NMA Ad Networks Special

NMA 3rd March 2011

By: Nigel Gilbert, chief marketing and development officer, Unanimis

While the market for video content online hasn’t changed dramatically over the last few years, the advertising models for video have. The same players that were big in premium video content in 2008 are still the biggest – Channel 4, ITV, Sky – and their model for selling video has remained virtually the same. The job now, of course, is to look for more channels of distribution as more budgets move online from offline. However, they’re still looking for monetisation in the same formats, the same group of advertisers and at the same type of yields.

If anything, the opportunity at the end of the market is to increase the yield, such as the demand for what’s seen to be premium content. We’ll also see some of the smaller channels with premium content maximising their own revenue this year. Currently, due to carriage deals, they’re tied to the likes of Sky and Virgin. But as opportunities like YouView impact the subscription revenues these channels are used to, their model is likely to switch to ad revenue. This will give them more control to release, distribute and monetise their video to wider audiences online, and give advertisers more choice about where they spend.

Elsewhere in the market we’ve seen exponential growth through initiatives using video creatives as well as in-stream advertising. We can’t all produce proprietary content and sell three 20-second pre-roll ads before every play, nor does every brand in the market see this as the only way to use video.

So if we look beyond selling around brand or content, there are only two primary ways to create revenue: creative execution and volume, two things ad networks are particularly good at. We can ensure that brands can reach a very large audience (not just the ones watching The X Factor) and, in Unanimis’s case, synchronise users across web and mobile to deliver an engaging experience for a fraction of the cost, while having the ability to track brand effectiveness and its impact on sales.

Video creative in standard inventory has become very big business over the last couple of years as a result of this. Brands that want to run pre-roll are not only finding it expensive and still surprisingly tricky to execute, even for big companies, but it’s also still quite small and restrictive. Expanding ads have contributed admirably to this resurgence and have given a much more cost-effective, interactive way of releasing films and games and getting your new mobile handset in front of the masses. At Unanimis we’ve found these types of creative, when executed well, increase interaction rates by over ten times.

Now working as part of a large telco group, we’re particularly excited about video distribution across mobile platforms. This allows brands to find and involve users regardless of how they’re consuming content and, paired with the correct research and data, it can be an extremely powerful targeting tool.

Moving forward, ad networks are still very well positioned to help grow this market. They’ve always responded to trends in the market faster than anyone else as they have three main functions that most publishers (even video publishers) usually lack: technology, data and scale. As a result, although the video space hasn’t grown perhaps as fast as any of us thought it might by this stage, there’s certainly nothing holding it back now.

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