It’s great to see that CityVice Network use Monetizer as a way of charging for their content. It really shows a shift in the media landscape where content providers, not just publishers, are able profit from advertising.

CityVice Network did a great job getting the top fashion bloggers of Finland to create and distribute their personal online fashion videos. The campaign was sponsored by H&M ads served by Videoplaza, the perfect advertiser for the perfect crowd.

Press release & some coverage in TechCrunch

Besides closing big deals with major media companies such as BBC, Ask.com, Miniweb etc. Gavin has a great ability to simplify technology, something that is key for us at Videoplaza. As any other technology company, we sell a tech product, however, our the reason our clients buy from us is something else and our challenge is to communicate just that something.

Gavin can be reached at +44 7900821352 or gavin@videoplaza.com

Press release & some coverage: PaidContent, TechCrunch

Having premium content that is safe and rights cleared, the content is monetised through advertising. We are starting to work with them now to help them monetise their content in the best way possible. I can’t say too much about the deal and the plans ahead, but I can tell you we will do some really exciting things in new innovative ways.

myvideorights.com Prime Content Network generates some 35M streams per month (!) on different properties such as YouTube. Tiger Aspect, Hattrick Productions, Maverick Television, and Comic Relief are some of their content partners. Read more about the company and the impressive team behind it here.

You’ll find the complete press release here.

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I’m now off to Streaming Media Europe in London. I’m on a panel tomorrow and we also have a stand, so come by and say hi!

Björn has a technical background as a web developer in the dotcom era but shifted gradually towards project management and business development in startups. Recently he’s been letting his passion out at Musicbrigade (not as ambitious as it used to be) and most recently Jalbum (still going strong).

He also happens to be a close personal friend to me which is why I know that he’s unbelievably talented in spotting flawed usability (really funny anecdotes there) and improving general team performance (oh yes, he’s a ‘doer’).

Make sure to follow Björn on Twitter or his blog (Swedish).

**

And by the way, haven’t gotten around to write proper blog posts about us being nominated to this year’s SIME Award and our appearance in this nice piece by SvD about promising Swedish startups (Swedish).

It’s clear pretty much everyone is interested in video in some way and we’ve had a lot of interesting talks at our stand. There are many publishers out there thinking about how to get their online video products profitable

Make sure to pop by this years show tomorrow if you didn’t today and I’m going to stop writing since my brain is out of fuel now. It’s been a hectic day and tomorrow will be even more so.

Cheers

The winners will be announced at the Streaming Europe event in London Oct 15th. We’ll definitely be there as I’m in one of the panels for Oct 16th.

Have a good weekend!

1- Projected growth
It’s quite obvious in-stream buyers are happy since 97% of them are planning to spend more next year. I guess they believe it works.

“The vast majority (97%) of all VOD media buyers expect their online video ad spend to grow over the next 12 months with over half (54%) of survey respondents predicting their spend will increase by 50%.”

2- Barriers to growth
Even if the buyers are planning to spend more next year, there are some issues holding them back.

“When asked to name the primary factor holding media buyers back from greater investment in VOD, the main barriers noted by media buyers were the need for shorter time lengths (10%), more research (24%) and better measurement (31%).”

What we and our clients are doing about it

On the second point, I think we and our clients are doing some things right. We are currently doing two quite extensive research projects. One is together with our Danish clients and TNS in Denmark and the other in Sweden with 3 of our clients. The results of those studies we hope will help our clients prove the effectiveness of their in-stream products beyond the reporting we can provide. We also hope to benchmark the effectiveness of in-stream compared to other media.

Some of our clients are also quite good at using the extensive reporting our platform offers to help show their advertisers how their campiagns have performed beyond impressions and clicks. This is not about just making the data available, it’s more about making sense out of it.

Moving forward we hope to combine the data from the research we’re doing together with the reporting metrics we collect to find patterns that make sense. Hopefully we can soon see claim that X% increase in time spent with the ad will give Y% increased purchase intent.

The full WebTV report takes you 5 minutes to read so give it a shot here.

Mad September schedule

We are kick-starting this autumn with a mad September schedule. Starting next week we will attend IBC in Amsterdam Sep 11-12th as we are a part of the Innovations arena. There’s going to be some good people at that session so looking forward to that.

The week after that we’re spending two days in Berlin for some meetings, Sep 17-18th. We still have some openings so let me know if you want to meet up.

Sep 22-23rd is the London Adtech show where we will be exhibiting also this year. Overlapping is the German digital show DM Exco in Cologne where we will have Magnus and myself attending at least the 24th. DM Exco is supposed to be 3 times bigger than Adtech London and really well executed I’ve heard, so looking forward to that.

I’m more than happy to meet up at any of these events, so please drop me a note if you’ll be there and we can maybe enjoy a coffee together.

This is where the future is going.  That’s obvious.  The only question is how long it takes us to get there–and who gets killed along the way.

Below is the official press release going out today. If you are attending the IAB event later today, make sure we meet up!

PRESS RELEASE

Videoplaza signs first UK Clients

Incisive Media, Factory Media first UK sites to use video dedicated ad server to monetise time

London, June 4th, 2009 – VIDEOPLAZA, announces its first UK clients for its ‘built for video’ ad server platform – Monetizer. Factory Media and Incisive Media will both launch online video advertising services, through Videoplaza, to capitalise on the growing popularity of online video.

