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

Oath Drives Insights into both the Consumer and the Advertiser

Better data-driven audience research is enabling deeper insights into consumer motivations, behaviors and actions for brands. 

A good example is what Oath is accomplishing through its premium video content and experiences, creating better understanding of the trends driving video consumption and growth across new formats. This valuable information can then be used to drive a brand’s strategy. “We know that successful brands grow by anticipating the needs of consumers in a constantly changing marketplace”, noted Maya Abinakad, Senior Marketing Manager, Oath. “The market landscape is evolving at a pace unlike anything we’ve seen before,” she added, “especially in the areas of AR, VR and 360, for example.”

As marketers try to keep up, the question on the minds of many industry leaders is: Do you have your finger on the pulse of the consumer? Are your current investments in an under-appreciated consumer technology well placed for future success or destined for a flop? Brands need to understand consumer expectations and the threshold for advertising or risk wasting valuable dollars and development time. Parsing the opportunities and pitfalls is the direction that AOL Video research is taking with their latest State of Video Industry online study in partnership with InsightsNow.

Abinakad believes that the best research uncovers the human motivations that drive consumer behavior, maybe even revealing results that upend the established order. “When you don’t question established order, it can lead to short-term results,” she stated. “Company leaders may believe and invest in something that may not be of great interest to consumers. This research is pivotal to keeping up (and ahead of) quickly changing consumer trends to maximize business opportunities and plan for the future,” she added.

The study focused on consumers age 16+ and B2B constituents, including industry buyers (agencies and brands) and sellers (publishers, ad networks and ad tech providers). The results revealed macro trends in the video ecosystem and where attitudes between consumers and companies merged and diverged. But Oath’s main purpose in this study is to deeply understand how and why consumers are engaging with video online and the importance of acting on insights as part of one’s video strategies, especially given how quickly the industry is evolving.

Here are the major takeaways:

      1.       Digital video investments show no signs of slowing down. B2B trends indicate greater spending on video which is increasing exponentially. 83% of buyers are expecting to increase their video spending this year.  

      2.       Dollars are coming out of television. This investment is coming out of Broadcast/Cable TV budgets and into predominantly desktop (72%) and mobile video (71%) platforms.

      3.       Social (50%) and quality creative (46%) are driving video’s growth.

      4.       But 44% of advertisers say measurement is still a big challenge, a +14% increase from last year.

      5.       Consumers want VR, 360 video and AR, especially younger consumers. Across all age groups, consumers are drawn to live videos as advertisers are increasingly investing in 360 Video.

      6.       Mobile video is driving much of digital video’s growth as 67% of all consumers watch videos on their phones everyday with 74% watching live video.   

      7.       Offering greater competition to linear networks, news, music and sports content dominate live video consumption.

      8.       VR is poised to become as common as mobile video among consumers for all types of programming such as movies, virtual tourism, science and shopping. But hardware constraints are currently seen as a barrier to fuller roll-out.

      9.       Consumers expect video advertising but the “right” length of the ad is important and it varies. Of course, who doesn’t prefer shorter ads, but the findings here indicate that expectations vary according to the length of the ad. The longer the video, the longer the expected ad. But the ad must be relevant and with some control still maintained by the viewer such as skipping and fast forward.

     10.   Programmatic spending will continue to rise, but both buyers and sellers are concerned about system integration and the ability to access premium inventory.

     11.   Branded video spend has reached its peak. Although branded video is still a revenue driver, the spend is slightly declining because of measurement challenges and cost.

Oath’s collection of more than global media and technology brands ranges from AOL and Yahoo to  HuffPost and TechCrunch. Their redoubled focus is on delivering content and ads across mobile platforms so research necessarily plays a big role in this effort. Understanding the accelerating trends in media and placing efforts in those trends are essential for their future success as well as their advertisers. 

Since their mission is to “build brands that people love,” noted Abinakad, “And, marketers are focused on delivering the highest consumer experience possible, then having and offering relevant, insightful research results will help Oath reach that goal. All of our products and services are designed to allow brands to build their brands, and allow agencies to do the same for client brands.”  

