While live television still plays a major role in consumers’ lives, U.S. audiences are no longer dependent on network scheduling to access programming.

While direct response advertising isn’t losing steam, marketers and consumer product manufacturers are looking more toward social media, mobile and video ads online as platforms to introduce shoppers to the brand and strengthen the relationship between the company and its audience.

As consumer focus shifts between a multitude of devices, so do brand ad dollars.

Last month, Nielsen gave a growing trend among American consumers a name. Zero-TV households refer to consumer groups that rely solely on non-traditional outlets and services – like streaming sites, Smart TV apps and mobile platforms – for television content.

Advertisers are increasingly using video as a primary brand advertising vehicle.  To attract premium advertisers, it’s imperative for publishers to find and offer the best video advertising solutions that are also engaging for their viewers. To help publishers offer the best placements for advertisers, YuMe now enables its publishers to segment their video inventory based on new, advanced player targeting capabilities. Specifically, YuMe publishers on the YFP Pro platform can now target their direct-sold campaigns based on player size, location and minimum visibility to ensure prime viewership. Details for each include: Player Size  – Target to video players that are of a specific size (i.e. Players of size 450 x 337 )   Player Location– Target to players relative to a specific page fold (i.e. above, below) and/or based on page location (i.e. top-right, center, bottom-left, etc.)   Minimum Player Visibility – Target to a minimum player visibility threshold, say 90%, to ensure maximum viewability of your campaigns   To use this feature for campaigns, publishers simply need to update their YuMe SDK to the latest version and ensure that this feature is enabled. Publishers can then create targets for their campaigns using the targeting rules in the new Player Parameters section within the Trafficker module.   In addition to targeting, publishers can now view advanced reporting on player size, location and visibility for each campaign, irrespective of whether player targeting was used or not. Therefore, publishers can now manage and analyze their video inventory in order to command high CPMs on their best performing inventory.   YuMe has been offering its proprietary Placement Quality Index (PQI) to its premium advertisers since 2011. PQI is a sophisticated advertising technology that takes into consideration many different factors, including the new publisher player targeting capabilities, to best match ads with optimal inventory placements …

Last year may have been considered the year of mobile, but as many focus on the growing capabilities and popularity of smartphones, tablets and everything in between, one trend is strengthening consumers’ addiction to internet technology.

While television was once considered a passive activity, mobile technology has since turned media consumption into a busier pastime, which consumers constantly switching from screen to screen as they watch TV programming and movies.

In the digital age, streaming capabilities, media publisher’s mastery of the web sphere and streaming technology have completely overturned the way consumers interact with brands.

While the internet isn’t completed vampirizing television the way it did print, many broadcast and cable stations have realized the need to put their shows online.

Billions of people around the world find themselves constantly connected to the web.  Internet speed and capabilities are growing so quickly that in quarter four 2012, viewers watched live video 18 times longer on desktops, five times longer on tablets and four times longer on smartphones than via video on-demand.