• by Melynda Fuller , August 16, 2019

In May, iMedia Audiences, a sales and software platform that represents a portfolio of media companies and platforms, partnered with visual AI technology company WowYow to drive revenue to its publishing partners.

WowYow's computer vision and image recognition technology offers an opportunity for publishers to monetize stories through its ability to analyze items present in an image or video, then turn them into ad opportunities.

A few months in, per iMedia Audiences, average lift in eCPM to date with WowYow enabled is 23.62%. A single day earned $17 eCPM for contextual-based ads.

“Through our exclusive and nonexclusive partnerships with major media brands and publisher sites, we have direct placement access to thousands of sites, billions of page and video views, including premium direct buy OTT and niche publications,” Sharon Edlefsen, senior market manager-mentor-publisher development lead at iMedia Audiences, told Publishers Daily.

Edlefsen offers the example of CNN Newsource.

iMedia Audiences was able to deploy WowYow’s AI tag through a VAST Tag on the publisher’s distributed video player. Almost instantly, videos from the 900 CNN Newsource affiliated websites were analyzed by the WowYow platform, which identified each video and began monetizing.

iMedia Audiences was also able to effectively monetize videos around the Women’s World Cup, pairing Nike and Visa ads through its platform. (Both are advertising partners in its ad network and U.S. Women's Soccer.)

The pairing even worked well on local news stories. In one case, a story about a waiter returning a $424,000 check left behind by a diner who didn’t tip was picked up by hundreds of CNN affiliate networks.

“In addition to an impressive technology, WowYow provides multiple deployment options, which was/is very important to us,” Edlefsen said.

“Each publisher is unique in how we can integrate new technology and/or monetization partners, so having the flexibility to adapt to every partner’s integration needs is important,” she added.

Update/Editor's Note: An earlier version of this article reported WowYow identified opportunities and applied a real-time relevant ad that earned $1.50 CPM. That figure is incorrect.