Posts Tagged ‘online video’

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.

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).