes, our lead-up to the Cannes Lions Festival presented by Coull. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>“We’ve seen … 40% more demand in the UK from Q1 to Q4,” according to video ad tech outfit TubeMogul’s UK MD Nick Reid. “We’ve also seen a 20% increase in CPM prices. Different regions are at different stages of understanding.
“We’re starting to see broadcasters like Channel 4 embrace the concept of automation. They’ve opened up their VOD to to automation – not yet linear but, it is the first iteration of automated trading.”
Reid says different regions around the world are at different stages of understanding when it comes to adopting programmatic automation.
“Programmatic TV won’t be an instant reality in markets like the UK because there are nuances when it comes to broadcast and supply,” he says. “However, broadcasters are starting to embrace the data they have in a way that can enable advertisers to be more specific when it comes to reaching target audiences.”
We interviewed him as part of the series The Road to Cannes, our lead-up to the Cannes Lions Festival presented by Coull. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>“What are the drivers of shareability?,” she says. “Some people think it’s cats, some people think it’s babies. It’s neither of those – it’s about making a really strong emotional connection. The intensity of the emotional connection is key.”
Wood is co-Founder and COO & CMO of Unruly.
Unruly, which publishes the Viral Video Chart, helps advertisers understand how viral video ads are likely to be by using its ShareRank algorithm to predict ideas’ resonance amongst target audiences.
Its programmatic platform, UnrulyX, combines bits of technology from across the ad tech “stack” to help deliver messages.
London-based but now in 15 countries, Unruly expects, in June, to turn on its emotional programmatic targeting capability in the US.
We interviewed Wood last week in Manhattan at the LUMA Partners ad-tech CEO conference.
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Wibbitz ingests client publishers’ news articles, runs artificial intelligence on the text and applies algorithms to produce a shortened summary. From there, the company quickly subs the shortened story out to a network of professional voiceover artists. Minutes later, the publishers get a video back incorporating images and a narrative of their piece, like this one…
To CEO Zohar Dayan, the idea is about helping publishers exploit booming commercial opportunities in video.
“There is a lot of demand from advertisers for video content. The problem is, there is a lack of supply,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview. Producing video content is super-expensive, it’s very heavy on manpower.”
Beet.TV interviewed Dayan last week at the BrightRoll Video Summit in Manhattan.
]]>“A lot of the broadcasters used to have websites as a marketing arm to their core TV business,” according to Lakana‘s president Phillip Hyun. “Now that digital has really become a real viable business, a lot of the marketers are seeing their digital strategies having to be run as real businesses.”
St Paul, Minnesota-based Lakana was formed in April when Nexstar Broadcasting Group merged three of its units – Internet Broadcasting Systems, EndPlay and Inergize Digital – to create a multiplatform company supporting broadcaster efforts.
Hyun says Lakana powers the websites and digital initiatives of around 250 local US TV channels and has a combined audience of 100 to 130 million people. When those channels want to publish thousands of videos each day and breaking news streams, cost can become prohibitive, he says.
We interviewed Hyun at the NAB Show. Beet.TV’s coverage of the show was sponsored by Akamai. Please find more coverage from Las Vegas here.
]]>The outfit has added live capability to its MainStage platform, following a partnership with Nowtilus.
Company sales and marketing SVP Malachi Bierstein says the idea is to reduce complexity in a fragmented world for broadcasters: “It is pretty complex but it doesn’t have to be.
“(Customers) want to be across the breadth of popular connected devices, they want to be able to offer business models like SVOD, EST, TVOD, live linear, ad-supported.”
Clients of London-, LA- and Tokyo-based Saffron include ITV and Sky, KDDI and NBCUniversal.
We interviewed Bierstein at the NAB Show. Beet.TV’s coverage of the show was sponsored by Akamai. Please find more coverage from Las Vegas here.
]]>“DASH is getting more and more attention out in the real world,” Wowza streaming industry evangelist and VP Chris Knowlton tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “We’re seeing more customers asking us about it as a potential replacement for other formats on the market.”
Knowlton says content owners are seeing DASH capabilities like multi-format encryption capability and 4K video support. “Only a few folks have actually deployed it so far. We have a lot of folks testing it for production,” he adds.
Colorado-based Wowza offers a video server called Streaming Engine for live and on-demand playback. At NAB Show, it unveiled cloud-based video streaming software, meaning broadcasters only need to use its remotely-hosted suite, and said features that previously came with a premium add-on fee are now part of Wowza Streaming Engine’s $65 monthly flat fee.
