Archive for August, 2008

Hej, I’m back in Stockholm now after four weeks in London. The purpose of my trip was to get a good feeling of the UK online video advertising market, and I think I did.

UK characteristics

I believe the UK market is not that different from the Swedish. They are both still very immature and a lot will happen in the coming two years. Here are four dominating characteristics:

1. Preroll domination. This is basically the only ad format used to monetize video.
2. Confusion on how to monetize video, meaning that no publisher is profitable, yet.
3. Lack of ad format standards, even doing a preroll campaign across different sites is a mess.
4. Inadequate metrics and reporting. Impressions and clicks is the best you can get.

4 weeks, 40+ meetings

During my stay I met up with more than 40 of the leading players in the industry. I covered five areas being publishers, video platform providers, media agencies, ad networks and other important industry players. I list some of them below while keeping the publishers for myself:

• Kewego, a video platform provider
• KIT-digital, a video platform provider, full service
• Brightcove, a video platform provider
• Mediacom, media agency
• Starcom, media agency
• Advertising.com, one of the largest ad networks globally, owned by AOL
• Utarget.fox, advertising network, has 120 websites large preroll network
• Adlink Media, more premium ad network, sells prerolls as well
• MIG – eType, they sell VideoEgg’s UK inventory and starting a preroll network soon
• IAB UK, educating and setting standards in the UK online marketing world
• and more…

Conclusion

Even if I was sick of hearing my own voice pitching our product and concept over and over again, the feedback was above all expectations! I can proudly and confidently now confirm that Videoplaza is heading in the right direction and that our product is highly competitive. That’s a pretty good feeling :)

London, I’ll be back.