• by Charlene Weisler , Op-Ed Contributor, September 13, 2018

Monetizing content has at once become easier and far more complicated with new technologies enabling insertions pre-, mid-, post- and within programming. With the advent of AR and VR, the options have widened further. 

Enter Samuel Huber, founder and CEO, Admix, who has been grappling with, as he explained, “the struggles of creating and monetizing content” for many years. He noted that there was “not much choice, besides banners at the bottom of the screen. When I discovered VR for the first time, I immediately thought we could do better than that, because the environment is not limited to a small screen anymore.” 

Charlene Weisler: Give me a short description of your company. Is it only for the AR and VR space?

Samuel Huber: Admix is the first monetization platform for XR, helping over 200 VR/AR developers like High Fidelity, Somnium Space or Atom Universe monetize their content through nonintrusive advertising. 

Through a free plugin for Unity, developers can create inventory within their app (a banner on a wall, a screen, or a 3D item on a table), filter the advertisers they want, to ensure ads are relevant to the content. That way, the ads will never interrupt the users, because they are in line with the content. 

Weisler: What technology do you use to implant ads? 

Huber: Admix is a supply-side platform built in-house and selling inventory to third-party demand-side platforms, such as Brightroll (Yahoo/AOL ). We then use our own renderer to display the ads in a 3D environment. 

Weisler: Are they static?

Huber: We have three ad formats: banner, video and 3D. Banner and videos are existing formats used by advertisers. The 3D format is a new format we are pioneering with our demand partners and that will be interactive and enable new interactions between brands and consumers.

Weisler: How are the ads measured? What data do you use and how do you integrate it into the buy/sell?

Huber: Being programmatic, we capture contextual data (about the environment) and gaze tracking data (where the users are looking), to calculate viewability. Gaze-tracking data is anonymized and used in aggregate, to understand how people consume a specific ad, how long they spend gazing at it, which is used to qualify the impact of the ad in a much more granular way than possible on the web. 

In the future, we aim to define a cost-per-gaze model, which will charge advertisers differently based on the interaction level with a specific ad. We can then feed that information back to advertisers, to give them more insights on the profile of the person interacting with their ads.

Weisler: Are you working with any media measurement companies?

Huber: The answer is not yet. We are having discussions with third-party measurement companies but no integration yet. To popularize the gaze-tracking metric, we are working together with Oath building these standards so will aim to make it a standard with existing players first.

Weisler: Is there a thought to integrate with other media platforms?

Huber: We are currently integrating with various DSPs to give us access to more advertisers.