Videoplaza, a privately owned company, based in Stockholm and London, enables clients to manage, present and track online video advertising. It has developed an ad server platform that can increase revenues and demonstrate media value, from advertising placed in and around their online video content. Working with leading broadcasters, news media, business and consumer publishers in five countries, Videoplaza’s ad server technology, creative ad formats and real-time reporting enables clients to monetise the time users spend watching online video, rather than started streams.

Factory Media’s extreme sports video channel Mpora will offer advertisers and sponsors access to its valuable audiences using Interactive Pre, Mid and Post Roll advertising. The channel will also use In-stream overlays, served within the video content, a format proving popular with advertisers and users alike and also Companion Ads synchronised with a client’s video ads.

Incisive Media a leading business information provider, is implementing Videoplaza’s ad server to offer exciting new opportunities for brands and B2B advertisers to target its high value audiences, starting with the IT professional community VNUnet

By adopting Videoplaza’s ad server platform both companies will be able to more effectively manage their online video advertising inventory, optimize client campaigns and demonstrate improved advertiser ROI, in terms of advertising exposure and engagement. The deals will also introduce the next generation interactive preroll format to the market called the iRoll.

John Barnes, Managing Director - Digital Strategy and Development UK & Asia for Incisive Media stated “We see a great opportunity in video and want to be equipped with the best monetisation tool in the market. We have chosen to work with Videoplaza not just because of their technology, this company understands this space and has made it work in other markets.”

According to Darryl Newton, Managing Director, Factory Media, “Mpora.com is now a significant part of our business, with over 2 million video streams served each month. Demand for advertising on our platform is growing incrementally and clients are particularly excited by creative video solutions. Working with Videoplaza we feel we can meet the needs of these customers better by offering more dynamic and engaging formats combined with video specific reporting such as engagement rates and time spent with the ads.

Sorosh Tavakoli, Founder and CEO for Videoplaza added “We are delighted to announce agreements with these two great innovative publishers. We are doing everything we can to repeat the success from the Swedish market where more and more publishers have profitable online video products.”

Videoplaza has been in the UK since January 2009 and is building a local team to advise and support both local media owners and international networks based in London.

For further information contact:
Sorosh Tavakoli, Founder and CEO Videoplaza
+44 7530 885 492
sorosh@videoplaza.com

John Barnes, Managing Director - Digital Strategy and Development UK & Asia, Incisive Media
+44 (0)20 7316 9007
john.barnes@incisivemedia.com

Darryl Newton, Managing Director, Factory Media
+44 (0)20 7332 9700
darryl.newton@factorymedia.com

Download the press release as pdf

Having had video for a long time and many of them having huge traffic, they are finally monetising this valuable asset in a proper way. From today, their videos are monetised through prerolls, overlays and companion banners all using Videoplaza.

However interesting this is, what I would like to tell you about is the story behind all of this. It isn’t too often you get the 4 largest players in a market to cooperate in this way. So here it comes: The story behind the Danish online video monetisation kickstart project – 4 publishers, 4 advertisers, 3 months, 3 iterations.

The story behind

When looking at expansion to Denmark, we quickly realised the huge challenge waiting for us. Nobody (almost) ran prerolls, hence the knowledge in the market was low both at sellers and buyers. We couldn’t even get meetings booked.

This is when we got in contact with Tim Frank Andersen and his Brandzation, now our exclusive partner in Denmark. They came up with the kickstart idea saying:

”if there is no market for this, let’s create it!”.

The publishers were quite clear that they couldn’t cover the big costs of producing, managing and distributing video with the extra display revenues they created. There needed to be something else. The problem was that nobody wanted to take the lead and invest in launching new formats into the market. This is understandable since there’s no know-how and making a try is quite resource intensive. But what if we, Videoplaza, could bring the know-how and we could do it all together?

After a number of meetings and brainstorming sessions, we finally had the sales managers of the four largest print publishers in Denmark around the table. And today they are all going live with 4 of the largest advertisers in Denmark, De Gule Sider, Nordisk Film, Nykredit and SAS, finally moving to a profitable video product!

Our role

We have contributed to the project in two ways - technology and know-how. Our product Monetizer is being used by all the publishers to manage, serve and track the ads in and around the video. The publishers are all running us parallell to their traditional display ad server, most of them using Adtech. And having run more than 100 campaigns for publishers in different countries, we have also a good feeling for how to package, price and sell this new inventory.

The kickstart project

The kickstart project will run for 3 months and consists of 3 iterations. We will use prerolls, overlay banners and companion banners. Every month we will try different setups and do research around it. We are also looking at the effects of the advertising together with Gallup. The purpose is to go beyond the click and look at what happens in the head from a brand lift perspective. We hope to publish some of the results here.

We hope this project will get this market started. It’s not just about chosing the same technology, it’s also about setting a standard for trading and to really dig deep to understand more about the final value created for the end client, the advertisers.

What this means for us

For us as a company it’s of course nice to grab an entire market in one go. Working with Ekstra bladet means also now that we have our first tabloid client. And not to be forgotten, today is the day we go live outside Sweden!

If you need help kickstarting your online video advertising market, you now know who to call.

Read more here: TechCrunch, ArcticStartup, Resumé (SE) & Dagens Media (SE).

I’ll be one on the speakers together with Nancy Cruickshank from the Telegraph, Sharon Braude from Media Contacts and Kieron Matthews from the IAB.

Read more and signup here.