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

Yesterday’s IAB announcement about the growth of ad networks had an interesting statement: “Interviews with online publishers, …, indicate that the lack of adequate pricing tools and inventory management discipline contributed to the growth in available ad space. This is causing publishers to seek out ways to sell large inventories of unsold ads.”

I’m sure the IAB study was generally talking about the display space. But as we’ve been saying on these pages for a while, if inventory management is difficult in the display space, it’s a disaster waiting to happen in the video space. Think about it. On a web site, inventory management is not that hard. Website ad inventory doesn’t change that frequently, or if it does, it is carefully changed, with lots of analysis of where the content should be, where the 300×250 ad should be located, where the skyscraper and leaderboards should be (above the fold, below the fold, etc.).

Once the site is created, it’s a matter of figuring out how many visitors (uniques and in total) are coming to the site. Inventory forecasting is limited to maintaining a database of the particular ad units, cataloguing them and forecasting the audience based on the last 30 days of traffic or some seasonal event.

Now, I’ve exaggerated the simplicity of the display world to make a point, but in the video world, things get much harder. The content is not static; it is syndicated to multiple sites, distributed in multiple formats. There are a myriad of ad formats and there is the fact that the syndication may be uncontrollable at times, at least in terms of the viewership. Add to this to the fact that the ad inventory itself is dynamic (maybe a pre-roll is better than an overlay for a particular piece of content), this becomes an issue that needs to be addressed by video ad networks.

One unrelated point I’ll make is that I will take a bit of issue with the point made in the article about lower CPMs from ad networks. Yes, in general, that’s probably true, even in the video space, but with the right ad management system or platform, content transparency, technology and automated optimisation systems, it need not be true all the time. I’ll save that topic for another day.

- Jayant Kadambi

We just added a new publisher – Kuma Games - to our network. Kuma provides rich high quality 3D episodic games delivered to PCs. Five of their most popular brands are: 1) The Dinohunters 2) Dogfights 3) The Killpoint 4) The Kuma War and 5) Shootout. We are excited about our partnership with Kuma because we will now have access to their “ultra-immersed” audience, 98% of which are Men 18–34. Check out Kuma Games… they have pretty addicting games…

- Lynn Cayabyab

For being a relatively new mainstream technology, mobile phones are also undergoing a change as the wireless carriers fight the commoditization of their products and services. In a white paper developed by Multimedia Intelligence for the iHollywood Forum, there’s a breakdown of the trends that the mobile phone industry is undergoing.

Revenue from voice services is falling, for example, and handheld devices have saturated the market, allowing for little revenue from new customers. At the same time, mobile phones are becoming more powerful, capable of delivering a crisp, clear image and an increasingly speedy connection to the Internet. And mobile handsets are always with us, unlike our computers.

The report notes that we are still in the early stages of mobile advertising but quickly highlights the reasons why advertising this way might be an attractive way to go, showcase the interactivity and personalization of the handset, traits that offer advertisers specific metrics and “unmatched targeting capability.”

“These features not only provide value to advertisers, but value to consumers since advertising can be far more relevant,” the report read. “With personalized and behavioral opt-in advertising, the conversion from advertising to purchase should be higher, enabling higher advertising rates.”

Jayant Kadambi

TV viewers are headed to the Web more often than before. And as video segments being offered over the Internet start to resemble TV programming more often – in the form of webisodes – some are asking whether viewers will actually go back to the traditional set, especially now that the writers are striking and popular shows will likely turn to reruns to fill their time slots.

On a panel at the Ad:Tech conference in New York earlier this month, Beth Comstock, president for integrated media at NBC Universal, said that “Video has been liberated” from the TV set.

In an article this week, the New York Times notes that emerging online video clips are becoming more regular and more frequent – but aren’t nearly as long as a traditional 30-minute or 60-minute show on TV, a conscious effort driven by the theory that viewers aren’t willing to sit at the computer monitors for such a long time.

The article also notes a handful of shows that are growing in popularity and are getting advertising built in. A MySpace series called “Roommates,” for example, features the Ford Focus while an online show called “Mr. Robinson’s Driving School” on MSN features the Volvo C30.

Jayant Kadambi

Ah, the spin. Ask thousands of consumers their thoughts on a particular topic, digest the results and find a way to spin those results into something that makes you say, “hmmm.”

Take, for example, the results of IBM’s End of Advertising Survey, which found that 11 percent of the 2,400 respondents were willing to pay a small fee to watch online video without advertising. Could that mean that a YouTube Premium subscription option soon would be in the works?

So, let’s put our own spin on this. If 11 percent are willing to pay a fee, does that mean that 89 percent of the respondents would not? Sure, we can’t discount those 11 percent who would dig into their pockets for a chance to watch online videos sans advertising. But, as online video continues to evolve and companies both large and small start experimenting with new platforms for distributing that content – such as what we do here at YuMe – it seems that the jury is still out when it comes to determining what viewers are and aren’t willing to watch.

The idea behind a premium service that removes advertising isn’t crazy – after all, look at the popular of HBO-like networks. But 11 percent seems like an awfully small number to consider when developing business strategies. Let’s give it some more time to see what works and what doesn’t – and how audiences, advertisers and content publishers interact with each other on this new medium.

Jayant Kadambi