Vibrant Media, the global leader in premium contextual advertising, today announced the launch of Vibrant Lightbox Video, connecting brands and audiences in a cinematic way that is user-initiated. A recent study, which Vibrant conducted with Dynamic Logic, found that 81% of consumers prefer online video advertising they can initiate, as opposed to the forced view of pre-roll ads.
Vibrant Lightbox Video brings together sight, sound, and motion for a relevant video experience that captures 100% share of voice for brands. It delivers contextually targeted ads in a brand-safe environment.
Lightbox aligns with Vibrant’s strategic vision to expand its existing suite of contextual solutions with innovative placements that deliver high performance for top brands and new revenue opportunities for quality publishers. Unlike pre-roll, which has a limited supply of content inventory, Lightbox can reach audiences wherever relevant content exists and the video can be triggered by users through Vibrant in-text hyperlinks in content or from Vibrant Image in-image ads. As a result, Lightbox extends the reach of video advertising beyond the confines of pre-existing video content.
Read more: PRWeb

Rocket Fuel Packages Up CPG Booster
REDWOOD SHORES, CA–(Marketwire – May 2, 2012) – Rocket Fuel, the leading provider of artificial-intelligence advertising solutions for digital marketers, today released CPG Booster, an integrated solution to help CPG brands reach the right audience, drive lift in brand metrics, boost coupon downloads, measure offline sales, and maximize campaign ROI.
Key Facts:•Rocket Fuel’s new CPG Booster helps brands optimize digital campaigns — display, video, mobile, and social — to dramatically increase sales, online and off. Already in use by some of the world’s leading CPG companies, including Pinnacle Foods, CPG Booster drives results in every phase of the consumer purchase cycle — from boosting brand awareness, to increasing consideration, to stimulating purchase.

•Based on Rocket Fuel’s flagship advertising management platform that leverages artificial intelligence and predictive data analytics technology to automatically improve campaigns in real-time, CPG Booster enables brands to easily optimize digital campaigns across channels. Campaigns use AI technology to “learn” from each other, automatically adjusting placement, creative, and targeting across billions of advertising opportunities in online display, video, mobile, and social media to reach the right audiences with the right messages at the right point in the purchase process.

•Rocket Fuel and Forrester Research CPG analyst Tracy Stokes will cohost a webinar on the digital challenges CPG marketers face and the impact CPG Booster can provide on 5/30 at 2pm ET. Register here.
Read more: marketwire

SAN FRANCISCO, CA–(Marketwire – May 2, 2012) – BrightRoll, the world’s largest provider of digital video advertising services, today announces it is teaming up with Google’s AdMob to allow publishers and developers to seamlessly integrate video ads into their mobile apps and generate revenue from premium advertisers.
Through this collaboration, publishers and developers who have the AdMob SDK can now use its Ad Network Mediation to access BrightRoll pre-roll ad units through the BrightRoll AdMob Adapter. BrightRoll is the first video ad network available through AdMob Mediation, which lets publishers manage their networks to increase their fill and eCPM.
“App developers often work with several ad networks to maximize mobile revenue. The updated Mediation solution in AdMob’s new SDK 6.0 makes that process easier and enables developers to more effectively build their businesses,” said Clay Kellogg, head of mobile platform and partnership strategy at Google. “BrightRoll’s efforts to make their video ads available via AdMob’s Mediation solution represent an industry-leading example of innovation in mobile advertising.”
Mobile video advertising offers publishers attractive revenue opportunities and superior CPM rates compared to traditional mobile display ads. BrightRoll adapts advertisers’ traditional TV or web video content into pre-roll ad units for a broad range of mobile devices including iPhones, iPads, Android phones and tablets. BrightRoll currently runs global, large-scale campaigns in every major advertising category, including entertainment, CPG, business, auto, financial services, and food and beverage.
Read more: marketwire

Personalized Video Recommendations Driving Views & Monetization, Three Times In-crease in Views in Some Cases
Amazon has made a big business in part because of its recommendations. Customers who bought this also bought that has proven tremendously helpful for book readers, as well as consumers searching out cameras, pet toys and other products on the world’s biggest shopping site. Netflix, similarly, has grown its business because of suggested movies and shows.

That’s why online video technology providers have staked a claim on personalized video recommendations, with companies such as Ooyala, Taboola and Digitalsmiths having skin in the game.

