Appnexus announced today that it is entering the programmatic video advertising market, claiming they will make programmatic video advertising available to advertisers ‘at a fraction of the prevailing market rate’. Appnexus say they can do this in a way that ‘preserves and improves yield for sellers of video inventory’.
Testing of the AppNexus platform’s video product is currently in closed Beta with an open beta planned for Q3. Appnexus say they can achieve ‘segment-targeted campaign user reach that is ten-times greater than that of channel-specific competitors’, saying they can provide inventory access ‘to 250 billion video impressions per month and growing’. However, this suggests that Appnexus is also counting display inventory as potential video impressions, which in fairness to Appnexus seems reasonable when you consider that the success of outstream formats and the fact that majority of programmatic video ads are currently served into 300×250 MPUs.
“Three years ago, I announced that AppNexus was not going to enter video until we could introduce products every bit as strong as our display platform,” said Brian O’Kelley, CEO of AppNexus. “Because of our scale, we offer greater audience reach and data match rates than channel-specific entrants. We can also deliver our product at a fraction of their cost. That translates to better value for buyers and increased monetization for sellers.”
Eric Hoffert, SVP, Video Technology, AppNexus, speaking at the Appnexus Summit in London.
AppNexus also announced the appointment of Eric Hoffert as SVP of Video Technology, who spoke about ‘bursting the video cost bubble’. Hoffert has clocked up 25 years of experience at Apple, Spotify, JW Player, AT&T Bell Labs and startup ventures. At JW Player, Hoffert was CTO and EVP Product leading engineering and product for the company’s video player and monetization platform. At Spotify, he was the founding member of the video team and served as video architect for its streaming product. Earlier in his career at Apple, he co-founded the QuickTime software project, led development of the first real-time software video compression algorithm running on the QuickTime multimedia standard, and managed the Multimedia Communications Group. For this work he received the Apple CEO Technical Award.
The Product
- 250 billion ‘video impressions’ per month (we’re assuming these include display)
- Buyers can target campaigns for linear, in-banner or interstitial video ads by player size, playback method, and ad position (pre, mid, or post roll)
- Integrates with a ‘number of leading video SSPs’ Additionally, buyers are able to view video reports by quartile, skip, start, completion rate, and cost per completed view.
