This will indeed be a good christmas. We’ve just signed the largest commercial TV broadcaster in Sweden to serve their advertising in and around their online video. After meeting some of the larger UK publishers during the last months, I’ve realised that TV4 is one of the larger online video players in Europe (no official numbers though). Update: They did 10,7 M streams in November and the Idol 2008 had a total of 26 M started streams, both short clips and full length shows (source).

The deal is made for all the TV4 domains, not only their main site TV4.se. Launch date is not official yet as well as other details about their upcoming service.

It’s been a pleasure to work with the TV4 team and their consultants Isotop this far. They are really on top of their game and have great ambitions to make the most out of this. We are also planning to do brand lift studies and other research together, something needed to convince the largest budgets. More on that in Q1.

This is a huge milestone for us as well as for all ad funded online video in Sweden. Having a large player like TV4 selling the medium and the formats will be a force in the right direction. This will mean further education of the market and increased consistency over the TV-broadcasters in Sweden.

For every new player out there trying to push our interactive ad formats the game will get easier for all of our clients. The bigger the possible reach, the bigger the incentive for the advertisers to really explore all the interactive opportunities of our platform.

Besides this deal, we have a bunch of other announcements to make in the coming days. Stay tuned.

In the press: Resume, Dagens Media, Internetworld and Dagens Nyheter.

Sales is extremely important, even when having the best product. And it’s been a couple of months now that we’ve had the first version of the Monetizer in place ready for distribution. That means we’re moving from dev-mode to sales-mode and that’s why Magnus Hultman, now is joining the team for heading up the sales on full time!

Magnus has actually been with us for almost two months now, and it’s about time we spread the word about this.

Magnus is bringing to the team the last important critical know-how, the one of selling a product professionally and efficiently. With a background from heading up the Swedish (and some Scandinavian) sales for a web analytics company Omniture (Instadia before acquisition), he brings the experience of selling an SaaS (or ASP, whatever you want to call it) to the company. The difference this time though is that the product he sells brings in revenue rather than being a cost, that’s pretty nice :)

This is a dream recruitment for us and the prognosis for 2009 is looking better than ever. More on his accomplishments in the next post.

I will be participating in a panel Tuesday next week Dec. 9th at the Online TV and Video forum in London.

Below is a short summary of the panel topic:

Placing Value on Internet TV

Online video adverts are commanding CPMs that are higher than some rates for multichannel TV. Which brands are willing to pay for online video adverts and how can advertisers target the right consumers?

Give me a note if you would want to meet up there!

I just had a great dinner together with this talk from Jason Kilar, CEO of Hulu, where he shares the ideas and vision around the worlds greatest ad funded video site. I think this is a must-see for anyone working with ad funded online video. Not only have Hulu built a great service for the users, they are also successful monetizing their service (an interesting story on that).

The video is from the NewTeeVee Live conference two weeks ago in San Francisco, the rest of the videos are found here.

Make also sure to check out the hulu.com, something that can be rather tricky if you are outside the US. The way in is to download the Hotspot shield and you’ll be welcome :)

Playing in the dark won’t improve your game

In a meeting with ad sales people in London last week, I was told that running campaigns in video was like throwing darts in the dark. The only thing the publisher can tell the advertiser is that the dart has been thrown. They can’t confirm where it has hit the board, not even IF it has hit the board. Not only is it a boring game, it also makes it dificult to improve your game.

A dark room. Photo: Nerovivo

Turn on the lights

Having built an adserver for video, we hope to change the game that’s played here. The way the Monetizer plugin is built, we can track and present pretty much everything happening in the publishers video player. Some metrics that we present are:

• Total impressions and clicks
• Unique impressions and clicks
• (Almost) All the interactions happening in the video player - flipping, minimising, maximising, hovering etc.
• Actual time spent with campaign, measured in days, hours and minutes
• The sites where your ads have been shown, when embedded on external sites (coming soon)

And on top of all of this, we’re both proud and happy to offer 3rd party tracking! You can both track impressions and links on all our ad formats through a third party, being DFA or any other platform. More on that here.

So if you and your clients are in the dark, we might be able to help you turn on the lights. Give us a call!

One of the major problems with most existing platforms for in-stream video ads is that the ads aren’t really accountable.

Because of the technical architecture (where the ads are served within a video player built in Flash or Silverlight) it’s not as straight forward as with regular display ads to actually track the impressions back to the customer/agency adservers or other external platforms. It’s simply not that easy to execute html/javascript from within Flash.

In that perspective it’s a major leap that we now have enabled external tracking in our platform.

No longer does our end customers (the advertisers/agencies) solely have to depend on the data the publisher reports back to them. And since we have our plugin implemented right into the video player, every ad impression is counted when it has happened, regardless of if it’s tracked internally or externally.

