It doesn’t seem to long since mobile-focused video ad tech companies were viewed as fringe players. But mobile video’s staggering growth has served to highlight just how well positioned all of these companies are in an increasingly crowded market. One of those companies is Beachfront Media. Here Frank Sinton, Beachfront Media’s CEO and Founder, explains the Beachfront proposition, how the company’s app development solution generates additional supply,
Could you give a high level overview of what Beachfront are bringing to the video advertising market?
Beachfront Media, with our core ad tech product, Beachfront.io, is one of a few video advertising companies that is taking a “mobile first” approach to video advertising. With the many publishers seeing more than 50 percent of their traffic coming from mobile or tablet devices, we saw that the approach to video advertising needed to a change – particularly around yield optimization and ad load performance.
Beachfront.io is both an SSP and DSP with a mobile focus. On the Beachfront.io SSP side, we enable publishers to yield optimize all of their video advertising, in one place. On the Beachfront.io DSP side, we bring geo-location, demographic, and unique interest-based data to advertisers to help them properly target & optimize their campaigns to reach their KPIs.
Who are the main users of your app development service? Do independent apps present a meaningful threat to the major video platforms?
Our app platform, Beachfront Builder, is being used by anyone who wishes to further engage their audience through mobile apps – our clients include YouTube creators such as Epic Rap Battles and EliteShotHQ to TV shows such as The Taste and Family Feud.
We don’t see independent apps as a threat to the big aggregators. Rather, it is complimentary – the big aggregators bring in a large audience and the independent apps are a tool for creators to further engage with their fans in a deeper way than they can on the aggregated apps.
Advocates of mobile advertising frequently talk about the amount spent on mobile advertising isn’t keeping up with the amount of time spent using their devices. Will there always be a shortfall — due to the smaller screens and the increased likelihood that short-form content is of an inferior quality — or do you believe spend will catch up?
This is the $30b “mobile gap” opportunity that Beachfront is aggressively betting on closing. We strongly believe that spending will catch up, especially as the technology to reach, measure, and deliver becomes better understood. It will take time and will be a process, but ad tech products such as Beachfront.io, Vungle, and MobFox are actively addressing the unique needs to reach this audience.
What are the main barriers for publishers when it comes to video advertising?
Right now, one of the main barrier for publishers is the lack of ad tech that properly delivers in a timing manner, with tools to do yield management. This is exactly the problem that we say with our own apps, and have heard from others too – it was the main driver for creating Beachfront.io.
The other barrier for publishers is to create the quality inventory that video advertisers want – i.e. non-incentivized, in front of content. However, as the brand spending is starting to pick up, we are seeing more and more publishers figure this out and offer premium content sections – similar to what Snapchat has done with their “Discover” section.
Connected TV is one area of video that many believe should be performing better than it currently is. What could be done to accelerate its growth?
On the consumer side, Connected TV requires a much easier user interface for users. Roku is successfully attacking this needs & the others are catching up. On the advertising side, proper measurement and targeting are the two needs that we hear about. While mobile video is still nascent, Connected TV is even earlier – we are expecting to see a lot of change in this area, especially towards subscription services, in the future.