We interviewed Knowlton at the NAB Show. Beet.TV’s coverage of the show was sponsored by Akamai. Please find more coverage from Las Vegas here.
]]>“We have been involved in DASH from the very beginning,” says Iraj Sodagar, a principal chief architect at Microsoft:
Microsoft unveiled Azure Media Player at NAB Show, featuring automatic device detection and player framework selection for streaming fallback.
Sodagar is also president and chairman of the 78-member DASH industry forum.
We interviewed Sodagar at the NAB Show. Beet.TV’s coverage of the show was sponsored by Akamai. Please find more coverage from Las Vegas here.
]]>Azure Media Services is getting a new video player and transcoding that will take place in the cloud.
“(Azure Media Player) does automatic device detection and chooses the right player framework and streaming fallback … to Flash or Silverlight … to ensure that the content is reached across all the devices consumers carry,” Azure Media Services director Sudheer Sirivara tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
“(Live Encoding Preview) enables a citizen journalist, for example, to broadcast a single camera feed from a phone in to the cloud … we do the transcoding in the cloud … and deliver using Azure Media Player.”
Azure Media Services is the brand Microsoft uses for its services covering live online broadcast, on-demand distribution, enterprise video and digital marketing video.
We interviewed Sirivara at the NAB Show. Beet.TV’s coverage of the show was sponsored by Akamai. Please find more coverage from Las Vegas here.
]]>Support for live ad insertion, digital rights management and the HEVC standard was added recently, and European internet TV standard HbbTV just just moved up to version 2.0 on DASH. Iraj Sodagar, president and chairman of the 78-member DASH industry forum, says more is to come.
“Next year, we’re going to have UHD and HDR, higher resolutions, higher frame rate… and DRM is going to be improved … and more audio codecs, like MPEG-H audio or 3D audio codecs.”
Why should companies switch to MPEG-DASH? “They can reach more devices, more customers, at lower cost,” Sodagar says. “Instead of having different solutions from different companies … now different devices can work with different services. It enables companies to deploy video services over the top in a larger scale.”
Sodagar is the Principal Multimedia Architect at Microsoft.
We interviewed Sodagar at the NAB Show. Beet.TV’s coverage of the show was sponsored by Akamai. Please find more coverage from Las Vegas here.
]]>The company is connecting with VideoElephant of Dublin, a library of professionally-produced video material that acts as an archive marketplace, to give publishers material on which they can serve video ads.
VideoElephant’s library of more than 130,000 videos includes material from National Geographic, Meredith, Press Association, ITN and Videojug.
Of course, SpotXchange is not an innocent bystander here. By brokering VideoElephant content to the publishers they serve, it hopes to get to serve more video ads, too.
“We’re giving access to a library of brand-safe premium professionally-produced content,” head of business development and partnerships Brian Cullinane told Beet.TV at the annual Beet Retreat in January.
]]>“The advertiser is competing with the regular newsfeed and the rest of the user-generated newsfeed. It remains a challenging environment,” GroupM chief digital officer Rob Norman tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
Norman also criticizes how Facebook charges advertisers for video: “The idea that, the moment a video enters the feed, the charging event takes place (when) people scroll using movie devices… I do not believe advertisers will find entirely acceptable.”
He reckons Facebook’s rival has a better offering right now: “Twitter’s six-second .gif preview for video is very effective and very interesting. Twitter’s video product for advertisers is attractive, both from an impact point of view and a pricing initiation point of view.”
One study out this week reckons more advertisers will pick Facebook than YouTube this year, but Norman thinks: “This race has a long way to go.”
Norman was interviewed by Beet.TV at the 4As’ (American Association of Advertising Agencies) Transformation 2015 event in Austin, Texas. Our coverage is sponsored by Videology. Please find more coverage from the conference here.
]]>“The NewFronts are expanding to almost two full weeks,” says IAB president and CEO Randall Rothenberg, whose organization stages the event. “There is more interest than we can contain in the time that we have.
“We are going to see more smaller innovative companies in the NewFronts this year… in the MCN world and other worlds, showcasing new styles of content in addition to these big players.
“We’ll also begin to see more format innovation. The past couple of years, we’ve been seeing a lot of things that look like television. Now we are going to start seeing new forms and formats…
“It’s a great time to be a marketer who gets to take advantage of this affinity between consumers and the new world of video creativity.”
