YuMe’s take2video Blog

Last Thursday evening, at the newly opened Lucky Strike Lanes in Manhattan, Mindshare World celebrated recent their victory at the YuMe Bar Game Olympics event in style.  Over 30 Mindshare employees came out to enjoy the open bar, buffet and 4 lanes of bowling in a private lounge courtesy of YuMe as the grand prize for their Bar Game Olympic victory.  An impromptu game of Name That Tune also took over, as guests were challenged to name the artists of the songs playing on sound system, with the first person correctly identifying the artist of the song playing giving out a drink to the person of their choosing.  Despite the challenging economic times we’re in, it was great to be able to kick back, enjoy some drinks and let off some steam with a great group of agency folks.

- Gian Lombardi

YuMe hit the ‘Big Windy’ this month…

With a Nintendo Wii in tow and harvest tables in row, YuMe had a great party for Chicago’s Zed451 on Clark and Huron for Chicago agenices and clients on November 4th. Although we had several games in hand at the event, the most popular game by far was ‘RockBand.’

With the talent that was on display, we had several people in attendance who brought out their inner-rocker and brought down the house. (It’s amazing how Weezer’s “Say It Ain’t So” and Bon Jovi’s “Wanted, Dead or Alive” brings out the hidden talent in us all.)

Stay tuned for future Chicago events, and please be there for future funk and circumstance. Remember people, YuMe keeps it sharp, classy, and with elegance in Chicago.

Keep it up…

- Bret Dougherty

Recently, there was an article that caught my interest in Ad Age “As the Ratings Fall, Networks Take on Ad-Skipping,” regarding the skipping of online adverts (or rather, the lack thereof). The article basically goes on to say that even though TV consumers are used to skipping or at least having the ability to fast-forward adverts, the same shows online don’t offer that privilege.     

As I’ve mentioned on these pages before, I simply don’t understand this behaviour. People’s habits vary on an individualistic basis.  Online ad technology allows adverts to be customised to the user, to the show, to whatever. Just let the user do what they want, allow ads to be skipped. If someone doesn’t like a particular ad, then show a different one. If they don’t like pre-rolls, show a watermark / bug or an overlay / post-roll. Forcing the same thing down every viewers throat just doesn’t seem like it’s cricket.

Also, there seems to be this great angst over how many adverts can be shown online. Rather than guess, let’s show a bunch and see what happens to the viewer interest and engagement. This isn’t that hard folks.

- Jayant Kadambi

I’m all for research and science. We need lots of it in the advertising business; so that we can replace guesswork and trial and error. And the nasty reputations that come along with the combination of media planners, publishers and ad networks using instinct to make plans, rather than hard data. Often-times it’s not their fault. The science is not ready, especially in video advertising, being that it’s a nascent market.

So, I read this article on Online Ad Clicker Demographics recently and they report the percentage of people in various age and income brackets that click on ads. It was interesting to note that younger people were more likely to click on a video advert than a banner, but as they grew older, the propensity to click on an video advert declined to mirror that of other ad units. The report goes on to find similar trends when comparing income.  People earning less than $50K a year, click far more on video adverts than on display, but as they earn more, they fall into line with the other ad units.

So, video ads are more engaging for younger and lower-income people and as engaging for everyone else. Imagine what you’ll get if you’re an advertiser and the video adverts are actually contextually matched to the content with the sophistication that 10 years of display advertising has brought. As I’ve pointed out on these pages before, online video advertising is still very young as an industry.  I’ll bet when this survey is run again in 2 years, video is clearly more engaging across all demographic types.  Assuming it’s done correctly.

- Jayant Kadambi

Congratulations to the team from Mindshare World for winning the YuMe Bar Game Olympics, having won two Gold Medal and one Silver Medal.  Beyond came in a close second with one Gold and one Silver medal.  We look forward to helping Mindshare enjoy their grand prize of a happy hour on YuMe.

Final Standings

Foosball
Gold Medal: Beyond Interaction – Melissa Kugelman & Rachel Veiga
Silver Medal: Mindshare – Bessie Zhang & Richard Oh

Pool
Gold Medal: For Your Imagination – Gino Tomac & Jon Johnnidis
Silver Medal: Underscore Marketing – Rachel Marcus & Victoria Shirley

Ping Pong
Gold Medal: Mindshare – David Wu & David Hwang
Silver Medal: Beyond Interaction – Meinan Liu & Risa Pearl

Beer Pong
Gold Medal: Mindshare – Chris Dino and Richard Oh
Silver Medal: Carat – Hugh Cullman & Will

- YuMe Team

Dynamic Logic, bless their heart, conducted a study recently on the reaction to people of ads that interrupt content. I can’t quite figure out what that means, but it seems they included pop-ups or “over-the-content” ads. Yeah, I’d be annoyed too, if I’m watching Quantum of Solace and something started to float over the critical chase scene when Bond and the Bond girl are strapped into an Aston Martin chasing the baddies.

What I found interesting in the article titled “What’s the right amount of advertising?” is that the subtitle is “It can depend on the type of ad” state that not only does it depend on the type of ad, but it depends on the viewer, the viewer’s tastes, the relevancy of the advert to the viewer and the content. Maybe Dynamic Logic can run a study that includes some more variables.