Ooyala said that its recently added content discovery features had boosted both viewing time and revenue for customers. Prior to the product launch last month, the company had tested the tools with existing customers, which includes broadcasters, media companies and TV networks.

Ooyala found that the first video abandonment rate after one play – i.e. leaving to go to another site – had dropped to 9% with its tools, from a 24% rate with the technology customers had previously been using to encourage viewers to watch more videos. “The more viewers are engaged with personalized videos tailored to their tastes, the longer they watch, and the more money publishers earn,” Ooyala said in a blog post.
Read more: MediaPost

Continuing to lose face among marketers, new research shows that clicks and total impressions are far from the best way to measure online conversions.
Rather, new findings from comScore and Pretarget — both of which market ad targeting services — show a stronger correlation between ad “viewability” and hover time, and conversion rates.
The findings indicate that the traditional way of buying mass impressions and hoping for conversions, i.e., “spray and pray,” is not the most effective approach, according to Kirby Winfield, senior vice president, corporate development at comScore.
“It once again demonstrates the perils of relying on click-throughs for measuring the performance of display ad campaigns, with this metric showing virtually zero correlation with total conversions,” Winfield said.
To arrive at these initial findings, the “intent targeting” specialists at Pretarget analyzed 263 million impressions over nine months across 18 advertisers in numerous verticals. Pretarget then used comScore validated Campaign Essentials to collect “viewability,” and hover data and a DSP to collect click and cookie-based conversion data.

Read more: MediaPost
With New Video Portal, AOL Puts The ‘On’ Back In America Online
Sometimes, what’s old is new again. AOL, whose robust content syndication strategy has helped distance itself from its aggregator past, is once again touting itself as a portal – this time for all things video.

The new hub, dubbed “AOL On,” was dubbed Tuesday evening during its portion of the digital “NewFront” to advertisers, agencies and the press in New York City.
With big acquisitions like The Huffington Post and 5Min Media, AOL had been focusing on spreading its influence to other sites and syndicating content around the Web. Now, it seems, the company wants to bring those eyeballs back.
With AOL On, the Web giant is bringing its entire video offering under one umbrella. AOL On is comprised of 14 discrete channels and more than 300,000 videos, including a new slate of seven original Web series (also something the company has tried in the past), and some 1,000 publisher content partners.
Many of the publishers have been part of AOL’s 5Min syndication network, and while their video programming will continue to be syndicated through that platform, they will for the first time be organized around a single destination.

Read more: MediaPost

There’s a significant amount of cross-pollination in the digital media space. Brands like to help each other out. They do it because they’re drawn to success – the success of social media properties, for example, in obtaining a critical mass of users. Like those users, consumer brands also have the capacity to recognize the potential in a good online product or service. Hence, they create Facebook pages and Twitter feeds and YouTube channels galore.
Whether they realize it or not, consumer brands endorse media brands by utilizing their services. Media brands, in turn, rise in stature due to their usage by consumer brands. It’s a win-win situation made even more promising when digital marketers choose to actively leverage it. Promoting a brand’s participation in social media helps to increase exposure and create a following, yes. But it must be taken seriously. In other words, as important as it is to create a campaign around your product itself, the value of doing the same for your media affiliations shouldn’t be overlooked. Treat them as a media buy in their own right and you can earn a sizeable return on investment.
Read more: Click Z

New Video Ad Metric Doesn’t Have You At Hello, Suggests You Complete Me
Forget about click-through rates. When it comes to online video advertising, it’s the “completes” that count, according to new research from Vindico. “Click-through rate was created in a neophyte ad world dominated by display and search,” according to the video ad platform.

“It should play a small part in measuring the success of a video campaign alongside other more powerful measures, like completion and engagement.” Rather, advertisers should evaluate a range of variables when evaluating performance, such as whether their video ad ran as in-banner alongside content or “below the fold.”

These situations would likely account for high impressions with low CTR as viewers are most likely not viewing the ad when it’s playing at the bottom of a page. Judging by “completes,” mid-roll is the clear way to go, as they achieve the highest completion rates (94%) of all ad positions in 2011, Vindico found, based on tens of billions of ad impressions served in 2010 and 2011.

Video ads placed during long-form content had a higher completion rate — 88% — than those placed with short-form content, 76%. In other words, a viewer who makes the commitment to watch a 30-minute episode is more invested in watching the associated ads, while a comparatively less-invested viewer “snacking” on short-form videos is somewhat more likely to click away when presented with an ad, Vindico finds. Completion rates across site types indicate that premium content on video centric sites yield higher completion rates.

