Before he speaks on diversifying media mix to boost video revenue at AdMonsters SE Asia on Aug. 2, we caught up with Steven Jones, Chief Strategy and Operations Officer for AdoTube, to get his thoughts on the biggest digital video challenges in Southeast Asia.
What is the one thing you think is slowing down video adoption across the region? Is it “standardization”?
Confusion around the different forms of video advertising. Part of this can be attributed to the standardization, or lack thereof, of video advertising. Video advertising started as “rich media” banner ads, some of which expanded and contained a video spot. Over the last several years there has been far more video content being placed on the web… in fact it’s one of the fastest forms of content that is being uploaded to the web.
The opportunity to advertise within this in-stream content is huge, however the challenge for advertisers is the understanding the differences between the types of video advertising inventory they are getting from publishers (in-banner or in-stream).
What was the toughest challenge that you had to address to scale across such as disparate region?
The balance of managing advertising delivery and performance between the publisher partners with video content and how much video consumption they get from users within each market. The amount of in-stream inventory, which is AdoTube’s focus, is still in a growth state for several local publishers. However, many of our existing global partners have strong user adoption rates. We leverage those relationships as we continually expand and extend our footprint by partnering with local publishers with video content.
The audience at AdMonsters SE Asia will be primarily Ad Operations and Ad Technology focused professionals – what is the one piece of advice you would give them as they start building out their video content capabilities?
Diversify the media mix to maximize revenue from your video content. The simple solution has historically been to leverage pre-rolls, and in some cases mid-rolls and post-rolls as they are more technically and creatively straightforward. In some cases the use of pre-rolls can affect the user’s experience, which can then lead to animosity towards the publisher along with the advertiser.
For publishers, this directly impacts user retention rate. The partnerships we have that work best involve integrations where both VAST and VPAID based video advertising are accepted by the publisher. This allows for the appropriate mix between pre-rolls, interactive full-stream units and overlays. Not abusing frequency capping is also important as this can be equally as irritating to users.