Forget complex definitions of how late in the server side adserving process the impression should be recorded. We go all the way, logging the impressions as they happen client side.

The same goes for the other 15 types of interactions we measure on our ads. More on that another day.

I’ll be speaking at the IMC (Internet Marketing Conference) in Stockholm at 11am, Nov 26th. The conference has a pretty mixed agenda with different perspectives on marketing online with speakers ranging from Toyota to Keybroker.

Hope to see you there!

So, it’s been almost a year since we officially incorporated Videoplaza. We launched an embryo of our product in March when we served our first overlay ad ever on Kanal5.se. In July we rolled out our take on the pre/midroll when we launched our interactive iRoll ad format.

But now it’s really time to open your eyes to the backend of Videoplaza, our Campaign Manager.

Pretty early on in the development of this company we figured out that there’s a lot to be done in the area of adserving and usability. To be honest, we decided not to look too much on other interfaces when building our own simply because most of them lack good ideas to borrow.

So instead of copying the spawns of 10 years of patchwork and legacy code, we decided to use our own expertise to build something new from the ground up.

There was only one problem, we didn’t really have any expertise.

So we spent half a year doing all the traffic of our product ourselves. We spent hours on the phone with the sales guys, meddled with the creative agencies, took all the blame when things went wrong and finally we had a pretty good idea of what it is like to work as a traffic.

Then we started to build the interface we would like to work with if we we’re to keep up our traffic consultancy business (which we have no intentions of doing).

In August we rolled out the first private alpha, in October we decided to let the first real user’s in relabeling it to beta, and today I’m proud to show you some screenshots along with a few words about our ideas behind the new interface (it’s still beta though).

The dashboard:

The dashboard is the first thing you see when you log on to Videoplaza Monetizer. The idea behind it is to give you a quick look at the speed of things and a confirmation that everything is up and running.

In the top left corner you have your site’s speedometer. Since it’s all Ajax the numbers are updated in real time (or every third second) and this of course relies heavily and the magic of our backend. (Ask around, how many adservers really have real time access to live data?)

To the right of the speedometer you get the speed of the different formats that we serve (prerolls, midrolls and overlays).

Below the graph (that gives you an idea of how your site has performed during the recent past) you also get a quick overview of the booking status of your site. This is a part of the system that we aren’t quite done with yet, but the idea is that you as a traffic immediately should be able to tell if the site is overbooked. Since we use color coding it’s kind of easy to tell.

The campaign overview:

On the campaign overview page you can see all the current, upcoming and recent campaigns of your site. Active campaigns are shown in green, while inactive campaigns are gray. If there are any problems with the campaign it turns yellow for smaller problems or red if something is really bad.

As with the Opel campaign from the screenshot that has been manually stopped (which is done by clicking the big red panic button — we have been getting a lot of great feedback on that one).

This page is powered by Ajax and JQuery which can be hard to tell from a screenshot. JQuery allows us to dynamically open up campaigns with a smooth animation to dive into the details. In the screenshot I have opened up the Arla campaign the get more details on it. Also, all editing is done right in place. Just doubleclick a value that you want to alter, and you can change it right in place. (Forget the time consuming clicking back and forth between edit pages…)

The progress bars give you an idea of how much is left of the campaign and also, if it’s running behind schedule (which is the case with the Volvo campaign in the screenshot).

That’s really all I have for you today, but don’t hesitate to leave a comment or drop me a line with your feedback. We love to know what you think!

Just wanted to drop a quick note that I’m heading over to Soho Hotel in London tomorrow for a First Tuesday event. The topic will be “Unlocking the Video-on-Demand Business Potential” and there will be key notes from people from Twentieth Century Fox, YouTube, BBC iPlayer, SKY and NMA.

I’ll be in London the entire week. Drop me a comment or e-mail if you’d want to meet up tomorrow or any other day.

Google held its first ever party in Sweden last Thursday when YouTube introduced its Swedish version. This wasn’t an average release party, it was really ambitious and huge! The crowd was a great mix between media buyers, internet people and celebreties. Drinks and the post-party sausages was floating around free.

Good work by the Google people to get this party going, but too bad they didn’t mention anything on the advertising opportunities on the worlds by far largest video site. I did have a quick chat with CEO Stina Honkamaa on the topic though and she was pretty excited about this. She mentioned full page take overs, branded channels and formats she currently couldn’t talk about. We decided on a lunch later in November, maybe things will have gone less secret until then.

I believe that the advertising opportunities on YouTube will be critical for the rest of the online video advertising industry. With around 70% of the worlds video traffic, YouTube will have a big say on formats and pricing/packaging.

And finally here is Dante enjoying a Heiniken and below Swing Fly, one of my favorite artists live, on the stage.