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“The traditional model is ‘let’s sell everything we can up-front through a direct sales model and then whatever’s left let’s push in to our SSP platform or exchange environments’,” SpotXchange platform SVP Sean Buckley tells Beet.TV.
“Now we’re hearing the strategy putting programmatic first from major broadcasters and premium publishers. As recently as three years ago, it was an afterthought, if it was even a thought at all.”
He was interviewed at Beet.TV’s annual executive retreat by Nielsen Digital MD Andrew Feigenson.
The Beet Retreat ’15 was sponsored by AOL and Videology. Please find additional videos from the event here.
]]>“There’s a paucity of data,” says Irfon Watkins, CEO and co-founder of Coull, a Bristol, UK-based company whose technology mines the content of videos, indexing them for ad targetability.
“(We need) metadata about what the content is… (for instance), is it sport or entertainment? As an industry, we slap ourselves on the back – but we could be doing a lot better.”
In January 2014, Coull helped serve 150m monthly video impressions. This past December, it clocked 15bn and is on track to serve around a billion each day, Watkins says.
The company is currently on a hiring spree, believing technology layered over content always improves the brand safety of online environments.
He was interviewed at Beet.TV’s annual executive retreat by Furious Corp founder Ashley J. Swartz.
The Beet Retreat ’15 was sponsored by AOL and Videology. Please find additional videos from the event here.
]]>“I look at the portfolio as brands, not as magazines,” McCabe tells Beet.TV. Case in point is recently-launched Daily Cut, which scoops up video from across Time Inc titles.
Time Inc produced 8,000 original videos in 2014 – McCabe expects to hit 10,000 in 2015, and expects Daily Cut to become a service, as well as a destination: “You can look at us having the Daily Cut across our brands, to unify the viewing experience, and each brand inside our portfolio can customize it to their needs.”
“There’s a huge business opportunity for us to launch (products) from where we currently exist, despite the challenges that have been documented in print.”
McCabe repeated Time Inc’s recent milestone: “In November of 2014, we topped 107m digital consumers vs 104m in print.”
McCabe was interviewed at Beet.TV’s executive retreat by Beet.TV Hulu ad sales SVP Peter Naylor.
The Beet Retreat is sponsored by Videology. Find all the coverage here.
]]>That is according to video ad tech platform FreeWheel, which expects to observe growth in its upcoming Q4 video monetization report.
FreeWheel’s business solutions GM James Rooke expects “continued growth in viewing taking place behind the authentication wall”: “In our last report, it was over 450% growth year-over-year
“More and more of our publishers are putting their content behind that authentication wall. Consumers are starting to understand how to access that content. That’s a great thing for the industry.”
Rooke was interviewed at Beet.TV’s annual executive retreat.
The Beet Retreat ’15 was sponsored by AOL and Videology. Please find additional videos from the event here.
]]>Eyeview, a vendor which helps personalize video ads according to targeting criteria, thinks the two disciplines connect.
“For example, a retailer has 100,000 products in different locations, different prices,” says Eyeview CEO Oren Harnevo. “We help them create 100,000 or a million ads for different products, different prices, different locations.
“When you create 1,000 ads, there’s not a lot of emotion. To create a lot of creative, you need to understand data.”
Eyeview last week hired VideoHub’s Anthony Risicato as chief strategy officer, after doubling its headcount through 2014.
Harnevo was interviewed at Beet.TV’s annual executive retreat by Furious Corp founder and CEO Ashley J. Swartz.
The Beet Retreat ’15 was sponsored by AOL and Videology. Please find additional videos from the event here.
]]>“This year, we think Facebook is going to be the big winner – Facebook is going to just explode in terms of video consumption,” says Richard Kosinski, president of Unruly Media.
He should know – Unruly, which produces the Viral Video Chart, tracks how videos are watched and shared on the web.
Kosinski, previously a Quantcast and Yahoo exec, predicted Super Bowl advertisers would ditch 2014’s leaning toward comedy in favor of nostalgic messaging. That’s because “emotional ads are twice as likely to be shared”, says Kosinski, whose Unruly also indexes video success by emotional content.
He was interviewed at Beet.TV’s annual executive retreat.
The Beet Retreat ’15 was sponsored by AOL and Videology. Please find additional videos from the event here.
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