Archive for May, 2009

Today the four largest print publishers in Denmark, Berlingske Media, Ekstra Bladet, Jyllands Posten and Børsen and 4 big advertisers have come together to kickstart the online video advertising market in Denmark!

Having had video for a long time and many of them having huge traffic, they are finally monetising this valuable asset in a proper way. From today, their videos are monetised through prerolls, overlays and companion banners all using Videoplaza.

However interesting this is, what I would like to tell you about is the story behind all of this. It isn’t too often you get the 4 largest players in a market to cooperate in this way. So here it comes: The story behind the Danish online video monetisation kickstart project – 4 publishers, 4 advertisers, 3 months, 3 iterations.

The story behind

When looking at expansion to Denmark, we quickly realised the huge challenge waiting for us. Nobody (almost) ran prerolls, hence the knowledge in the market was low both at sellers and buyers. We couldn’t even get meetings booked.

This is when we got in contact with Tim Frank Andersen and his Brandzation, now our exclusive partner in Denmark. They came up with the kickstart idea saying:

”if there is no market for this, let’s create it!”.

The publishers were quite clear that they couldn’t cover the big costs of producing, managing and distributing video with the extra display revenues they created. There needed to be something else. The problem was that nobody wanted to take the lead and invest in launching new formats into the market. This is understandable since there’s no know-how and making a try is quite resource intensive. But what if we, Videoplaza, could bring the know-how and we could do it all together?

After a number of meetings and brainstorming sessions, we finally had the sales managers of the four largest print publishers in Denmark around the table. And today they are all going live with 4 of the largest advertisers in Denmark, De Gule Sider, Nordisk Film, Nykredit and SAS, finally moving to a profitable video product!

Our role

We have contributed to the project in two ways – technology and know-how. Our product Monetizer is being used by all the publishers to manage, serve and track the ads in and around the video. The publishers are all running us parallell to their traditional display ad server, most of them using Adtech. And having run more than 100 campaigns for publishers in different countries, we have also a good feeling for how to package, price and sell this new inventory.

The kickstart project

The kickstart project will run for 3 months and consists of 3 iterations. We will use prerolls, overlay banners and companion banners. Every month we will try different setups and do research around it. We are also looking at the effects of the advertising together with Gallup. The purpose is to go beyond the click and look at what happens in the head from a brand lift perspective. We hope to publish some of the results here.

We hope this project will get this market started. It’s not just about chosing the same technology, it’s also about setting a standard for trading and to really dig deep to understand more about the final value created for the end client, the advertisers.

What this means for us

For us as a company it’s of course nice to grab an entire market in one go. Working with Ekstra bladet means also now that we have our first tabloid client. And not to be forgotten, today is the day we go live outside Sweden!

If you need help kickstarting your online video advertising market, you now know who to call.

Read more here: TechCrunch, ArcticStartup, Resumé (SE) & Dagens Media (SE).

About a month ago IAB UK released the Video Guide where Alfred Ruth was one of the contributors. June 4th, the guide will be printed and there’s a small launch event for that organizied by the IAB at their offices at 14 Macklin Street. It’s titled: Online video advertising: pause, play and fast forward.

I’ll be one on the speakers together with Nancy Cruickshank from the Telegraph, Sharon Braude from Media Contacts and Kieron Matthews from the IAB.

Read more and signup here.

One of the main events of 2009 for Videoplaza will be the Admonsters event in Prague June 7-9th. I’ve come across Admonsters a couple of times and I’ve only been hearing good things about it and after meeting Matt O’Niell, who heads things up there, a couple of times my impression is that they are doing a lot of things right.

Admonsters is basically one of very few forums for ad ops people to meet and share knowledge about what is happening in this more and more complex world of ad serving. We are a result of that complexity, adding a new nische product to the current eco system of products out there solving different problems.

We are proud GOLD sponsors at the big Prague event which means we can spend a lot of time with the Admonster members. It will be a very good opportunity for us to show what we can offer but also to learn more about our users.

From Videoplaza, we will have me, Alfred Ruth our VP Products and Magnus Hultman our VP Sales attending. If you are also attending, we are all looking forward to meet you there!

(…and if you are working with ad ops, make sure you get your self a ticket straight away!)

Mike Butcher and his gang will hit Stockholm on Wednesday this week to gather the Swedish, or maybe even the Nordic, startup scene. I think they will be quite successful as there are a lots of good people signed up for the event already.

I’ll be on the Investment Panel about trends in startups and funding at 4:50pm.

You can register for the event here and if you will be there, make sure we connect!

Also, I can tell you that we will be making an announcement that day that I think will be quite fun!

Cheers

When over in Paris a couple of weeks ago to kick things off and for the Ad:tech conference, Franck Perrier did a  video interview with me about Videoplaza. Below is the video and here is the link to his blog post (translated in English here).

And regarding the French market, Sophie is coming up to speed and building a good base now. We are also working on a French part for this blog that she will manage. Stay tuned within the coming couple of weeks for more info on that.

If you are based in Paris or just passing by, make sure to meet up with Sophie over a coffee! She can be reached at +33 6 70 01 90 48 or sophie@videoplaza.com.

Au revoir.