According to the data, another interesting trend is that from 2005 to 2007, the number of people that found it simply unacceptable or borderline unacceptable to have “over-the-content” ads dropped from 48% to 36%. That’s significant. It either means that the ads are getting more relevant, or people are getting more tolerant. I’d suspect the former, given that from 2005 to 2007, the number of ads has increase per piece of content. Maybe in 2 more years, the number of naysayers will drop from 36% to 24%. But hopefully this time, because ads are much more relevant and contextual and tailored. Again, let’s see.

- Jayant Kadambi

If you haven’t seen the article from last week titled “Forbes Expands Ad Guarantee Program“  it got me thinking and writing. So here’s my post.

Forbes is “guaranteeing reach and frequency” for its ad buys. But only if you are part of an elite group who spend a serious amount of money on Forbes per year. Hmm, so Forbes doesn’t guarantee reach for the proletariat? If we don’t deliver the reach we promised (as per the IO), we either continue the campaign until it delivers or refund the money. I’m not sure what it means to guarantee it. Guaranteeing frequency? Well, we do that (as I’m sure others do). We’ll frequency cap the ads so the user doesn’t tire from seeing the same ad, if that’s what the advertiser wants. Basically, I’m confused about the point of the article or what Forbes was trying to say.  
 
The article goes on to state that Forbes is against the proliferation of ad networks. I guess it’s ok to say that. It’s their opinion. But the article didn’t spend enough time on why. Let me open on a couple of reasons why Forbes could think this is a good idea (and then quickly plug YuMe while doing so…)

First - Ad Networks take away business from Owned and Operated (O&O) sites such as Forbes. Well, Forbes of all magazines should be OK with a bit of friendly competition. What are they afraid of?  That we’ll outperform them because we have a far larger set of content, uniques and publishers so we can optimise and spread the ad around better to make the campaign perform better?

Second - Ad Networks are devaluing O&O inventory?  Maybe the display and search businesses sold their inventory blind, but we don’t. Everthing is transparent and we sell inventory at premium prices, while have the ability to blend in other inventory to lower the effective cpm for the advertiser, yet maintaining the campaign metrics and goals.

Third - When advertiser go to the O&O publisher and the publisher is sold out, they shouldn’t have another choice, so they simply book their ad campaign next month or next year, instead of finding another alternative. See the first point above. Sounds pretty anti capitalist to me.

- Jayant Kadambi

Our friends from Google, a few miles south of us on the 101 hit the jackpot for several reasons, one of which was their allowing all advertisers, (but mainly small ones, and ones from SMBs) to sign up, login and start running text ads. Great idea. Let’s now all do it for video. Small issue though – It’s a few orders of magnitude harder to upload a video ad than to type in a 3 line text advertisement.

Also, since the availability of video content on ad networks is far, far less in terms of volume or impressions/streams, or whatever metric you want to use, it deosn’t work so well. The reason being even if we figured out how to get the video built, uploaded and targeted,  the next problem is that the target of the 94065 zip code or DMA would end up with a few hundred or a thousand people actually watching the video. In other words the ad network just isn’t big enough to get enough scale for this kind of SMB or small market video advertising.

Spotrunner tried their hand at it for the cable spot market by hiring dozens of people with green screens, G5 Macintoshes and video cameras. There are several companies, big and small, including Comcast (see article here) who are dipping their toe in this water and specifically pitching the fact that it will be easy to advertise online with video because there are great tools to make and upload ads and target the ads online.

Well, we support all these measures. And we think it’s a great opportunity to get the little guy the ability to advertise on video. We just think that doing it on a large network will afford more eyeballs than on a web-site or property-by-property basis. Maybe we should call Comcast.

- Jayant Kadambi

So, I was forwarded this Google blog post on the future of online video. First time I’ve ever looked at the Google blog, to be honest. Anyway, not surprisingly, Chad Hurley is quite sanguine about the prospects for online video. Go figure. But seriously, given YouTube’s history over the past 3 years, it’s a pretty safe bet.   

As I’ve mentioned on these pages before, I fancy myself to be a photographer, (mostly wildlife and nature, not portraits), not that you cared. Why do I mention this?  Well, it’s amazing how when I have a video camera or a camera in my hands, people will mug for the camera, do silly things, pose, and then rush to see what it looks like and then ask if they can have a copy so they can send it willy nilly to friends and acquaintances alike. It seems human nature loves video and the social interaction that comes with sharing video. So, yes, we agree with the assessment that video has a good future.

The question on the table in our minds is really which of this video is monetisable in a systematic way that will allow the cost structures for uploading, streaming, delivering and syndicating this video content all over the planet to be supported by a method other than charity from Google’s search business. Will advertisers actually place ads in, around, over and generally associate themselves in order to make this video distribution and content creation business really blossom? Or will there be another business model around it?

Interesting times, for sure.

- Jayant Kadambi

We threw a party at the top of the Transamerica building last Wednesday, 9/10 in San Francisco. We invited clients to check out the spectacular view and enjoy the Wii. Boy, did some people really get into Rock Band. We had a few people that played the drums and they were spot on! There was also a guy with the mic that scored 99%!!! Can we say the next American Idol!!! Anyway, everyone had a great time and check out some of the pixs and vids.

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- Lynn Cayabyab