Yaniv Nizan's Personal Blog

AdKeeper - A New Startup that Let's You Keep Ads You Liked - Very Relevant for Video Ads

I just ran into a very interesting company called AdKeeper. The idea is to basically let users keep an ad in the same way you would cut an ad out of a newspaper. Pretty basic yet very useful for users who are hesitant to click on an ad and prefer a service they can predict and trust. 

The founder of this company is Scott Kurnit, who also founded about.com which will definitely help it reach the critical mass of partnerships required for this type of companies.

 

 

I found this service even more relevant to In-Stream video ads such as pre-rolls, mid-rolls, and post-rolls that tend to disappear after 30 seconds unless they are clicked.

Will be very interesting to watch this company evolves.

Online Video Ad Networks Sizes

I was doing some research for EyeView and came across this piece of interesting information by ComScore. The table below gives the size of each one of the top 10 video ad networks according to their reach.

While this table is gives some idea of the size of the networks it doesn't tell the full story. One thing you must have noted is that YouTube and Hulu are missing from this table since they are classified as publishers and not networks. Both of them have bigger reach from any of the networks listed here.

Another thing to note about this table is that there is a big difference in the quality of the inventory in different networks. This is true for any type of advertising but the difference is very drastic in Video. Since video production usually costs a lot of money to produce, publishers that feature original premium productions that are mainly based on TV programs or movies can charge very high rates from their advertisers. At the same time, websites such as YouTube that feature user generated content (UGC) can barely sell their inventory. 

If you want to visit the websites of each of these networks, here are the links:

1. Tremor Media
2. ScanScout
3. Yume
4. Adconion (Joost)
5. Advertising.com
6. BBE
7. Break Media
8. Spotxchange
9. Tidal TV
10. Bright Roll

Google AdWords Retargeting Feature Will Change the Face of the Web

In a recent post I commented on a troubling trend towards compensating publishers at the low-end of the funnel and the implications this may have on the entire online advertising industry. I anticipated that this problem will get solved over time and today we are one step closer to that. 

Earlier this week, Google announced a new feature for AdWords called remarketing (also called retargeting). Essentially this gives advertisers a way to present targeted ads to users who have already been to the advertiser website by planting the double click cookie. This new feature presents great value for advertisers and I'm sure it will be adopted quickly by the majority of the advertisers.

Putting aside the privacy issues that this new feature presents, Google just created a very big opportunity for publishers at the higher end of the funnel to get better compensation for "intent generation". As this new feature gets widely adopted it's implication on conversion rates will be quantified and it will be easy to associate a dollar value with the act of planting the cookie (flagging). I expect that soon after a new payment model will be developed to compensate such an act - let's call it cost per flagging (CPF). The advertiser will be able to plan a campaign where a user gets flagged on the publisher website if he reached certain criteria based on time of exposure to the ad, dwell time over the ad or some interaction with an interactive ad (widget). Since the advertiser can now associate a dollar value with the flagging he will be able to pay much higher rates in CPF as compared to CPM and since very little user actually click out of the publisher website, CPF will also yield more RPM/eCPM than CPC for the publishers.

This can have very significant implications on the entire web since it can revert the current trend towards the end of the funnel. Giving more revenue to the publishers at the higher end of the funnel means more quality online content and less annoying aggressive advertising which tries to get you to click out of the website. So essentially, it means better web experience for the users.

The implication on the online advertising industry can also be tremendous. The existing trend towards trapping the online advertising industry in the "intent harvesting box" can now be reverted and the advertisers will start shifting the huge brand advertising budgets from other media channels to the online channel as they will be able to measure the ROI on "intent generation" / brand advertising.

Startup Opportunities in the Online Advertising Market

I recently had the opportunity to read a post by Chris Dixon and was really inspired. Chris described a problem in the online advertising market which is a very interesting market for a startup as it's still growing, changing and creating opportunities to make things better.

The problem Chris described is that online advertising budgets are being more and more focused on what he referred to as "intent harvesting" as opposed to "intent generation". In a nutshell, what Chris is saying is that the appetite of the user is built over several visits to different websites but only the last one of them gets the credit for driving the purchase. 

I believe that this problem will get solved over then next 5 to 10 years. 

The online advertising market is part (a rather small one) of the overall advertising market. If we take a look at the bigger picture, the current trend is putting the entire online advertising at the risk of being trapped in the "intent harvesting" box and never reaching it's full potential. There are just too many people who will loose from that situation including the ones who are currently gaining from the trend.

