Video ad company Adap.tv on Tuesday said it closed $20 million in financing led by Bessemer Venture Partners. The need for more capital, however, doesn't mean that business isn't booming, insisted Toby Gabriner, president of Adap.tv. "Although we have tremendous traction in the market ... the demand for our products domestically and internationally requires us to move faster," Gabriner said. "Specifically, we will focus on expanding the capabilities of our platform across all three product suites," Gabriner said, referring to Adap.tv for Advertisers, Adap.tv Marketplace and Adap.tv for Publishers. The company most recently launched Adap.tv for Advertisers, with Interpublic Group's audience-buying platform Cadreon on board as its charter user. The new service includes media planning and buying, ad serving and trafficking, performance and optimization; it connects advertisers with thousands of buyers across platforms including the Web, mobile, set-top boxes and Web-connected television sets. Calling the company's existing model "a smashing success," Gabriner noted that Adap.tv Marketplace now has more than 4,000 publishers listing their inventory and hundreds of buyers transacting daily. Going forward, Adap.tv's greatest challenge remains smart execution on an increasingly larger scale. "Execution is the critical component to the success of start-ups at this phase," said Gabriner. "We have a growing market, a set of products in demand and a great team -- now it is simply a function of executing effectively." In addition to international expansion, San Mateo, Calif.-based Adap.tv plans to further develop its capabilities into mobile and emerging platforms. "You can expect some big announcements from us in the coming months," Gabriner said. Nearly a year ago, Adap.tv added a real-time bidding interface to the adap.tv marketplace. At the time, the company said it considered RTB to be a key technology in a new breed of online advertising tools, which are increasing ad effectiveness for advertisers and driving higher revenue for publishers. Existing investors, including Gemini Israel Funds, Redpoint Ventures and Spark Capital -- which have already helped Adap.tv raise $23 million -- also participated in this latest round.
Sony Pictures Entertainment's mid-sized digital video platform, Crackle, now says it is the first platform to offer full-length, ad-supported movies on a number of Sony-manufactured consumer devices and other equipment/services. Crackle says ad-supported full-length movies and television series can be seen on Sony's game console PlayStation 3 and its Bravia line of TV sets, as well as on Blu-ray Players and on Roku Devices. Unlike other major TV and movie studios that are pushing more for consumers to pay for content, Sony says it is committed to offering consumers a free, ad-based model -- supported, says Eric Berger, senior vice president of digital networks of Sony Pictures Television. Crackle says viewers spend 50 minutes per visit on average to the site on connected TVs. Crackle can be found in the Channel Store on Roku, on the PlayStation 3 Internet Browser home screen and on all Bravia internet-connected devices, including Sony Blu-ray players and Bravia televisions. In addition, Crackle has been a launch partner with Google TV. Movies come from Sony Pictures Entertainment brands: Columbia Pictures, TriStar Pictures, Screen Gems and Sony Pictures Classics. Movie titles are refreshed frequently, featuring approximately 20 new titles per month. Current and upcoming movies include: "The Da Vinci Code," "21," "Ghostbusters," "Bad Boys," "Big Daddy," "Gridiron Gang," "We Own the Night," "Eight Millimeter," "Ultraviolet," "A Few Good Men," "The Patriot" and "Mr. Deeds."
Appliance maker Haier America is taking the time between Earth Hour (which happened last weekend) and Earth Day on April 22 to launch a social media/awareness effort around the environment. As part of the nearly month-long program, Haier has launched a microsite, www.smarterlifebetterplanet.com, which will feature a new video featuring an environmental advocate or expert every day. In the videos, each of which is less than two minutes long, the participants challenge consumers to do something small every day to help the environment. In one video (posted on March 29), Micki Krimmell, CEO of NeighborGoods, explains what her company does (it encourages neighbors to register and share the oft-unused power tools they may have) and challenges each person to inventory their power goods, sign up with NeighborGoods, invite three neighbors to do the same and "see what happens." (Other challenges included researching the tax breaks that may come with hybrid cars, and replacing harmful products, such as a Styrofoam cup, with less harmful products, such as a ceramic cup.) The idea was born out of Haier America's parent company, China-based Haier Inc.'s participation in Earth Hour, says company representative James Liess. (The first video featured Andy Ridley, the executive director of Earth Hour, encouraging people to participate in the global product to turn off all electric appliances for an hour on March 26, the same day the video appeared.) "[Haier Inc.] let us know they were taking part in Earth Hour and we were looking for a way to continue the effort from there," Liess tells Marketing Daily. "Hopefully, we can continue this as our corporate social responsibility effort. We haven't been able to do that in the United States and we saw this as an opportunity to do that." The hope is that even after Earth Day, the site will become a hub for green ideas and create a community of people interested in helping the environment, he says. Ideally, some of the company's other partners, such as Energy Star, will also be encouraged to participate, Liess says. To attract consumer interest, Haier America is working with Boston-based agency 4Goodmedia (which also found the video participants and shot the video) on generating grassroots support through social media, Twitter and email.
