Archive for December, 2008

This will indeed be a good christmas. We’ve just signed the largest commercial TV broadcaster in Sweden to serve their advertising in and around their online video. After meeting some of the larger UK publishers during the last months, I’ve realised that TV4 is one of the larger online video players in Europe (no official numbers though). Update: They did 10,7 M streams in November and the Idol 2008 had a total of 26 M started streams, both short clips and full length shows (source).

The deal is made for all the TV4 domains, not only their main site TV4.se. Launch date is not official yet as well as other details about their upcoming service.

It’s been a pleasure to work with the TV4 team and their consultants Isotop this far. They are really on top of their game and have great ambitions to make the most out of this. We are also planning to do brand lift studies and other research together, something needed to convince the largest budgets. More on that in Q1.

This is a huge milestone for us as well as for all ad funded online video in Sweden. Having a large player like TV4 selling the medium and the formats will be a force in the right direction. This will mean further education of the market and increased consistency over the TV-broadcasters in Sweden.

For every new player out there trying to push our interactive ad formats the game will get easier for all of our clients. The bigger the possible reach, the bigger the incentive for the advertisers to really explore all the interactive opportunities of our platform.

Besides this deal, we have a bunch of other announcements to make in the coming days. Stay tuned.

In the press: Resume, Dagens Media, Internetworld and Dagens Nyheter.

Sales is extremely important, even when having the best product. And it’s been a couple of months now that we’ve had the first version of the Monetizer in place ready for distribution. That means we’re moving from dev-mode to sales-mode and that’s why Magnus Hultman, now is joining the team for heading up the sales on full time!

Magnus has actually been with us for almost two months now, and it’s about time we spread the word about this.

Magnus is bringing to the team the last important critical know-how, the one of selling a product professionally and efficiently. With a background from heading up the Swedish (and some Scandinavian) sales for a web analytics company Omniture (Instadia before acquisition), he brings the experience of selling an SaaS (or ASP, whatever you want to call it) to the company. The difference this time though is that the product he sells brings in revenue rather than being a cost, that’s pretty nice :)

This is a dream recruitment for us and the prognosis for 2009 is looking better than ever. More on his accomplishments in the next post.

I will be participating in a panel Tuesday next week Dec. 9th at the Online TV and Video forum in London.

Below is a short summary of the panel topic:

Placing Value on Internet TV

Online video adverts are commanding CPMs that are higher than some rates for multichannel TV. Which brands are willing to pay for online video adverts and how can advertisers target the right consumers?

Give me a note if you would want to meet up there!