Watch all red carpet interviews from Streaming Media West in San Jose.
Companies that produce online video have one thing in common. They’re all trying to make their video production economically sustainable.
Zappos.com, a retail company, produces marketing videos to help sell more shoes, shirts and sunglasses. The marketing expense it incurs to produce online video needs to translate to greater sales.
An online publisher, such as NYTimes.com or ESPN.com, wants to generate advertising revenue around the video it produces. Simply put, it wants to monetize the video.
The challenge companies face in the wild west of online video (and the more wild and more west of online video advertising) is one of standards and interoperability. Every publication has a different online video platform provider. And there are a variety of ad networks that deliver a variety of ad formats, types and sizes. So if a brand advertiser, such as Nike, wants to advertise on ESPN.com and SI.com, among other sports sites, it may quickly discover that ESPN.com has one video platform, whereas SI.com uses a totally different platform to deliver its video. ESPN.com uses ad network A, whereas SI.com uses ad network B.
And Nike has a unique type of in-stream overlay ad it wants to display on both sites. But neither has an ad platform that can handle the type of ad Nike wants to deliver. So customization and tweaking need to be done to make it all work.
Multiply this experience by the thousands of brand advertisers that want to advertise on the thousands of sites that use a variety of video platforms and ad networks, and the online video monetization game comes to a screeching, inefficient, manual labor inducing halt.
Enter Adap.tv, a video advertising platform company that helps publishers, ad networks and advertisers monetize online video through in-video advertising.
I spoke to Teg Grenager, Vice President, Product & Marketing, and Co-Founder, at Streaming Media West. Adap.tv is trying to become an operating system for online video ad delivery that creates standards, APIs and hooks to help normalize the ad creation, delivery and monetization processes.
The companies OneSource product is a video ad management system. It helps companies connect to their own internal ad server or any number of ad networks that Adap.tv has partnered with. Adap.tv works with many of the major Online Video Platform companies, such as Brightcove, Kaltura, VMIX, The Platform, and Ooyala, Ad Network companies, such as BrightRoll, ScanScout, SpotXchange, TidalTV, Adconion, Tribal Fusion, Break Media, Fox Audience Network, and a number of rich media technology vendors, such as EyeBlaster, EyeWonder, and Adotube.
Teg said that standards are something that the industry has been working on to get online video ads to display. They’ve been working with the IAB, among other organizations, on this front. Once standards are in place companies can innovate and create new ad types that can be easily integrated with publishers existing video platforms and ad networks.
Innovation is important because pre-roll ad units are not delivering the most value to viewers, advertisers and publishers. Today, the overwhelming volume of ad spending for online video is repurposing 30 second TV ads for online delivery. So what’s next?
I asked Teg for an example of a web site that is innovating with video ad delivery. He mentioned Hulu, which allows viewers to pick what type of advertisements they want to watch. For example, if a viewer likes lemon over orange, they will see an Absolut Citron ad rather than an Absolut Mandarin ad.
For advertisers, ad insertion and detailed ad tracking (analytics, metrics, measurement) are critical, and Adap.tv, along with others in the industry, is working to make sure that more data is available to advertisers to slice, dice and act on.
