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!
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.
We are excited to announce that Streaming Media has selected YuMe, along with 9 other companies, as the ten “most innovative, most important, and just plan coolest stuff in online video.” In addition to YuMe, others who made the list are: Amazon Cloudfront, BoinxTV, Encoding.com, Howcast, Kyte, Livestream, Netflix, Visible Measures and Winnov. Click here to read more about the top ten.
The following video is an exerpt from an interview Daisy Whitney of Beet.TV did with Jayant Kadambi at our roundtable last week, addressing the increasing shift of TV content to alternative distribution channels and the challenges advertisers are facing.
Below is a recap of the “top 3″ challenges advertisers are facing:
Scale - TV advertisers are use to buying audiences at scale, but currently it’s hard for an advertiser to spend a lot online because there is not just one place advertisers can go. YuMe is building enough of an audience to help advertisers shift more TV dollars to online video.
Data - Everyone says they want data, but there is so much data that can be provided that it can be overwhelming. We can tell the advertiser anything they want to know, but its better if we know what their goals are, so we can provide the data that is important to them - engagement, clicks, video completion rate, etc.. Measurement of a campaign and its effectiveness can be very different per advertiser.
Format - Daisy asked “Is there a consensus on the best format?” As Jayant points out, video has a time component, which lends itself to multiple format types. What YuMe likes to do is let the advertiser run the campaign the way they want, encouraging creativity and getting them to try different executions. YuMe can then adjust in real-time based on performance.
A lot great content from last weeks event, you can watch the entire re-broadcast here.
We are very excited to announce that we have closed a $25 million round of funding today led by Menlo Ventures and including our existing investors - Accel Partners, BV Capital, DAG Ventures and Khosla Ventures. Joining our Board of Directors from Menlo Ventures is Shawn Carolan, who also sits on the board of Roku and has invested in IMVU, PlaySpan, PlayPhone and Siri. You can read all about our announcement in an article that appeared in today’s New York Times written by Brad Stone.
We had a great 2009, achieving significant revenue growth, reaching profitability and experiencing accelerated adoption of our video ad management platform “ACE.” Our ACE platform is unique in its ability to deliver qualified audiences at scale without wasting impressions, making publisher content more valuable and maximizing ad campaign performance for advertisers.
“Video is the largest advertising category on the planet and the shift from broadcast to Internet went into high gear in 2009,” said Shawn Carolan, Managing Director for Menlo Ventures. “As we evaluated all the video ad solutions on the market, we became convinced that YuMe has built the best technology in the industry in its ACE ad management platform, with its ability to optimize video advertising across all viewing environments, including IPTV, mobile and Web. The company already has demonstrated it is the market leader going into 2010 and this funding will help facilitate new technology offerings and additional expansion.”
We are very excited to announce that Scot McLernon has joined our team as Chief Revenue Officer. Scot has an amazing sales background, with over 15 years in the interactive media and advertising industry. McLernon built and led three successful web advertising sales teams, including at CBS MarketWatch, which was recognized by Forrester for highest revenue per sales person for four years in a row. While under his leadership, CBS MarketWatch won “best business and finance site to advertise with” and his sales teams earned the acclaimed ASPY award as Best Overall Sales Team on the web. Most recently Scot was President of Upstream Group, where he developed Habitat - the industry’s only combined training and networking event for sellers.
“Scot is an undisputed leader in online ad sales,” said YuMe CEO Michael Mathieu. “Having a person of Scot’s caliber join our team is a validation of YuMe’s strong position in the market and a huge boost to our team overall. Scot’s experience in driving sales and scaling business will help grow YuMe’s online video monetization efforts, strategy and value proposition.”
McLernon was on the Board of Directors for the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) for five years and co-founded the Bay Area Interactive Group (BIG) in 2004, which educates and helps network the Bay Area’s interactive marketing community. Recognizing Scot’s accomplishments as an innovator and industry pioneer, he received the ad:tech Industry Achievement Award in 2007.
Check out MediaPost’s coverage of the announcement.
Today we announced a partnership with Hearst Magazines where we will be providing in-stream video advertising technology and sales for Hearst’s portfolio of web sites, including Cosmopolitan.com, GoodHousekeeping.com, RealBeauty.com and HarpersBazaar.com.
“As the popularity and consumption of streaming video content continues to thrive, the digital team at Hearst is focused on helping its loyal advertisers take advantage of this engaging and dynamic communications medium,” said Chuck Cordray, SVP and general manager of Hearst Magazines Digital Media. “With the help of YuMe’s video ad technology, we’re able to ensure that our visitors are presented with the most relevant advertising messages and that we realize maximum revenue opportunities across all of our online media properties.”
Check out the story that Mark Walsh of MediaPost wrote.
This morning we announced that YuMe is working with Ooyala to monetize live video streams for publishers using that company’s online video platform.
At YuMe we have always been excited about the potential of live streaming video—that’s why we started offering publishers the ability to insert ads into live streams back in 2007. TV advertisers love live events like the Super Bowl where they can reach highly engaged audiences that can’t wait to see what happens next, and we think live streaming video has the same potential. Publishers like Fox News have had great results using our ACE platform to monetize their live streaming content.
In the past year, live streaming has exploded in popularity with consumers, and we are excited to help Ooyala publishers profit from their live content going forward.
YuMe works with many of the major online video platform providers, including Brightcove, Ooyala and thePlatform.
You can check out the full press release here, or see what some reporters aresaying.
At its best, advertising in online video lets marketers present their most engaging creative to attentive consumers. That’s why pre-roll and other in-stream video advertising sells for substantially higher CPMs than banner ads (which a user may not even notice, let alone click on). In the past few weeks, though, there has been quite a bit of discussion about the risks that advertisers face when buying online video inventory, particularly about the danger of ads that run in videos located “below the fold” on webpages or ads associated with content that starts playback without requiring any user initiation.
These days consumers can find video running on TV network websites, embedded on blogs and social network profiles, and even on mobile phones. This explosion of content syndication has been wonderful for consumers, letting them watch their favorite movies and shows wherever and whenever they want to. Unfortunately limitless choice for consumers has led to confusion and uncertainty for marketers.
Now that even the major broadcast networks are syndicating their prime time shows across multiple websites and allowing users to embed them anywhere they choose, everyone working in online video needs to have a firm grasp of the different contexts that video can appear in, and the relative value of any resulting advertising impressions.
To that end, we’ve put together a whitepaper that provides concrete definitions for many of the terms that people use to describe video syndication and lays out some of the steps we’re taking to ensure that advertisers only pay for video impressions when a real person actually watches a video on purpose. We’d love your feedback.