Marketers gained a demand-side platform to support video ads when DSP DataXu released DX Video Wednesday. The tools range from real-time programmable buying and optimization to advanced targeting and new audience discovery. DX Video automatically optimizes results against advertising objectives, such as awareness, engagement, views, influence and sales. Mike Baker, DataXu CEO, said a handful of companies have been testing the platform, pointing to Universal Studios as an example. "There are about 1 billion video impressions available to us for in-stream video per month, and about 60 billion ad video impressions available on page, not in a stream, but video that shows up in a box," he said. "We support about 4 million URLs daily." Universal Studios, which has been working with DataXu since the beginning of the year, wanted to reach fans of thriller movies, related shows and movies, and females 18-49 for its new theatrical release, "The Adjustment Bureau." As with most ad campaigns for movies, the campaign ran for just a few weeks, not allowing much time to adjust targeting and tactics that don't perform as expected. The campaign's objective to maximize consumer engagement with the auto-start video ad unit was measured as clicks-for-audio and replays. Reaching the audience required targeting tactics, premium content buys, category and behavioral targeting supported by third-party data, demographic targeting of females age 18 to 49, and DataXu Audience Discovery targeting. The campaign outperformed traditional tactics by 2 times at 15 times the scale, according to the company. The results were achieved by observing high variability in performance across times, content, consumer demographics, consumer psychographic segments and geography -- and by identifying and buying the highest-performing impressions both within and outside the campaign's identified targets. DX Video features DataXu's Audience Discovery technology, which enables an advertiser to find the best-performing audience and engage with them across the Internet, as well as gain insights into consumer behavior. DataXu has been experimenting with Web browser technology HTML5 standards to make it easier to distribute content, with a focus on mobile. It will give advertisers the ability to lighten the payloads and expand the ad to provide a "richer experience" across operating systems. Companies paying more attention to platforms supporting video ads have begun to shell out capital to support the move. Adap.tv, which supports buying and selling of video advertising, closed $20 million in financing led by Bessemer Venture Partners. Collective also said it acquired online video advertising network Web TV Enterprise. The deal follows six months after the company's expansion into the United Kingdom and weeks after acquiring video advertising platform Oggifinogi. More than 70% of online video advertisers expect to increase video budgets by 25% during the next six months, according to an internal Web TV Enterprise market report based on a survey of U.K. media buyers. The research also suggests that digital buyers are responding to improvements in audience measurement techniques, an obstacle for many advertisers.
Periodically and with increasing speed, the Internet goes through a transformation, which is today being defined by digital video. Thanks to innovative communications providers, the continued expansion of broadband and availability of faster download speeds to anyone with an Internet connection, video is now the new frontier on every device. Many are rushing to get a piece of the "action" and now, just like a growing community, we need to build the proper infrastructure to measure and value digital video. This transformation is opening up new opportunities not only from a content perspective, but also for brands looking to expand their message beyond traditional banner ads that are wrought with abysmal clicks-through rates, hovering somewhere around .01% -- an unacceptable rate that over time has somehow become acceptable. Online video differs from display advertising because it has a way of engaging users with sight, sound, motion, emotion and time savings that could never be achieved with written text. At the same time, it also drives increased quality time spent with a brand and its message, and delivers a more effective call to action that should ultimately generate better results. However, because of the application of old video models to new ones, marketers are not seeing as optimal results as they could when shifting budgets to this new medium. Additionally and unfortunately for marketers, the ability to skip ads as well as the introduction of forced viewing is actually eroding the consumer's relationship with advertising and the brands they love. So the ultimate question still looms. Yes, consumers may be playing an ad or piece of video content, but are they watching, listening, paying attention, feeling differently about a brand and then acting as a result? Google and TubeMogul are to be congratulated for advancing the digital video platform and have introduced to the IAB Digital Video Committee a new measure for adoption: · CPV and User-Initiated - CPV pricing would apply to all video ads that are user-initiated, distinguishing ads that viewers choose to watch from those that simply load by default (auto-initiated) within a video player or on a page, which would continue to be priced in "impressions." While this new standard will help to measure potential views, it does not prove that a consumer has actually watched the video content. Here's a potentially more valuable measure that we feel is important for the entire online advertising community to adopt. This new measure is referred to as "user-verified," and asks viewers to actually prove they have watched a brand's video advertisement or sponsored content. We not only feel that this is more valuable, it is something that will be desired by the advertising community, because it measures actual views. According to a study led by Dr. Keith Niedermeier(Adjunct Professor at the University of Pennsylvania) that was published in the International Journal of Integrated Marketing Communications, online type-in advertising -- a form of user-verified measurement that requires viewers to type in words or phrases that are part of the ad to prove that it has been watched-significantly increases brand and message recall. The study found that user-verified, type-in ads achieved 65% brand recall and 35% message recall. These findings demonstrate how type-in or user-verified ads deliver double the brand recall and more than 11 times message recall, compared to 32.3% and 3.1% for static ads. Our team found that user verification of brand videos also increases the click-through to 'calls to act' that accompany these videos, averaging just about 10% -- nearly 50x that of historical and expected click-through rates on all other platforms.Professor Niedermeier's research is helping to further validate the case for a standard being created for user-verified advertising and adding this measurement to the Google and TubeMogul proposal. It should also be noted that the user-initiated measurement represents a highly valuable action taken by the consumer. In essence it tells the brand, "Yes, I saw your ad. I remember your brand. And I can prove it." While we will join the chorus in letting the advertisers decide which measure is more valuable, I have a feeling the much higher brand recall, action and engagement will win this foot (print) race. Welcome to the new age of video advertising online.