• by Charlene Weisler , Op-Ed Contributor, August 10, 2016

Oded Napchi is CMO of HIRO Media, founded in 2006 first to enable legal peer-to-peer downloads for content providers. “We always wanted to expand the numbers of sites that present video beyond the major five,” he added.

Charlene Weisler: Tell me about HIRO Media.

Oded Napchi: We are a programmatic distributor of videos, with a network of over 20,000 sites, 3 billion video views and 3 billion ad views. We allow publishers to present videos from the top content owners without the need for technical integration. It is a seamless feed from their original site. We can target videos to the viewer and also target ads.

These videos are professional videos only from top content sites such as MGM, Discovery and BBC for example. They can be short — 15 seconds — or longer, like a telenovela. You can click on the site and see full-length videos, but usually the content providers put on shorter videos that then lead to the longer form videos on the content owners’ sites.

Weisler: How do you generate audiences and discover new sites for the videos?

Napchi: We reach out to people via our distribution to over 20,000 sites. It is always a big challenge to build audience so we go to content brands that don’t have enough sites and partner with them too.

We tap into sites and blogs -- anything that has legitimate audience such as Salon, the New York Times and the New York Post. We also love vertical niche sites because advertisers often seek something specific like political sites or sports sites for example. Interestingly, we’re finding that many are seeking Republican-centric sites but also food blogs, pet blogs. Fifty percent to 60% of our viewers come from the larger sites and all the rest come from smaller sites.

Weisler:  What type of data do you collect and use?

Napchi:   We collect anonymous data. No cookies. We tend to work with different type of data beyond the standard age and gender that is easy to buy from third-party sources such as Oracle. What we want to know is how long someone spent on the site and how they scroll through the site so you know where to place the ad. We look at super users who look at the ad and have a high engagement rate. We keep data on all of the sites.

Weisler: You don’t use cookies?
Napchi: No. There are pros and cons with audience targeting. We have found that analyzing sites gave us more predictive information about users, better than using cookies. When you buy on cookies, it is often the household computer and often there are discrepancies between different providers of data. Anyone can be using it.

Charlene Weisler:  What about fraud and viewability?

Napchi: Fraud is an easy problem to fix. There has been great advancement in the past three years on fraud. We work with several very good anti-fraud companies as well as our own proprietary technologies and best practices and as a result fraud is now less than 1%. Viewability is more challenging. But you can optimize against it.

There are two newer problems worth noting here, though. The first is adware fraud, where some creative has malware that hijacks sites. We developed technology to completely block this behavior. We have an exchange hotline to let others know about that creative.

The second is that there are a huge amount of ads that do not play because of problems that could crash the browser or block the screen. This is not intentional. Sometimes it is a tech problem. Several industry researchers claim that over 50% of sites have problems presenting ads.

Weisler: What do you think the impact of smart TVs will have on your business?

Napchi: I have been thinking about this for three years, and am always wrong. First I thought that app stores would rule smart TVs, but now I think smart TV will evolve more from larger video companies such as Youtube, Netflix and Amazon as the way forward.