It has been an exciting week in the world of video and connected TV advertising, with highlights this week featuring, Intel, Verison, TubeMogul, Simulmedia, Google and Wuaki.tv. To stay up to date and have the latest industry news and insights delivered straight to your inbox, sign up for the weekly VAN newsletter.
Verizon Buys Intel’s Media Division, Including OnCue Pay TV Service
Verizon and Intel announced this week that Verizon would be buying the assets of Intel Media, a division dedicated to the development of cloud-based TV products and services, which include OnCue, Intel’s stillborn TV platform. The deal is thought to have been for just under $200 million, and OnCue will be rolled into Verizon’s FiOS Internet TV service.
Once again, and probably not for the last time, we’ve learned that you can’t build a fancy TV platform expect the media partnerships to come rolling in. That said, the fact that a player as big as Verizon are committing to IP-delivered TV will be welcome news for anyone interested in seeing TV move online.
TubeMogul Launches Viewability Reporting, Powered by Open VV
TubeMogul out the viewability reporting integrated within the TubeMogul dashboard this week, which provides marketers with data on where their video ads are seen and with tools to reduce the number of unseen ads. TubeMogul say the feature will be powered by OpenVV, an open source viewability standard which has been endorsed by over 20 other companies.
TubeMogul said in a statement that video viewability is currently ‘a patchwork of proprietary standards’, and that most of the data isn’t actionable. Most reported is executed at the campaign or publisher-level, making acting on the information difficult. Standards of what counts as “viewable” also vary. Many major video ad servers, for instance, consider muted videos viewable.
TubeMogul say their reporting is designed to tell marketers not only why an ad is not getting watched:
- The portion of a video ad in view and how long it is in view for the entire duration of a video;
- Whether a window is active (i.e. a viewer is not in another window or tab);
- Player size;
- Whether a video is muted; and
- How many ad impressions are not measurable.
Google Launches Adsense Direct to Allow Smaller Publishers to Make Direct Sales
While this isn’t a video story, anyone with an interest in long tail publishers will take be interested to learn about Google launching Adsense Direct, a new service that will allow publishers to make direct sales via Adsense. The service is now aimed at display advertising, but it seems likely that in time the service will eventually be rolled into other channels.
Simulmedia Want to Move TV Ad Industry Past Demographics to Purchase-Driven, Closed-Loop Audience Targeting
Simulmedia, a US-based audience-targeted television advertising company, has expanded on a 2012 deal to integrate FourthWall’s daily feed of anonymous, second-by-second, TV viewing data from more than 2 million US homes. The data partnership will allow Simulmedia to match that viewing to household purchase data in a way that they say privacy will be protected.
“Already, Simulmedia uses FourthWall data in combination with multiple other data sources including TiVo Inc.’s TRA, Nielsen Buyer Insights and GfK MRI, among others, to sell and measure TV campaigns based on reaching audiences based on their actual purchase behaviors, not just demographics,” says Dave Morgan, Simulmedia’s founder and CEO. “Our new agreement with FourthWall meaningfully expands Simulmedia’s footprint of US TV viewing data and the anonymous purchase matching will help enable our next generation of closed loop ad targeting on TV, where we intend to report on actual purchase lift generated by campaigns. We want to make every spot count and to guarantee the results.”
Wuaki.tv Poach Microsoft’s Xavier Llobera to be Partnerships and Devices Director
Wuaki.tv, a UK-based movie and TV series streaming service, today announced the appointment of Xavier Llobera as New Partnerships and Devices Director. Xavier is charged with driving business growth through brand, device, mobile operator and retail partnerships.
Best of the Rest
Iponweb’s Shane Shevlin Explains the Different Types of DMP (Exchangewire)
AOL Agrees to Buy Gravity, a Content Personalisation Company
Google Launches a Super Bowl ‘Ad Blitz’ Gallery for Superbowl Commercials
