Archive for September, 2009

We’ve had a great day at Adtech today in London. We were seven from the team there: Me, Magnus, Alfred, Bill, Sophie, Nic and Erik. Magnus is leaving for DM Exco in Cologne early tomorrow and I’m going there on Thursday.

It’s clear pretty much everyone is interested in video in some way and we’ve had a lot of interesting talks at our stand. There are many publishers out there thinking about how to get their online video products profitable

Make sure to pop by this years show tomorrow if you didn’t today and I’m going to stop writing since my brain is out of fuel now. It’s been a hectic day and tomorrow will be even more so.

Cheers

5000 votes later and we are a finalist in the Video Advert Platform category!

The winners will be announced at the Streaming Europe event in London Oct 15th. We’ll definitely be there as I’m in one of the panels for Oct 16th.

There are many things to building a sexy product. Great usability, awesome functionality and of course a sexy team.

Have a good weekend!

WebTV Enterprise, a good partner to us and probably the most succesful online video network in the UK, has done what we all should do more, listened to their clients. They’ve asked 101 UK in-stream buyers questions around their spending and the results are quite interesting. And since this is a bi-annual report, it will be even more interesting to see the development of the market in 6 months. The report is really interesting and there are two points about growth I find more interesting than others:

1- Projected growth
It’s quite obvious in-stream buyers are happy since 97% of them are planning to spend more next year. I guess they believe it works.

“The vast majority (97%) of all VOD media buyers expect their online video ad spend to grow over the next 12 months with over half (54%) of survey respondents predicting their spend will increase by 50%.”

2- Barriers to growth
Even if the buyers are planning to spend more next year, there are some issues holding them back.

“When asked to name the primary factor holding media buyers back from greater investment in VOD, the main barriers noted by media buyers were the need for shorter time lengths (10%), more research (24%) and better measurement (31%).”

What we and our clients are doing about it

On the second point, I think we and our clients are doing some things right. We are currently doing two quite extensive research projects. One is together with our Danish clients and TNS in Denmark and the other in Sweden with 3 of our clients. The results of those studies we hope will help our clients prove the effectiveness of their in-stream products beyond the reporting we can provide. We also hope to benchmark the effectiveness of in-stream compared to other media.

Some of our clients are also quite good at using the extensive reporting our platform offers to help show their advertisers how their campiagns have performed beyond impressions and clicks. This is not about just making the data available, it’s more about making sense out of it.

Moving forward we hope to combine the data from the research we’re doing together with the reporting metrics we collect to find patterns that make sense. Hopefully we can soon see claim that X% increase in time spent with the ad will give Y% increased purchase intent.

The full WebTV report takes you 5 minutes to read so give it a shot here.

The summer has been really good. I’ve got married, been away on a long honey moon to Bali and even got some work done. The office got back in full speed today with Alfred being the last person coming back from his holiday. We’re all fueled up and excited to be back in business!

Mad September schedule

We are kick-starting this autumn with a mad September schedule. Starting next week we will attend IBC in Amsterdam Sep 11-12th as we are a part of the Innovations arena. There’s going to be some good people at that session so looking forward to that.

The week after that we’re spending two days in Berlin for some meetings, Sep 17-18th. We still have some openings so let me know if you want to meet up.

Sep 22-23rd is the London Adtech show where we will be exhibiting also this year. Overlapping is the German digital show DM Exco in Cologne where we will have Magnus and myself attending at least the 24th. DM Exco is supposed to be 3 times bigger than Adtech London and really well executed I’ve heard, so looking forward to that.

I’m more than happy to meet up at any of these events, so please drop me a note if you’ll be there and we can maybe enjoy a coffee together.