Sorosh Tavakoli 
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:
- Preroll domination. This is basically the only ad format used to monetize video.
- Confusion on how to monetize video, meaning that no publisher is profitable, yet.
- Lack of ad format standards, even doing a preroll campaign across different sites is a mess.
- 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.
4 Comments
lol your posts are in english but the lamna en kommentar? :P
congrats dude! just a year ago, u were saying to me over coffee about this idea, remember. and now you’re here! :D
Hey Sriram,
“lämna en kommentar” is there to keep the Swedish feeling :) We have a new site coming up in a couple of weeks so we’re leaving it for that.
I won’t forget our coffee, we should actually have another one soon!
[...] networking with local agencies and companies working with and around online video. He writes in his latest blog entry that the UK and Swedish market are very much alike and “a lot will happen in the next two [...]
[...] « Summary: UK summer tour 2008 [...]
Do you have anything to add?