Archive for May, 2008
The Sky Is Falling
I don’t know if children still read about Chicken Little. As a matter of fact, I’m not sure they still read, but rather than discuss the state of our educational system, I thought I’d make a couple of comments on Will Richmond’s VideoNuze blog about the broadcast media revenue sky falling.
Given that I like history (and in the beginning of this venture dabbled in the theatrical, feature-length film space), this business about TV money drying up because broadband doesn’t monetise as well sounds familiar. When DVDs came out, there was a human outcry. People would copy, pirate, and do all kinds of bad things that would presumably shutter the glorious cinema industry. Last I checked, DVDs were over $20B in revenue and theatrical revenues were under $10B.
Here we are again. People online don’t watch as many ads as on TV, so therefore, we’ll all make less money, etc., etc. Maybe. But being a wannabe mathematician, I will point out that the total revenue isn’t just the number of ads shown—it’s the number of ads shown multiplied by the number of people watching multiplied by the amount of money charged per ad. Let’s all say FOX and Will are correct and the number of ads per each piece of content will always be higher on broadcast than online (though I’m not personally conceding that). Even under those circumstances, we still have 2 other factors to keep the total revenue reasonable: cost per ad and scale.
Well, scale is easy. Broadband will have huge scale, in fact it will have worldwide scale and more people will have access to content online than on TV. It’s only a matter of time. I guess watching broadband delivered content is interesting, but let us not go there yet.
As far as cost per ad, if you had an ad management system and platform that allowed run-time and real-time optimization to figure out which ads worked best, targeted the ads to the user so they didn’t get annoyed, found the correct ad type that worked with this content and managed to automate all of that at scale, maybe, just maybe, the CPMs would stay up.
This is a very nascent market. While I admit that online advertising is taking longer than analysts once expected, I don’t think we should all rush to conclusions because the current state of the ad industry from a technology side isn’t running as optimally as the search business. It will.
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Branding Facelift
We just completed the design process for a new logo and tag line. We will be rolling it out over the next couple of weeks, so bear with us as we redesign our website. When I joined YuMe a year ago last February, I had a total of 2 weeks to get the company launched, so it was nice to finally have some time to focus on our brand and messaging. My goal when I started this process with our creative agency Singlebound, who was fantastic to work with, was to add an element of fun to our branding and to develop something that would resonate with both the ad agency and publisher community.
For our tag line we decided to go with “Where ads go to play.” We hope this will drive home the idea that YuMe’s solution works across all platforms – streaming, download, mobile – and that we are the place to go for ALL video advertising. And, not to sound too corny, but we wanted to have a little fun with the concept that ads that run on YuMe are happy because they are placed in a contextually relevant, brand safe and engaging environment.
If you have any feedback on our new look, good or bad, let me know.
- Molly Glover Gallatin
MicroHoo Theatrics
According to yesterday’s NPR Marketplace “Microsoft refines search for Yahoo deal” edition, YuMe may have a role in the latest Microsoft Yahoo theatrics!
Bob Monroe, associate professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, sees huge potential in developing the next generation of ads – “if they [Yahoo-Microsoft] could find a way to target video ads — the way Google currently does targeted keyword advertising, to actually insert different ads for different viewers [exactly what YuMe does!] — that’s where I think there’s a really interesting opportunity. But nobody’s really figured out how to do that right yet.”
We’ll be reaching out to Yahoo-Microsoft and Prof. Monroe to make sure YuMe is included on the latest negotiations!
- Rosanne Vathana 
CBS Acquisition a Boost to CNET’s Video Strategy
Today’s announcement about CNET being acquired was big news, but the blog post that I found most interesting pertaining to this deal was one from Liz Gannes at NewTeeVee. Liz noted that CBS has actually been a lot more aggressive than CNET in its online video strategy and that CNET’s video content to date has been underutilized and could end up being much more valuable under new management. This is just another validation that well-executed video can be a very profitable venture these days.
- Molly Glover Gallatin
Kuma Games Joins YuMe’s Video Ad Network
We just added a new publisher – Kuma Games – to our network. Kuma provides rich high quality 3D episodic games delivered to PCs. Five of their most popular brands are: 1) The Dinohunters 2) Dogfights 3) The Killpoint 4) The Kuma War and 5) Shootout. We are excited about our partnership with Kuma because we will now have access to their “ultra-immersed” audience, 98% of which are Men 18–34. Check out Kuma Games… they have pretty addicting games…
- Lynn Cayabyab
In-Stream Video Ad Formats Launched by the IAB
The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) announced yesterday the release of “In-Stream Ad Format Guidelines.” YuMe was involved in crafting these, which like any process where you try and get multiple companies to agree, was trying at times. That being said, we are very excited to finally have some parameters out in the marketplace that make buying video advertising easier!
Video is still a moving target and it is still early in the game, but the guidelines announced are at least a step in the right direction and should help encourage consistency across publishers in terms of ad formats and specs supported.
Ad products addressed by the guidelines include:
Linear video ads – ads that are consumed before, in the middle or after the video content. Just like a commercial on TV. Examples include pre-rolls, mid-rolls and post-rolls.
Non-linear video ads – ads that run concurrently with the video content so the user sees the ad while viewing the content. An example of this is the increasingly popular interactive overlay ad. Below is an example of this ad format that we created for one of our advertisers – Kellogg’s.
Companion ads – display ads, rich media, or skins that wrap around the video experience.
Andy Plesser from Beet.TV did a great post on this announcement that I recommend checking out.
Also, as part of these guidelines the IAB launched an Ad Format Compliance Seal and I am happy to say that we at YuMe are already compliant.
- Molly Glover Gallatin
New Video Ad Formats
In the Industry Standard blog, Melissa Chang speculates on ad formats that are being used now and posts a few that may work in the future. We read it with interest over here at YuMe, because at least the first two ideas; video lead-generation and interactive pre-rolls are ideas that we’ve already seen and that fit well with video.
We’ve been saying at YuMe for some time now that video advertising systems should allow advertisers and ad agencies the same tools, analytics and general optimization and SEO/SEM-equivalent capabilities that the current search and display networks provide. As the power of the Internet is used to help provide direct-response-type metrics in video, lead generation is an obvious choice. We’ve already had ad agencies and advertisers ask us to allow the viewer to enter their email address and other data that will allow YuMe’s system to make the ad more relevant to the user.
On the second item about making the pre-roll interactive, most if not all of our pre-rolls are interactive at least from a clickability standpoint. Some publishers chafe because clicking on a pre-roll often forces the user to navigate away from the video that they were supposed to see, but we’ve not seen any drop-off in video views. And, we at YuMe can do things like remember that the user attempted to interact, wait until the video was viewed and return to the interaction, if it’s something that forces the user to navigate away from the video.
- Jayant Kadambi
