Measuring the Gaze For Ads-in-Program. An Interview with Samuel Huber of admix.in

Monetizing content has at once become easier and far more complicated with new technologies enabling insertions pre, mid, post and within programming. With the advent of AR and VR, the options have widened further. Enter, Samuel Huber, Founder and CEO, Admix who has been grappling with, as he explained, “the struggles of creating and monetizing content” for many years. 

He noted that there was, “not much choice, besides banners at the bottom of the screen. When I discovered VR for the first time, I immediately thought we could do better than that, because the environment is not limited to a small screen anymore.” 

Charlene Weisler: Give me a short description of your company - is it only for the AR and VR space?

Samuel Huber: Admix is the first monetzsation platform for XR, helping over 200 VR/AR developers like High Fidelity, Somnium Space or Atom Universe, monetize their content through non-intrusive advertising. Through a free plugin for Unity, developers can create inventory within their app (a banner on a wall, a screen, or a 3D item on a table), filter the advertisers they want, to ensure ads are relevant to the content. That way, the ads will never interrupt the users, because they are in line with the content. Because we integrate with Unity, any 3D content can use Admix, not just VR/AR - we are integrating with Atom Universe which is a PS4 title. We are the first company to build the infrastructure to distribute XR ads programmatically, meaning automated and at scale. We are building new standards together with Yahoo, AOL and other demand partners, giving their advertisers the ability to access VR/AR media for the very first time.

Weisler: What technology do you use to implant ads? 

Huber: Admix is a supply side platform (SSP) built in house and selling inventory to 3rd party demand side platforms, such as Brightroll (Yahoo/AOL ). We then use our own renderer to display the ads in a 3D environment. 

Weisler: Are they static?

Huber: We have 3 ad formats - banner, video and 3D. Banner and videos are existing formats used by advertisers. The 3D format is a new format we are pioneering with our demand partners and that will be interactive and enable new interactions between brands and consumers.

Weisler: How are the ads measured? What data do you use and how do you integrate it into the buy/sell?

Huber: Being programmatic, we capture contextual data (about the environment) and gaze tracking data (where the users are looking) to calculate viewability. Gaze tracking data is anonymized and used in aggregate, to understand how people consume a specific ad, how long they spend gazing at it, which is used to qualify the impact of the ad in a much more granular way than possible on the web. ‘Impressions’ are not binary anymore, but on a continuous spectrum, giving advertisers a lot more insights. In the future, we aim to define a Cost per Gaze model, which will charge advertisers differently based on the interaction level with a specific ad. We can then feed that information back to advertisers, to give them more insights on the profile of the person interacting with their ads.

Weisler: Are you working with any media measurement companies and if so who?

Huber: The answer is not yet, we are having discussions with 3rd party measurement companies but no integration yet. To popularize the gaze tracking metric, we are working together with Oath building these standards so will aim to make it a standards with existing players first.

Weisler: Is there a thought to integrate with other media platforms and if so what?

Huber: We are currently integrating with various DSPs to give us access to more advertisers.

Weisler: What do you see as the future of advertising 3 years from now?

Huber: I believe that XR will profoundly improve advertising for the better, by bringing it at the center of the creative process and giving developers the ability to control the experience. VR and AR give advertisers a lot more freedom to be creative. In particular, product placements, which do not interrupt and are relevant to the story, are going to replace banners, pre rolls and popups. From a financial point of view, because they do not interrupt, you can imagine having 50 product placements per app, as opposed to 1 pre roll when the app loads, meaning more revenue for the developers, and more brand recognition for the advertisers! For the first time, interests of the consumers, the developers and the publishers are aligned. This is the future that we see at Admix, and are working on building!

This article first appeared in www.Mediapost.com