• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, February 5, 2015

Consider the emerging native ad format in video feeds. Sure, advertisers love the idea of getting an autoplay clip right there amid the content. Who can miss that? It is just like content, right? Well be careful what you wish for. Those ads still have to contend with the most talented and ruthless opponent the mobile era has produced — the consumer’s adroit and lightning fast scroll thumb.

That is what Opera Mediaworks is trying to get across to agencies and their clients about the unique properties of the native feed. “The biggest thing is that our partners understand how native video is consumed differently from pre-rolls and interstitials,” says Nikao Yang, SVP, global marketing.

Opera recently acquired AdColony, which launched an in-feed, auto-playing video ad format not unlike the approach Facebook appears to be taking in its video advertising. But the dynamics of the feed are entirely different from the usual full screen video takeover or the simple pre-roll. Consumers are whipping through their feed at a remarkable pace. As brands discovered early in using Vine and Instagram video, there is no margin for error here, no time to fade into a message or even set a mood. This is a wholly different context for getting users’ attention with a moving image. “It needs to be thought of differently from the bottom up,” he says.

To that end, Opera Mediaworks just launched A Native Video Fund that is helping to fund ad creative made expressly for the native mobile video context. They are awarding agencies and their clients up to $50,000 to create ads, plus $50,000 in media (or $100,000 in media alone) to further the art of the emerging ad form.

Campaigns for Carl’s Jr. and mobile game "Game of War" already ran last weekend and in support of their Super Bowl spots. In these cases, TV creative was recut for the native video format. In upcoming campaigns for GM OnStar and others in the program, Opera has advised from the early storyboarding stage in order to get assets for multiple versions that will work well on mobile.

Other sponsors in the Fund program and running in the first quarter include Adidas (and Johannes Leonardo, Carat, TBWA), Lenovo and Digitas, History and Horizon and Walt Disney Studios and OMD. In order to work with the Fund the campaign needs to use AdColony technology and run exclusively on the Opera Mediaworks platform for the length of the initiative.

Most interesting to me about the initiative are the early learnings about how advertising in native video needs to be different. It has to grab the active scroller with boldness. “We want the product or the service advertiser to have the hero shots of the product, very close up of the product or the feature set,” he says.

Also important to grab attention is quick cutting. Inspiring shots in quick succession get a story arch going quickly and simple catch one’s eye. The weekend campaign for Game of War, for instance, had a rapid fire reduction of the on-air Super Bowl piece culminating in a longer clip of the product and download calls to action.

Mobile video needs text. Headlines, copy and captions are becoming de rigeur in mobile-first video for good reason. They compel us to read them and they help satisfy one of the biggest realities of in-feed video… .

Don’t rely on audio. “The advertiser needs to assume the volume is turned off,” he says. This is why the visual language of a native video ad is so important. Many in-feed ads will be muted by default and require a tap to volume up, or the user is keeping the phone muted to avoid public embarrassment from an errant audio message. The ad needs to work as well without the narrative as with it. “You need to rely on hero shots, zoom ins and quick cuts” to tell the bulk of your story, “Don’t assume sound will be available,” Yang says.

Many of Yang’s points can be borne out just by looking at the best of Vine or Instagram videos. NowThisNews figured some of this out long ago in its social media news updates on mobile. Their general manager, Ed O’Keefe, once told our Mobile Insider Summit audience that you have two seconds to get your scroller attention and tell the gist of the story arc. Ed is not with CNN Money and Politics, where you can see a number of these principles playing out in the network’s online video stories: a lot of narrative-free video storytelling via headlines and fast graphics in under a minute.

In this new realm, the 15-second ad spot may start feeling like an unwieldy epic.