• by Steve Smith  @popeyesm, October 11, 2013

History is repeating itself on mobile when it comes to standardization and ad formats, says Tremor Video’s Dave Sanderson, senior director, creative strategy. It is like the earlier days of Web video when ads had to work with countless different video players that had their own ways of rendering ads. Getting a simple pre-roll into that environment was hard enough. But it wasn’t until Flash helped normalize things that ad networks could get fancier in their ad units. Getting sophisticated interactive video ads outside of the more reliable app environment and into the mobile Web has been tough and complex. HTML5 has emerged as a constant in the mobile. Getting the ads to move fluidly between app and Web environments was not a trivial task. “The problem with HTLM5 and iOS is we needed some consistent component that could read our ads and then read the HTML5 player and translate them.”

Now Tremor, one of the largest video ad networks on the Web, is helping some of its highest-profile media property partners bring their interactive video ad inventory onto the Web via HTML5. Announced this week, Tremor is already running the new units on the Brightcove player and plans to make the ads compatible with the other major players in short order. In these units, a layer of interactivity is served atop the pre-roll, inviting some direct action by the user with a native tap or swipe gesture. The link can serve up additional video, share on social links, get showtimes or even order tickets. Tremor has been serving interactive video ads into apps for some time. At its latest investor conference call, the company said it saw mobile revenue leap 317% year-over-year so that mobile accounted for 13% of revenue in Q2.

“The SDK is a proprietary toolkit that allows us to build the interactive ad unit in a scalable way so at runtime it understands the device and OS it is being run on and then calls the appropriate ad,” he says. “It works seamlessly across apps in iOS and Android, and now we take it to HTML5 where it will render in the same way.”

For these units Tremor uses engagement pricing so the advertiser only pays for views that activate an interaction. Tremor looks at the user demographic, time of day, location and other factors to optimize placement in front of the right person at the right time. The format has been especially popular with entertainment properties as well as gaming and health and beauty.

Tremor works with over 500 premium publishers across platforms and extends sites for companies like A&E and Hearst on both desktop and mobile Web.