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

AOL’s Programmatic TV Offering. Interview with Amanda Powter

Amanda Powter, VP, Product for ONE by AOL: TV, studied library and information sciences which she applied to building and launching software products. She has focused her career on building innovative products with different kinds of data and sophisticated software and technology.

Starting first at Amazon.com, she created data-driven and analytics features for both buyers and sellers. Then, at PrecisionDemand, she led a team that built software for targeting and measuring the impact of television advertising. “We were acquired by AOL in 2014 to expand upon Adap.tv’s offering in digital video with linear TV. I love being able to combine my technical knowledge with experience in TV advertising to create a product that understands TV from the ground up and brings it into a powerful cross-channel solution in ONE by AOL,” she says.

Charlene Weisler: What is ONE by AOL?

Amanda Powter: It is our flagship programmatic platform for both advertisers and publishers.  On the buy side, ONE by AOL enables brands and marketers to optimize their campaigns across all screens, formats, channels, and inventory types. On the sell side, we support publishers, helping them maximize their inventory and drive meaningful monetization across every format and channel. ONE by AOL is a complete end-to-end stack, increasing efficiency, reducing waste, and improving performance. We give both advertisers and publishers full control of their own data, choice of tools, and media. And we offer a powerful analytics engine at the core of the technology, driving actionable results with real-time audience data and cross-channel insights.

Charlene Weisler: What is the overall 'elevator pitch' for its new self serve initiative for ONE by AOL:TV? How does data play a role?

Amanda Powter: We expanded our flagship ONE by AOL Platform to include a self-service programmatic TV buying module. It brings national TV network inventory – premium broadcast and cable with audience scale to match – into a self-service, data-driven, and interactive planning and buying platform. Traditionally, linear TV inventory has been bought using broad demographics that lack the necessary targeting to drive deep relevancy.

We have applied real-time planning and intelligent automation to core parts of the workflow, which allows marketers to take full advantage of rich data capabilities quickly and easily while still interfacing seamlessly into existing TV systems and processes. With our new self-serve programmatic TV module, we put advanced data capabilities and precision in the hands of buyers. We believe it will advance the way TV media is valued, bought, and sold.

Charlene Weisler: Tell me the specifics as to how it works and can it be cross platform?

Amanda Powter: Advertisers can take campaign buying and targeting into their own hands. They can go into the platform and with just a few clicks, generate a TV media plan – selecting audience targets, establishing KPIs, and setting campaign parameters – interactively on top of real-time services with the most timely inventory and audience data available.

Marketers build plans against national broadcast and cable TV inventory leveraging their own rich first-party data or proxy targets built from hundreds of attributes, and our proprietary TV viewership scoring metric, to understand how these plans will deliver against their specific targets. Once they have generated the plan that meets their goals, they can submit the order directly to the networks from within the platform through a fully automated integration directly with our network partners. With our platform, advertisers purchase inventory and measure campaign performance with complete supply and pricing transparency, transacting highly targeted programmatic buys alongside their existing buys.

We have also made it possible for TV media plans to be influenced, in real-time, by granular campaign learnings. Through use of our Convertro measurement and attribution offering, advertisers that execute TV media plans may also have access to distinct, data-driven insights into their campaign impact through built-in multi-touch attribution spanning linear TV, mobile, and digital. For instance, advertisers can correlate a television ad’s influence on mobile site traffic or digital video viewership. This allows advertisers to develop “smart campaigns” that can pivot as needed, based on attribution learnings.

Charlene Weisler: What datasets are used?

Amanda Powter: We leverage rich first-party advertiser customer data – such as advertiser CRM data – or proxy targets built by selecting from hundreds of attributes, which are then analyzed through our patented predictive targeting tools. This is integrated into the self-service module where the most up-to-date inventory is scored in real time as a user is interactively planning their campaign.  Through third-party audience data partnerships in place with the industry’s top automotive, in-store shopping, demographic and TV viewing data companies, including Experian, Acxiom Personicx, MRI, IHS Automotive, Shopcom, and Rentrak, we also are able to enable these TV targeting segments within our self-serve module. Combined, we are bringing marketers the most extensive data and targeting solutions for TV, allowing them to make more effective media buys that are driven by person-level data and proprietary predictive audience targeting.

This article first appeared in www.MediaBizBloggers.com