Read more: MediaPost

While advertisers often complain about the lack of a single measurement for determining the value of their online ads, particularly when it comes to the fast-growing video category, ultimately, they really just want to know whether their placements drove awareness, favorability, consideration, purchase intent, or actual sales.

Many Internet marketers get caught up in arguments over the most important strategy to improve conversion rates: search engine optimization (SEO) or conversion rate optimization (CRO). They talk about them as if one must be chosen over the other when, in practice, they are anything but mutually exclusive. SEO and CRO go hand in hand and must work together for a website to be successful.
And what ultimately defines success? Conversions. Whether converting a casual browser on the SERPs to a visitor on your website through SEO or converting that visitor into a customer through CRO, it’s clear that these strategies are tightly linked. Let’s begin by defining the most basic goals of SEO and CRO. The goal of SEO is to achieve high rankings in search engines for keywords that most closely match a user’s query, and the goal of CRO is to increase the number of visitors that are converted into customers. These are obviously simplified definitions, but they demonstrate the close connection between SEO and CRO and the role each plays to improve conversion rates.

Both SEO and CRO focus on website visitors. SEO wants to find prospects based on what and where they are searching and provide them with a reason to visit a website, and CRO wants to create the best possible user experience when they arrive. To succeed in both requires an understanding of the user’s intent, which will also help determine the quality of the visitors. Qualified visitors are far more likely to be ready to make a buying decision than unqualified visitors who may only be searching for information or even be unaware of why they ended up on a particular landing page in the first place.
Read more: ClickZ
LiveRail Launches Brand Safety Alliance For Video Advertisers
SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–LiveRail, the first real-time video ad technology platform for publishers, networks and agencies, today unveiled the Video Brand Safety Alliance, a series of technology partnerships providing advertisers, agencies, publishers and networks with the highest degree of safety available for in-stream video placements.

The launch combines best-in-class offerings from Affine, comScore validated Campaign Essentials, DoubleVerify, Proximic, AdSafe Media, and TRUSTe with LiveRail’s own reporting, analytics, and video ad serving. All of the technology partners are now natively available to the more than 200 publishers, networks and agencies that utilize LiveRail’s video infrastructure technology.
The Brand Safety Alliance gives every player in the video advertising ecosystem access to a holistic view of brand safety. Agencies and networks can now offer their brand partners insight into URLs, semantic page content, and the content of the actual video accompanying ad impressions. In addition, advertisers and publishers can utilize privacy compliance solutions to incorporate privacy notice and choice into their video ads.
LiveRail customers can now take advantage of Affine’s industry-leading image-recognition software to automatically classify and tag the video in which their ads appear. With Affine’s frame-by-frame video analysis technology, advertisers now have the data needed to determine if video content aligns with campaign objectives and brand safety specifications.
DoubleVerify’s technology will provide brand safety targeting data before the advertisement is sent to the video player ensuring brands only run the highest quality environments for all video campaigns. In addition, advertisers can make use of TRUSTe privacy compliance solutions, ensuring they comply with industry self-regulation efforts and maintain consumer trust.
The new technology partners are the latest example of LiveRail’s dedication toward complete brand safety and transparency in online video. The LiveRail Safety Alliance supplements the company’s existing URL whitelisting and syndication management capabilities, ensuring video ads never appear in environments an ad buyer deems unsafe.

Read more: BusinessWire

Media buyers are always looking for better ways to evaluate expected campaign performance. Video ad network YuMe on Thursday is expected to debut a proprietary algorithm that aims to identify the best placement of video ads across digital properties.

Publishers such as MSN, MSNBC Digital Network, IDG Entertainment and Glam Media use YuMe’s ACE ad management platform.

The new Placement Quality Index (PQI) measures key performance metrics, including interaction rate, video completion rate, video player size and player on-page location.

A baseline PQI is calculated continuously for YuMe’s Connected Audience Network, so new campaigns can be evaluated in real-time against the average performance of the entire network.

As a marketer’s campaign progresses, the real-time PQI calculations allow YuMe to automatically adjust campaign placements in an effort to optimize performance.

With a continuously updated stream of metrics, the PQI does away with “outdated or oversimplified data,” claims YuMe CEO Jayant Kadambi.

