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.”
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!
