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.

This week is an important week for two great friends, and the future of music. Spotify and SoundCloud are both launching this week, it’s crazy!

Spotify

Spotify, founded by a good friend of mine, Daniel Ek, was finally launched after signing all of the major labels for its streaming music service.

I like to describe it as an “iTunes store” where you can stream all the music instantly, instead of buying/downloading it. The service has changed the way me and a lot of my friends are listening to music. It’s now also confirmed that our VC’s, Creandum, has made an investment in Spotify.

SoundCloud

Tomorrow I’m heading over to Berlin for the release party of the hyped music moving company SoundCloud. The company is founded by Eric Wahlforss and one of my best friends Alexander Ljung.

They moved to Berlin a year ago to build their company and tomorrow they are releasing one of the best designed and smartest services in the music industry. SoundCloud helps professional music artists distribute and share music, both in the pre and post release phases. If you are around in Berlin tomorrow Friday, make sure to join the party!

I don’t know how it happened, but in less than three months we’ve more than doubled our team. Being only the three founders in June, our team now sums up to seven people! The latest recruits are two multi talented guys ready to help us change the world.

These guys are fresh media tech engineers out of Stockholm’s top tech university KTH. Together they just completed their thesis project, kTube. They’ve built a complete video service for KTH to be used in the education, including CMS, video player, etc.

Joakim Sarnelid we actually recruited way back in June, but he couldn’t start until now. Joakim is a really skilled Java developer that will help us further improve the speed and reliability of our development with his skills in automated testing.

Of course, as all people in a startup needs to be, he’s multi talented and does a lot more than Java. After evaluating his coding skills we decided to bring him in and feel him out. And we certainly weren’t disappointed. Joakim is one of those individuals that everyone just likes. Kind, caring, perceptive, yet really funny.

Why does this sound like an episode of Nilecity? (Link in Swedish)

Apart from his coding skills Joakim juggles fire sticks, hikes or bikes mountains and joins 90 kilometer ski races (Vasaloppet). He’s also well traveled and surely knows why to avoid happy pizzas.

With only about a week left until Joakim was supposed to start, we learned that his friend and thesis colleague Jonas Frid was also scouting for openings.

Since we had already evaluated (and been impressed by) the source code output of the two we felt that we should really meet Jonas as well.

And sure, Jonas made us laugh too, so he was welcome to join. (With both of them, we just had to persuade them to turn down all the other attractive offerings they were getting.)

As with Joakim, Jonas is skilled with Java, but besides that he’s into usability and interface design. Lately he has based a lot of personal decisions on the dice but when it comes to coding he takes no chances. At least that’s what he tells us.

As multi talent is one of the key factors of becoming an employee here we weren’t disappointed when Jonas (during his first interview) mentioned as a side note that he’s authored a book in his spare time. His skills with German, French, Spanish and Chinese certainly wasn’t a setback either.

Oh yeah, and it sure is a pity that you couldn’t be there when Jonas (after having lost the dice) approached a somewhat reluctant young girl with his sweet talk. Impressing. Or not.

Last week was really exciting for us! We rebranded the company, attended our first trade show, partied until 5am, and met tech entreprenuers at Minibar.

Rouzbeh has put together some photos for you here, enjoy!

Ad:tech and adnetworks

The show was really good for us. Besides learning a lot and getting a better feeling of where the market is heading, we got to show off Monetizer 1.0 and got great feedback!

Something that really got me thinking was all the ad networks (there were more than 50 of them there!). There are loads of them out there and quite a few are actually monetizing video. A couple of them are doing prerolls, but that’s about it.

I believe the networks have one big problem when it comes to video: consistency. Different sites have different video players, sizes, length of content, interfaces and functionality making implementation and traffic a nightmare.

For Videoplaza this is both an opportunity and challenge. I will put a lot of the coming weeks brain time to better understand our place in this ecosystem. We can’t afford to bet on the wrong things here.

Hi there, how do you like our new costume?

Today we’re launching our new website and profile, straight from London.

The logo

The idea with the logo is to illustrate simplicity, transparency and innovation. And of course some kind of video window.

To our help, we’ve had help from Hummingbirds (Logo and profile) and Winston Design (Web design and code base).

Ad:tech London

Our entire team is now here in London for the Ad:tech conference, ready to kick ass! I’ll be speaking tomorrow at 3.50pm and make sure to come by our stand to get a glance of our brand new Campaign Manager interface. Our stand is numbered 414 and we have fresh coffee and Swedish candy waiting for you.

Cheers!