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The future of video ads
By Rafe Needleman
The following
article can be found on Webware.com at the link below:
I just got a very interesting demo from Adap.TV CEO Amir Ashkenazi.
His company has built an online video-advertising technology that
ignores one of the old maxims of advertising: that advertisements
should be in the same medium as the content they are running in.
Adap.TV places text ads in videos. When a user clicks on one of
these text come-ons, the video pauses and a new window opens on the
ad's Web page.
It's a smart strategy, because there are a lot more text and Web ads
for the system to chose from than there are video ads, and the
experience for the Web user is less obnoxious than other embedded
video-advertising schemes, including preroll, postroll, and in-place
permission-based video ads.
Adap.TV currently uses the Looksmart text ad network as its source
of ads. It also reads in the Amazon catalog and can match products
to videos that are playing. The system is completely automated--it
uses both metadata (tags and links) as well as video analysis
(speech-to-text and scene change detection) to determine the ads to
place and where to insert them.
When you click on the text ad under the video, the player pauses and
opens the ad link in a new window.
In the screenshot is a sample of what the system does at its best,
from the Spiderman video game promo that's up on MetaCafe (the ads
don't seem to appear on the video when it's embedded, which is
interesting).
Adap.TV isn't universally brilliant, though. On a user-submitted
music/travel video I tried, it popped up seemingly out-of-context
ads. I got a "Locate people for free" promo at about 1:24 in this
video of pretty sunsets.
The system monitors performance of the ads it chooses and refines
its choices based on what users are--and are not--clicking. So,
hopefully, other users won't see the bad ad that I did.
For the past month, Adap.TV ads have been served on four channels of
MetaCafe (Travel, Video games, Music, and Sports). MetaCafe has not
yet increased its payouts for publishers whose videos get the ads,
but the Adap.TV platform has increased the site's revenue per video,
Ashkenazi told me. Other partnerships are in the works.
People who want to embed the Adap.TV technology on their own site
can get code from the company to do so. Ashkenazi says it takes
about an hour to integrate it into a video site (I did not test
this). The advantage to doing this, of course, is that all the
advertising revenue from the Adap.TV ads will then flow directly to
the publisher.
The way Adap.TV puts text ads into videos is very smart. We haven't
yet seen, though, what Google/YouTube will settle on for its video
monetization strategy. For all we know, Google may settle on Adap.TV.
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