It’s no secret that publishers are struggling with mobile. Advertising budgets have been slow to migrate to the small screen, mobile display is struggling, and CPMs range from low to pathetic. One company who are trying to make mobile advertising work is Vdopia, an Indian company who have created outstream mobile formats which they run across a portfolio of publishers. VAN spoke to Farzad Jamal, VP Europe at Vdopia, to see what they’re bringing to the video advertising market.
Could you give provide a little background on the origins of Vdopia and the company’s proposition?
Vdopia was founded by Srikanth Kakani, Chhavi Upadhyay and Saurabh Bhatia in 2008. We have since grown to 250+ employees globally with most recent additions in Germany and Australia. Vdopia’s proprietary tech solutions enable the scalability of video ads across all mobile devices. In addition to the more common mobile video formats such as instream and interstitials – the tech allows for videos to be delivered through mobile formats known as .VDO. These are available in mini, medium and max sizes. The company is now on a growth vs profitably stage as we’re looking to expand rapidly in EU and continued steady growth in APAC and US markets.
Where do you think you’re typically winning budget from – mobile display or video/TV?
Currently, the majority of budgets are coming from the relevant digital/mobile teams within the tier one agencies. However, the AV teams are constantly looking for opportunities beyond the usual broadcast channels and we think this is an area where Vdopia can definitely play a role .
Mobile display has been struggling to deliver significant returns for publishers and some of the leading mobile video solutions have focused on the app market. Is mobile video the key to making big brands push more budget into mobile?
Brand advertisers recognize the massive shift in which their audience is consuming media. The shift to mobile cannot be denied – however there is still a disparity between this and the money currently being spent by brands on mobile. The recent increase in mobile video consumption has allowed traditional TV advertisers (and more recently VOD advertisers) to more easily take advantage of this shift without the need for extra investment in mobile tailored ad formats. For this reason – mobile video (for the second year running) has been recognized as the fastest growing digital ad format.
What type of engagement rates do you get with your formats?
When it comes to clicks, our video formats perform frequently perform ten times better than display (CTR ranges from 2 to 2.5 percent, although we’ve had campaigns that went as high as 9 percent!). However those figures are of course entirely dependent on the video creative and product! For brand metrics – we have run a number of brand studies which demonstrate a marked increase in metrics such as brand awareness and purchase intent.
Why would an advertiser choose to work with a mobile video specialist rather than a multichannel solution?
In most places where we do business, we have the ability deliver more unique users using the “mobile video” only for the advertiser than most multi-channel solutions can deliver using all their channels combined. Most multichannel solutions do not have a good way to provide “unduplicated users” across the multiple channels they are operating on, potentially wasting precious impressions. We, however do not have such problems since we focus on one channel alone.
Vdopia’s mission is to deliver the best mobile video experience for consumers and advertisers across all smartphone and tablet devices. Our competitors tend to be companies that have diversified into this space – we conceived of it. Mobile video was our first product and we have spent the past 6 years investing in this technology.
