March 21, 2010

In Silicon Valley, every startup fears than an established brand will one day acquire a rival or build a similar offering and instantly become the industry gorilla. When it comes to advertising, Google, which claims not only both the largest ad network and number of relationships with advertisers, but the most automated and profitable system on the Internet, is the most obvious example of this phenomenon. Ditto for Oracle and Cisco in the enterprise software space and eBay and Amazon in e-commerce.

Yet while fear of the 800-pound gorilla rightfully looms, upstart ad ventures can take heart in mounting evidence that suggests online ad categories are not cornered by deep-pocketed brands, but by new market entrants. This has held true across several different categories, including Google in search, DoubleClick in ad serving, Advertising.com in display, NexTag in CPA, RightMedia in exchanges and AdMob in mobile. Each of these companies emerged from humble beginnings to become billion-dollar businesses, and did so in the face of large, incumbent competitors. Additionally, a slew of other firms exited at valuations in the hundreds of millions of dollars, among them Overture (search), Atlas (ad serving), ValueClick (display) and Quattro (mobile), to name just a few.

To read the rest of this post, please visit GigaOm

December 10, 2009

Lately, I’ve been looking into the evolution of successful Internet companies. How did they succeed? Which factors were the game-changers for them? Earlier, I wrote an article that addressed a few of these issues, where I dove into why many successful Internet companies build or buy an ad network.

Being in the online video business, I began to wonder: Is the same true for video networks? I think the answer is yes.

To read the rest of the post, visit MediaPost

October 26, 2o09

In recent months, the video ad market has generally been rewarding those publishers who 1) have high-quality, branded content; 2) have a significant amount of inventory; and 3) are willing to be reasonably aggressive with their CPM rates in exchange for larger budgets.

I am often approached by publishers who want to grow video ad revenue and are willing to be flexible on pricing in order to get there. The challenge they sometimes face is that their amount of available inventory doesn’t justify the CPMs at which they need to sell in order to remain competitive.

To read the rest of the post, visit MediaPost

April 23, 2009

There’s a great amount of buzz about “TV Everywhere” — everywhere! And while many consumers will be thrilled to have access to the video content they pay to see at home — everywhere — independent content producers have good reason to worry about the “big boys” moving in on their turf. After all, wasn’t the vacuum created by the lack of legal super-premium content the reason for the great success of independent video over the last four years?

Not completely.

It’s true that independent video filled an important void for those looking to watch something interesting during their lunch hour (or “other” time), but who weren’t interested in (insert-clichéd viral -video reference here). Yes, the fact that quality independent video took off was due in large part to a lack of serious competition, but also because it was engaging, well-produced and often compelling.

Now, those independent producers face an uphill battle in holding onto and growing their audience. They’ll be battling with some of the very best content in existence for very limited consumer attention spans. Because lunch hours (and even “other” time) are only so long, even compelling content isn’t enough anymore. To stay in the game, independent producers must assign equal importance to the editorial and business sides of their ventures.

To read the rest of the post, visit MediaPost’s Video Insider.

In July of 2008, I penned a byline for MediaPost’s Video Insider that addressed an increasingly hot topic in industry circles: how to reach TV-sized audiences online. In an era of ‘TV Everywhere‘ talk, and growing focus on online video metrics, the need for better standards around measurement has become vital. In many ways, it helps to look at online video ad buys in much the same way as we look at TV ad buys.

Unlike traditional GRP, iGRP (the Internet Gross Ratings Point) addresses many of the same metrics that TV buyers are familiar with, but packages them for the Internet. As more brands devote their ad budgets to hybrid campaigns that include TV and online video buys, or entirely scrap TV buys for video campaigns, I’m glad to see that iGRP is being pushed as an industry standard for measurement.

Consumers are increasingly watching content across many different platforms. To reach them, advertisers need to understand how to best harness the power of the Web and television, and be able to accurately measure the mediums against each other.

As I wrote in my piece, online video offers the best of both worlds – measurable performance coupled with massive audience aggregation. Why not leverage the strengths of the medium and package it in a way that the bigger buyers understand?

Nine months later, it’s heartening to see more of our industry peers signing on to the iGRP standard: This week, YuMe announced their “coining” of the iGRP term. While they weren’t the first to discuss this online video advertising standard, these types of visible stands are exactly what the industry needs to mature and thrive.

Here is the official release from Streaming Media and we will be sharing more about this award in a press release later today.

That said, we hear it so often that it seems to have fallen victim to market confusion. The answer is clear, but it is entirely dependent on the scale of the reach you are trying to achieve coupled with the relationship between price and inventory quality. Here are your options, broken up into six categories.

1. Buy from a single branded site
2. Buy from a portal
3. Buy from a portfolio of branded sites/portals
4. Buy a large portfolio of sites/portals from a network
5. Buy a site channel from a network
6. Buy a portal, portfolio of sites or a site channel with syndicated inventory

See the full article on the Video Insider at MediaPost.

Here are the highlights:

Pre-Roll Quality Categories
1. Gold Standard: Traditional Pre-Roll, as defined above
2. High Quality: Video ads that play in the middle of long form content (such as an ad between segments of House on Hulu.com)
3. Medium Quality: Video ads that auto-start with sound in a publisher’s video section; no user initiation
4. Low Quality: Video ads that auto-start with sound on a publisher’s home page; no user initiation or attention
5. Questionable Quality: Video ads that auto-start without sound in display inventory (typically by an ad network without video technology)
6. Borderline Fraudulent: Video ads that auto-start without sound on a publisher’s video player which can be embedded by users anywhere

Key Queries to insure 100% Pre-Roll:
1. Will my video ads ever be played in the middle of content, as opposed to before content?
2. Will my video ads ever be served into an environment where video is not the main content on the page?
3. Will my video ads ever be auto-started, i.e. started without a user initiation?
4. Will my video ads ever be started with the sound off?
5. Will my video ads ever be served into display inventory?
6. Will my video ads be served into any syndicated content? (Syndication almost always means a reduction in quality.)
7. Can you provide me with a list of every URL my ads will appear on?

Today, MediaPost’s VideoInsider posted an article I wrote about this issue and some thoughts on how to address it. Click here for the VideoInsider article.