Today we released our Q2 Video Ad Metrics Report, highlighting the key trends we have seen from January through June, 2010.  Some interesting findings include the following:

• Video completion rates were up in Q2 for both pre-rolls (73% completion rate) and our custom ad placements (75% completion rate).
• Females are more often targeted than men across our network and they have a higher video completion rate.
• Custom ad placements increased by 53% from Q1 to Q2 and now represents 7% of our total ad placement mix.
• 15 seconds pre-rolls still represent a significant portion of our volume at 76% of our total pre-roll inventory.

Download the complete report here.  And if you have any feedback or data you would like to see added to our next report, email us at metrics@yume.com.

- Molly Glover Gallatin

We sponsored SFBig’s Battle of the Bands event Wednesday night at the Great American Music Hall, which was a fantastic event filled with great music!  The event was emceed by Hooman from Alice at 97.3, who did a fantastic job peddling our YuMetini, a.k.a. an apple martini.  The event was not only a ton of fun, but also helped raise money for an important cause - the San Francisco School District’s Department of Visual and Performing Arts.  The four bands who battled it out Wednesday night were:  Chief Enablers, Lovebutter (representing Universal McCann), Rainbow Brite & The Flaming Cobra Death Skulls (representing Adify) and Slipstream Sparrows (representing Butler Shine, Stern & Partners and MRM).  The winner of a HUGE trophy and Flip cameras, courtesy of Cisco, went to Lovebutter.  Take a listen below and check out our photos from the event.

YuMe is committed to providing the most powerful video advertising technology for publishers, wherever and however they choose to publish their videos, from PC to mobile, to IPTV. So we are excited to announce that our ACE technology platform now supports HTML5. Check out what NewTeeVee says about the news.

This means that publishers now have the option to monetize video distributed through HTML5-compatible devices — both on desktop and mobile devices such as Apple’s iPad®, iPhone®, and iPod® Touch, and Google’s Android devices. By ACE-equipping their HTML5 players, publishers can choose to use the ACE Ad Management System to take control of their video ad operations, or to serve ad-supported content through our premium video ad network.

If you’d like to see an HTML5 player in action, check out the live demo here. You can learn more about ACE or become a YuMe publisher here.

Yesterday’s New York Times “Corner Office” column features an interview with our very own CEO, Michael Mathieu. Not only does Michael discuss the key lessons he has learned about management and the meaning of life as he knows it, he also highlights some of the things that make YuMe such a wonderful place to work.

You can read the column, “Want the Job? Tell Him the Meaning of Life,” here. If you like what you read, you can explore our open positions here.

We are firmly committed to providing our advertisers with a brand-safe experience, so we are excited to announce that we have added a powerful set of brand security solutions to our ACE Ad Management System. Using our widely adopted ACE technology, we can proactively assess the in-page environment of a syndicated or embeddable player and prevent ads from running in inappropriate contexts. As a result, we are able to protect brands and ensure that their ads are associated with brand-safe content and work with publishers to improve the list of sites in which their syndicated and user-embeddable players appear.

You can learn more about YuMe Brand Security here. And be sure to check out MediaPost and MediaWeek’s take on the news.

Tune in this Tuesday, June 22nd from 4 to 6 p.m. EST for our video roundtable with Beet.TV and MSNBC. Hosted by Scot McLernon, YuMe’s CRO, and Mark Marvel, MSNBC.com’s Sr. Director of Video. The topic? Exploring online video monetization and syndication. Moderating the panel is Andy Plesser of Beet.TV and Peter Kafka of All Things Digital’s “MediaMemo.” Joining us on the panel includes the following industry veterans:

Andy Chapman, Leader, The Exchange, MindShare

Allen DeBevoise, Chairman and CEO, Machinima.com

Ran Harnevo, CEO, 5Min

Ping Li, Partner, Accel Partners

Bob Mason, Co-Founder and CTO, Brightcove

John McCarus, VP & Group Director, Digitas/The Third Act

Adam Shlacter, Managing Partner, Digital Investment, MEC Global

Tania Yuki, Director, Product Management, comScore

You can check out the live stream here, on our home page or on Livestream at www.livestream.com/beet_tv.

- Molly Glover Gallatin

Think LA 2010 - Pokeraoke - Watch more Funny Videos

We sponsored the poker tournament at ThinkLA’s Pokeroake event, which was a blast!  There was a great turnout from our agency clients and publisher partners in L.A.  Here’s a few photos and a video from Break.com, who interviewed our fabulous Sr. Manager of Sales Planning, Victoria Steinberg.

Blake Hebert, YuMe's Sr. Automotive AE, hanging with Kamla Kasichainula, YuMe's Sales Planner, and friends from Vibrant Media.

I spent the past few days at the iMedia Agency Summit in Austin, TX.  It was a great conference, with the usual mix of networking, cocktails and industry learnings, not necessarily in that order.

iMedia Welcome Reception

The theme this year - “Building the future of digital advertising.” The opening keynote by Lisa Donohue, CEO of Starcom, on Monday was interesting and I was glad to hear she agrees that we should move past the online metrics of today, like click-through rate. Her metrics of choice? Community, conversation, currency and content.  Guess we will need to figure out how to measure this??  Doug Weaver, the co-founder and CEO of Upstream Group, gave an entertaining keynote on Tuesday on “Dead Internet Ideas.”  My favorites “dead” ideas were: (1) Optimizing Click Rates, (2) Blind RFPs and (3) Worshiping at the altar of advertising. Jodi Harris of iMedia did a nice recap that you can check out here.

And the biggest highlight of the conference, of course, was the opening night party we threw with mouth watering Texas BBQ and a mechanical bull!

Today we are happy to announce that we are now supporting publishers who choose to use the Sorenson 360 online video platform, or to build their video players using Adobe’s new Open Source Media Framework (OSMF). By ACE-equipping their Sorenson 360 or OSMF players, publishers can choose to use the ACE Ad Management System to take control of their video ad operations, or to monetize their videos through our premium video ad network.

We believe that publishers should be able to manage their video advertising through one simple interface without worrying about where and how they will be able to distribute their videos—that’s why we’re constantly working to make sure that publishers can ACE-equip all of their video players no matter what technologies they choose, and no matter what viewing devices they distribute their content to, from PC to mobile to IPTV.

If you’d like to see an ACE-equipped Sorenson 360 player in action, check out the live demo here. You can learn more about the Open Source Media Framework here. Click here if you’d like to learn more about ACE or become a YuMe publisher.

We are committed to providing the most powerful video advertising technology for publishers, wherever and however they choose to publish their videos, so we are excited to announce that our ACE technology platform now supports Microsoft Silverlight. Check out what MediaPost and Beet.TV have about the news.

Starting today, publishers can ACE-equip their Silverlight players with our new Silverlight SDK. Publishers with ACE-equipped Silverlight players will be able to receive pre-, post- and mid-roll ads as part of our video ad network, and they will have the option to take control of their video inventory with the ACE Ad Management System—our set of cloud-based publisher ad operations tools.

We would like to thank IBN Sports for working with us as we finalized the Silverlight SDK. You can check out some great sports content in their Silverlight player at www.ibnsports.com.