This expected change will create a lot of startup opportunities.

Changes always creates startup opportunities. It's much harder to navigate a bigger company through a change then it is to navigate a small one and so some of the bigger companies wouldn't survive this change and some of the startups will become really big.

Online Sales - Doing it Right

My background is 100% b2b enterprise sales which are rarely done online. Since EyeView is all about increasing online sales, I had a lot of learning to do in order to understand how online sales works. What I discovered is that the basics are very similar - it's all about engagement and commitment.

In order to close a sale (either online or offline), you want to engage your buyer and then turn his engagement into commitment. This is done in multiple steps in which you get a commitment and then leverage it in the next step.

In offline sales, the engagement is done through a presentation and personal relationship and the commitment you want to achieve can be customer actions like:

1. Spending time learning about your product
2. Coming to your office
3. Risking his reputation by championing your product in the organization
4. Getting other resources in the company commit time to evaluate the solution
5. Making a commercial commitment

In online sales, the engagement is done through creative content and the best tool for that is video (check out www.eyeviewdigital.com). The commitment is usually done by the customer taking actions like:

1. Spending time on your website
2. Sharing with others
3. Giving away personal information (aka - signing up)
4. Downloading and installing something on his PC
5. Giving away credit card details (without payment)
6. Submitting a payment

If you want to see some good samples of how to do this right, check out EyeView, Yield SW, Readysite, Ginger SW and Caphyon. 

Why Online Video is Perfect for Preformance Advertising

Not too long ago I published a post called “why online video advertising will never work” I would actually like to take some of it back. Don’t get me wrong, I still believe that the expectation that online video advertising will become even close to TV advertising in revenue will prove wrong due to the nature of the use of the internet. 

However, what we started seeing recently in EyeView is that video is a very powerful tool to increase click quality and click value. More specifically, our stats show that users who have been exposed to promotional video content before or after the click on the banner where 10%-50% more likely to convert (buy, register, download, ...) when compared to users  who weren't exposed to the video content. This means that while video is not a good tool for online display advertising or for improving CTR (click through rate) it is a great tool for performance advertising or affiliate marketing.

To understand this, lets get into the mind of a user. As long as the user is browsing an interesting news article he will respond quite negatively to something as dominant as a promotional video and will probably try to close it as soon as possible if not even browse out of the website completely. However, once the user showed some initial interest by moving his mouse over a banner or clicking on a banner, he is already expecting to receive a sales pitch and this is where the video is a perfect tool for getting the user excited about the product and driving him to take action.

To conclude, while video is probably not going to revolutionize display advertising it might have a chance for doing that in performance advertising.

Why Online Video Advertising Will Never Work

I wanted to write about internet video advertising being failure for a long time but didn’t get a chance to do that. Since my colleague here at EyeView beat me to the punch with this post I’m going to add my 2 cents.

As soon as online video began to boom the search for a way to monetize online video began as well. The leading thought was that the video advertising is going to be done the same way as TV advertising is done - by adding short commercials in between videos. So far this have proven to be a failure as noted by Ben Weinberger of Digitalsmiths in this post. 

My take on it is that the internet is fundamentally different than broadcast TV since the internet is an interactive hyperlinked world where you can run in multiple lanes at the same time while the TV world is a passive world in which the information is sequenced and channeled. This drives a very different user behavior in each one of these mediums. The TV user expects to do nothing while giving 100% of his attention to the big screen and basically accepting whatever sequence of programs he is getting including all the ads in between. At the same time, the internet users are actively searching and discovering things and are giving attention only to content that they are interested in while immediately clicking away from anything that is promotional or looks like an advertisement. This is the reason why video will never work as an advertisement in the online world.

Having said that, online video and specifically promotional video is going to grow bigger and bigger. How is promotional video is going to grow without video advertising? The answer is very simple – the videos are going to be on the destination websites. There are 3 main things that makes video perfect for destination websites:

1. The users that get to the destionation website are there to learn about your product so they will be happy to receive that information in a promoation video.

2. The video tends to focus users on one thing and this is exactly how you want them when they enter the buying process.

3. Unlike in video advertising, you can fully monitor, control and adapt the video experience to reach maximal impact when the video resides on your website.

To conclude - video can be a great marketing tool as long as it is being used properly - on your own website and not on the publisher website.