As such, YuMe is selling brands on the promise that their campaigns will reach “the right audience and run on sites that yield the highest possible performance,” according to Kadambi.

Read more: MediaPost
Will Facebook’s Premium Ads Be a Game Changer?
The most successful brands on Facebook share a common trait – they’ve figured out a way to connect with users around a shared interest or passion. They build upon that foundation and success by creating unique and engaging content, encouraging conversations, and adding value. While “likes” can build quickly through word of mouth, they are often accelerated through the integration of the brand’s Facebook address across all key touch points and via promotions and advertising to Facebook’s more than 126 million active users in the U.S. and Canada. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that Facebook was the U.S. display advertising leader for the second straight year according to eMarketer, with $1.73 billion, followed by Google and Yahoo. But with Google nipping at its heels, Facebook is once again looking to change the game, and it starts this month with the launch of Premium Ads, its new ad format.
Facebook’s Premium Ads, announced officially at Facebook’s “fMC” confab on February 29, combines the strengths of Facebook (where connections, conversations, and community flourish) with the triad of marketing disciplines (paid, earned, and owned media so central to every leading brand’s media strategy). Premium Ads not only puts a brand’s page and relevant post in front of the right audience, but it leverages an individual’s connections, i.e., “social context” to amplify its relevance and trust. The result, according to Facebook’s internal testing, is expected to delight advertisers. Specifically, according to Facebook, Premium Ads are:
Read more: ClickZ

NEW YORK–(BUSINESS WIRE)–PubMatic (http://www.PubMatic.com), a media technology company that enables premium publishers to realize the full potential of their digital assets, today announced PubDirect. PubDirect is a new management suite of tools and services powered by PubMatic’s optimization engine that accelerates the publisher’s ability to monetize their guaranteed and non-guaranteed inventory in a private marketplace that covers all demand channels.
“Top publishers struggle to directly offer comprehensive premium and reach solutions to advertisers,” said Rajeev Goel, Co-founder and CEO of PubMatic. “With PubDirect, we are introducing a unified optimization engine and insights for publishers to package in the best way to ensure that they meet the needs of their advertisers and don’t miss new revenue opportunities.”
The PubDirect suite of management tools offers premium publishers what they need to navigate the increasingly complex digital marketplace.

•Unified Optimization Engine allows publishers to monetize guaranteed and non-guaranteed inventory against multiple demand sources with a unified strategy to maximize publisher revenue at the impression level.

•Audience Direct gives publishers the ability to respond to the growing demand for audience buys by helping them to create and manage the variable value of their audience in real time. By combining first-party and third-party data sources, publishers can sell audience- targeted campaigns on a guaranteed basis using their existing ad server relationships.

•Deal Management enables pricing and brand controls and enhanced floor and deal modeling to help publishers do more than examine campaign performance. PubDirect tools and services facilitate action.

•Unified Insights enable publishers to understand their inventory and revenue across guaranteed and non-guaranteed sales channels and delivery platforms. In addition, publishers can identify and package new revenue opportunities and easily access PubDirect via their iPad. This first-ever iPad application allows publishers to conveniently view performance at anytime and from anywhere.
Read more: BusinessWire
The ABCs Of DSPs
To the uninitiated brand marketer, the term demand-side platform, or DSP, can be very intimidating. When one ventures into the nascent world of video DSPs, where the definition often changes from provider to provider, things get even more confusing.

DSPs have made a nice foothold in display advertising, and while they are attempting to provide value to video marketers, the technical differences between display and video are forcing some to stretch their claims.

It’s a bit like getting a massage. One service can differ greatly from the next. A Napa Valley resort might offer stress-relieving hot rock massages, or you could endure some of the torturous, yet effective, sports massages I’ve experienced in my past life as a runner. Of course, the massage hawked on Las Vegas Boulevard is a completely different animal (so I’ve heard). Just as the treatment (and resulting sensations) can vary, so too can the promises of each DSP.

A. Brand Safety By their very nature, ad exchanges offer little transparency into the content or pages where their inventory resides. As a result, DSPs are often unable to utilize brand protection in these environments.

Consequently, most video DSPs that promise “superior brand protection” are really offering “implied brand protection,”aka. placing sites in predetermined buckets. This strategy works some of the time, but we all know that premium news sites, for example, carry professionally made content about natural disasters, violent crimes, and other topics not fit for brand adjacencies.
Read more: MediaPost