Posts Tagged ‘adtech’

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

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).

Last week was really exciting for us! We rebranded the company, attended our first trade show, partied until 5am, and met tech entreprenuers at Minibar.

Rouzbeh has put together some photos for you here, enjoy!

Ad:tech and adnetworks

The show was really good for us. Besides learning a lot and getting a better feeling of where the market is heading, we got to show off Monetizer 1.0 and got great feedback!

Something that really got me thinking was all the ad networks (there were more than 50 of them there!). There are loads of them out there and quite a few are actually monetizing video. A couple of them are doing prerolls, but that’s about it.

I believe the networks have one big problem when it comes to video: consistency. Different sites have different video players, sizes, length of content, interfaces and functionality making implementation and traffic a nightmare.

For Videoplaza this is both an opportunity and challenge. I will put a lot of the coming weeks brain time to better understand our place in this ecosystem. We can’t afford to bet on the wrong things here.