Acquistions, launches, new hires and rebrands — here’s what happened this week in video advertising. For a weekly summary of industry news and other VAN interviews and videos, sign up to the weekly Video Round-Up.
BrightRoll/Yahoo Rumour Mill Continues to Gather Pace
The rumours surrounding the possibility of Yahoo acquiring BrightRoll for somewhere between $500 million and $1 billion have been continuing this week, as was first reported by TechCrunch. The prospect of a deal has led to a flurry of media speculation, the most interesting being Business Insider’s interviews with unnamed ‘industry insiders‘. While some scoffed at the price tag, perhaps the wave of consolidation in video this year is increasing the value and strengthening the negotiating positions of the scaled companies left standing.
Ooyala Acquired Videoplaza
Ooyala, one of the industry’s leading online video streaming platforms, acquired Videoplaza, a Swedish video ad platform that is headquartered in London. Read full story on VAN.
AOL Announcement
Kantar Media Acquired Audio Watermarking Division of Civolution
Kantar Media, an audience measurement company, has agreed to acquire the audio watermarking unit of Civolution with a view to strengthening the firm’s audience measurement technologies, which it intends to use for second screen activation.
US Video Advertising Spend was Up Seven Percent YoY in Q2
Total online ad revenues in the US climbed to an historic first half-year high of $23.1 billion, according to the IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report published by the IAB and prepared by PwC. The growth represents a 15 percent rise over 2013’s first-half ad revenues of $20.1 billion.
Online video — which for some reason the IAB classifies as a component of ‘display-related advertising’ — reached $1.5 billion, a 13 percent increase in revenue over the first half of 2013 at $1.3 billion.
The study also found that online advertising spend tends to be dominated by the ten leading ad-selling companies (which the report doesn’t name), accounting for 71 percent of total
revenues in Q2 2014, up slightly from the 70% reported in Q2 2013. Companies ranked 11th to 25th accounted for 11 percent of revenues in Q2 2014, down slightly from the 12% reported in Q2 2013.
Despite the emergence of a few heavyweights in online publishing, the concentration of top-10 revenue has remained relatively unchanged over the past ten years, fluctuating between 69 percent and 74 percent.
Vdopia Launched ‘Chocolate’, a Mobile Video Programmatic Marketplace
Vdopia, a company that specialises in mobile video advertising, has launched a programmatic trading platform for mobile video advertising. The new marketplace product, called ‘Chocolate,’ is built from the ground up solely for mobile video advertising. Chocolate makes use of Vdopia’s proprietary .VDO technology, which enables run video-enabled ads to run on both the mobile web and apps without Flash or plug-ins.
“One of the unique advantages of Chocolate is the capability to provide real-time bidding (RTB) to demand partners which have only basic VAST support but no RTB capability,” says Srikanth Kakani, CTO of Vdopia. “In addition, Vdopia’s new marketplace unifies a fragmented mobile video market space and addresses growing mobile industry complexities – like lack of standards, brand safety and a dearth of quality mobile video inventory – making it the only marketplace that offers end to end functionality for scaling video ads on mobile.”
TubeMogul Partnered with FreeWheel on Programmatic TV Inventory
TubeMogul announced that the company have been carrying out several months of beta testing with FreeWheel programmatically buying reserved inventory via FreeWheel’s FourFronts marketplace. In May, FreeWheel launched a pilot programme to allow selected buyers can use their own proprietary audience data to buy premium inventory on a reserved basis. Allstate, IPG Mediabrands Haworth Marketing + Media are among the first companies expected to participate.
Ad of the Week: BBC Music, ‘Gold Only Knows’
Worth a Watch: Keynote from Mipcom featuring Netflix’s Chief Product Officer
