• by Philip Rosenstein , April 10, 2017

The advent of sophisticated 360 video and virtual reality (VR) advertising technologies has opened the door to the programmatic buying and selling of new ad creative that further capture users’ attention and imagination.

VR and 360 video advertising platform, OmniVirt, worked with ABC to programmatically serve a 360 video experience for its new drama series “Time After Time.”

The 360 video ad units developed by OmniVirt were served programmatically through Google’s DoubleClick Bid Manager.

“We want to power a 360 video or VR experience where the audience is today,” explained Michael Rucker, COO at OmniVirt. Users looking to experience the VR version of an ad still need to hook up their devices to a headset. Users can switch off viewing the ad creative between a 360 version and a headset-compatible VR version.

The enhanced ad units can be served to typical ad placements, like banner and pre-roll spots, as well as on mobile browsers. “On mobile, 360 and VR ads we see on Facebook or YouTube can only be played through proprietary mobile applications,” continued Rucker. “Through the OmniVirt platform, advertisers no longer face those constraints.”

With a wider scope of available supply, brands that want to start using VR and 360 ads can find price-appropriate placements.

Many of the questions facing 360 and VR ads up to the present have to do with limited scale and measurement data. Nonetheless, Rucker anticipates that 2017 will be the year when we experience increased scale for 360 and VR ads in the form of many additional eyeballs. In two to three years, “we anticipate a full-on adoption of VR with headsets.”

Separately, OmniVirt and SpotX announced a partnership last week powering 360 virtual reality advertising for brands. The partnership aims to bring OmniVirt’s 360 VR technology across all media owners on SpotX’s platform, giving marketers the ability to distribute their 360 VR content at scale.