Posts Tagged ‘preroll’

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).

After having launched their catch up service TV4 Replay in January, TV4 today took the next big step towards a complete online offering. Unlike TV4 Replay, the new service launching today called TV4 Play, will consist of both short and long form content.

After a quick test-drive I can easily say they currently have the best commercial online video offering in the Nordics, in the broadcast league at least. They’ve pushed the new player very hard to having everything from external embedding, chapters and Facebook connect-powered chat. The experience is great and reminding a lot of the big successes out there being BBC iPlayer, Hulu and SVT Play.

The site is currently being monetised through prerolls, midrolls and overlays using our technology. There’s very few display ads around, which I think is good, encouraging more video consumption and thus more valuable in-stream inventory.

The challenge is to find the perfect balance between a pleasant user experience, large enough ad inventory and value for the advertisers. The key here I believe is to work with the different frequency settings and Monetizer is full of them since video is mainly a time based medium.

I’m really excited to work with a proactive client like this, we have a lot to learn from each other and explore together.

Here’s an example of their embedded player (it doesn’t seem to be geo-blocked outside Sweden, yet):

We’ve just launched three new publishers, NT, Corren and Sydsvenskan, all of them local newspapers (well, that’s their background at least). It’s amazing how quickly and independent they’ve got started and have preroll and overlay campaigns up and running just after a couple of days!

You can check them out here: 24nt, 24Corren and Sydsvenskan TV. The advertisers are local retailers, brokers, opticians, local dating sites etc. instead of the P&G’s of the world.

A preroll ad for a local broker.

Why local newspapers?

I believe local newspapers have a big opportunity when it comes to monetizing their online video content because of three reasons:

1. They have strong relationships with the local advertisers, better than local TV.
2. They have a tradition of producing the actual ads for their clients, which makes it easier to get them to try new formats such as overlay banners or our iRolls.
3. It’s complementary to their existing advertising products as it involves audio and moving images which can communicate brand experiences in a completely different way than print and online display ads.

I believe we will see more and more local papers embrace online video because it will make their overall ad business perform better. Hopefully, they will also get a piece of the TV budgets that sure are gonna get relocated.

We’ve been memebers of the IAB UK’s Video Council since October where we together with the other influential player of the British market are trying to create a standard for online video advertising as well as a pedagogical handbook for media buyers. All of this since we believe it will play an important role to help the growth of the online video advertising business.

When it comes to the Swedish market, IAB has been a bit slower. In fact, IAB Sweden wasn’t even formed until September 2008. But now things are moving, and we’re part of creating a Swedish IAB standard for online video through the IAB Sweden Video Task Force which I am currently chairing.

I’m glad to say that we most definitely have had a kick-start. We had our first meeting last week and besides a few exceptions we had all of the major Swedish publishers present. And we’re working hard to recruit the last few.

Of course, the Swedish workgroup will strive to make the Swedish standard compliant with other similar efforts in other countries. And since IAB UK is certainly making a good job, we are paying close attention to what’s coming there.

Anyway, we are all joined in the effort to make online video as profitable as possible in order to pave the way for better services to the end users.

And the first step is of course to develop a standard in order to make it easier to buy.