Check out our roundtable, currently live from MSNBC at 30 Rock! Our roundtable is over, but you can check out the two-part rebroadcast below. Thanks to everyone who participated!

Live from 30 Rock - It’s the YuMe Roundtable!

Tune in and watch our roundtable live at yume.com or beet.tv on Tuesday, October 20th from 3-6 p.m. ET.  Hosted by Charles Tillinghast, President & Publisher of msnbc.com and featuring panelists from Adobe, Time Inc., CBSNews, GroupM, the Wall Street Journal, Ogilvy, Transpera and more.

Moderating the sessions will be Rafat Ali, editor and publisher of paidContent, Kevin Delaney, Sr. Deputy Managing Editor of the WSJ.com, and Advertising Age’s Michael Learmonth.

A big thanks to Andy Plesser of Beet.tv and the gang at MSNBC.com for helping me pull together such a great event. Check out the agenda and don’t forget to tune-in!

- Molly Glover Gallatin

We are thrilled to announce that Fox News, Glam , IDG Entertainment and Funny or Die have selected YuMe’s ACE video ad platform to manage the monetization of their video inventory. Check out our press release we sent out today announcing this news and highlighting the impressive growth we have achieved with not only the adoption of our video ad platform, but with the growth of our video ad network and advertising sales.

Here’s the quote from Funny or Die, which you will see is in true Funny or Die fashion. “YuMe’s ACE video ad platform is a true end-to-end solution,” said Mitch Galbraith, COO of Funny or Die. “ACE has streamlined our ad operations, improved inventory management, increased revenue, eliminated the common cold from our office, cured my fear of heights, and taught several of our employees to speak Portuguese.”

We also announced today that with the release of comScore’s April Video Metrix Ad Network report, YuMe is now ranked the largest video ad network with over 63 million unique viewers and 560 million video streams per month.

In addition to the great growth we have experienced with publisher adoption of our video ad platform, we have also seen tremendous momentum with video advertising sales. We now have over 100 advertisers running on any given day across our premium video ad network and the number of monthly ad impressions we are serving has increased by over 325% since January!

We are very excited about the advancements we have made in 2009 and congratulations to the YuMe team for all their hard work.

- Molly Glover Gallatin

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

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

Targeting is a funny thing (funny strange, not funny ha ha). Every Advertiser wants targeting. They want to know if people are left handed so they can pitch them left handed golf club ads. And if they are interested in golf, they figure they can pitch them a really expensive, left-handed set of golf clubs.

The issue with targeting on video (or for that matter anything) is that as you get more granularity on the audience, the smaller the inventory pool.  Audiences (18-24 yr. old males) become niches (18-24 yr. old males who like golf) and niches become micro-niches (18-24 yr. old males who like golf and were visiting golf club sites).

So, the general problem is that once you find the micro-niche for the advertiser, they’re happy and in turn they’ll run the campaign. Then everything is great, until the campaign completes and it under-delivers. Micro-niches have this nasty habit of reducing the available pool of people.  

So what’s the solution? Reach and scale. In behavioural targeting terms, it’s called overlap. If you have a large potential audience (we do - 134MM), the odds of finding people who have been shopping around for a car (proxied by people who have visited car websites or been watching car videos, etc.) in your network for that niche grow higher. And you’ll get more of them as a result, which means intent-based or behavioural targeting opportunities will be more relevant.

We recently announced the capability to do just this across our  network. We waited until we had grown to a point where we could provide a meaningful audience for advertisers. Because few things are more frustrating than being sold the ability to find left-handed males who are golfers and then finding out that the network has 3 people.  It’s hard to go back to the client and tell them that their targeted spend under-delivered badly.

YuMe’s behavioural targeting solution is pretty simple… we have reach and scale on a national level, offering advanced targeting and optimization capabilities that make video ads perform… that’s just it.

- Jayant Kadambi

Everyone who’s watched James Bond movies knows the power of branded entertainment. I can still picture Sean Connery’s Aston Martin from Dr. No, and that was run in 1961. There was an article recently in the WSJ about the success of branded entertainment. We agree, involving the advertiser early and often is the best way to integrate the content/video with the brand, get all the ideas flowing, put the brand in the right context and generally make everyone happy. There are a few problems though and it will be interesting to see if the industry can figure them out. The first is whether this system can scale to volume. It’s time consuming, onerous work, and repeating it at scale to build a $100M business may not be easy. Each set of webisodes or videos takes time to figure out (where do I put the soda can, car, etc.). The second, more interesting problem, is the same problem faced by TV in the upfronts. How many people am I going to get to see this? Since it’s new content, there’s only comparables to the content or comparables to the site. (On a side note, there are several companies who generate traffic by syndicating the content in players with auto-play turned on to blog sites to solve this problem. More on whether that is a scam or works well later).

So, how does the agency know whether their $750K for a sponsorship and branded entertainment video is going to be a success? Is the publisher/content owner going to guarantee views? The last question is whether advertisers will care if the branded entertainment gets syndicated onto sites of questionable repute or they don’t care where the content ends up. At least on TV, you know it’ll be on NBC. Online, it’s a more difficult problem.

- Jayant Kadambi

Our VP of Ad Operations, Bob Bahramipour was on a panel on Monday at SES in San Jose. After the panel he was interviewed by Mike McDonald, pretty interesting discussion… check it out.

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- Lynn

It’s quite amazing (even if I do say so myself) to look back and see the changes at YuMe over the past year. We opened the company for business in March 2007 and in a little over a year, we’ve grown our little business to be the biggest little video ad network and platform in the US. Given the huge available opportunity in the nascent video space and realising that this space is growing rapidly, we’re extremely excited to announce the addition of Michael Mathieu to the team as CEO.

We believe we are at the cusp of building something special here at YuMe and a large part of that is the team. Michael is a great addition to the team and culture here at YuMe and we look forward to building on our leadership position in this market.

- Jayant Kadambi

Watch TVTonic’s free internet TV service, enjoy great content when you want, online or offline!

YuMe is happy to announce our partnership with Wavexpress’ TVTonic free internet television service.  TVTonic is a great showcase of YuMe’s dynamic ad insertion technology for online and offline video viewing.  In addition, the YuMe platform offers TVTonic advertisers the ability to target content channels with the most effective ad units. 

Through Windows Media Center, subscribers can sign up for TVTonic and immediately access free, top notch content in channels like Technology, Lifestyle, Women, Gaming, Kids and Sports – including the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games.  These top channels include HD shows such as Rocketboom, Golf Tips, Draftguys TV, and others covering Cooking and Parenting topics.

The YuMe integrated service is now available with the recently launched version 3.3 of TVTonic for Windows Media Center.

- Rosanne Lee Vathana