Unicast

As you know, we recently welcomed MediaMind Technologies, Inc., a leading global provider of integrated digital advertising solutions and the EyeWonder video and rich media advertising unit to the DG family. We share DG’s excitement in broadening our team and scope. Unicast has been a pioneer of innovation in the interactive space, working with the world’s largest publishers on a global scale. Together with MediaMind and EyeWonder, we will further expand our interactive capabilities and the strong service-orientation DG has already established over the years.

The combination of MediaMind, Unicast, and EyeWonder brings together a highly qualified roster of professionals, a complementary footprint of offices worldwide, along with innovative technologies to connect advertisers and agencies with the most desirable audiences on a global basis.

While we integrate with MediaMind and EyeWonder under the MediaMind brand, we encourage you to continue follow our news updates at http://creativezone.mediamind.com/Blog/ or click here to subscribe.

The IAB is issuing a clarion call at “the Future of Display” event, which starts tomorrow. As summarized by Randall Rothenberg, IAB president:

“It is time to admit to ourselves that almost everything we have done over the past decade optimizes interactive media for direct response and promotional advertising. We must redouble our efforts as an industry to both prove and illustrate that we build brands; for if we do not, we will simply become a substitute for the U.S. Postal Service.”

Unicast is pleased to announce our ability to support all the Rising Star ad formats – Filmstrip, Sidekick, Billboard, Slider, Pushdown and Portrait – in alignment with the IAB's stated mission. Here at Unicast we believe that we are in a unique position to help champion the adoption of these new ad formats, since we have been a longtime developer of the kind of premium ad formats that help advertisers to successfully drive brand advertising online.

"Unicast has an intrinsic and deep understanding of the IAB Rising Stars ad units, as the creators of the Sidekick unit and as a premier rich media vendor supporting the formats,” said Peter Minnium, consulting director at the IAB. “They are truly one of the companies shaping the future of interactive advertising.”

We also have a history of partnering with large publishers to deliver groundbreaking and technically challenging units like these on a global scale. Some examples of similar formats we have pioneered include the branded canvas, a standard in interactive preroll that has been running at scale on major broadcast network sites for well over five years; the 3D cube, which we developed and ran worldwide using Unicast technology (before Flash could support the 3D functionality); and, more recently, a variety of Flash-based 3D formats that have run globally in support of major theatrical releases and other global advertising events.

“Unicast has an ongoing tradition of partnering with global publishers to innovate within the interactive space and develop new formats and stronger standardization to the industry,” said James Dillon, general manager of Unicast. “We’re glad to be working closely with the IAB to drive meaningful results online for brands around the world.”

As more and more video content becomes available online and more users turn to the Internet to consume video content, the quantity and quality of In-Stream ads is expected to grow steadily. According to ComScore, the number of online video viewers across the U.S. in March alone was 174 million with an average of 14.8 hours per viewer. The total U.S. Internet audience engaged in more than 5.7 billion viewing sessions that month.

By now, the majority of online viewers have encountered In-Stream ads, which are video advertisements that are delivered before, during or after a video segment. The experience is very similar to what you see in traditional broadcast where video ads are delivered during commercial breaks. In the online space, these types of ads fall under the In-Stream Linear Video category and are commonly referred to as Pre-Roll, Mid-Roll or Post-Roll ads. Every now and then, you may also see an overlay that momentarily appears at the bottom of your video screen. These types of online video ads fall under the In-Stream Non-Linear category since they appear in parallel with the main editorial video content.

On the surface it may seem simple to deliver In-Stream ads within video player environments; however, there are many technical and creative challenges to overcome. First and foremost, the online video ecosystem is highly fragmented making it a challenge to integrate a scalable technology solution that is compatible across a wide range of publishers, networks and video platforms. Furthermore, marketers are demanding a consistent set of detailed reporting metrics across all media placements in order to gain insight into the overall performance of their campaigns.

Here at Unicast we have a long history of developing scalable technology solutions and integrating them with many of today’s leading online publishers. With over 7 years of In-Stream experience, Unicast has developed a robust In-Stream product offering which has been successfully deployed and serviced across the top broadcast networks including ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox and MTV Network, just to name a few. Over 4 years ago Unicast developed and served the first third party served Branded Canvas and helped to scale this Linear Interactive format across the above premium broadcast networks. Through this innovative and highly interactive ad format, Unicast established the standard in Pre-Roll advertising and raised the bar to a whole new level.

In addition to solving some of the technical challenges, Unicast has also made great strides in addressing some of the creative challenges marketers commonly face with trying to deliver these interactive In-Stream ads. In order to run In-Stream ads across these premium publishers, marketers only need to submit one set of assets to Unicast. Our dedicated and talented creative services teams help brands effectively scale these interactive, highly engaging In-Stream ads across multiple video player environments, while our creative developers are trained to ensure every ad is being built according to the best practices we’ve established over the years.

Since its inception, the Branded Canvas has been a top performer and has consistently produced the highest interaction rates and highest average video view times as documented in the Unicast Q4 2010 US Analytics Benchmark Report. We expect this to be a recurring trend due to the consistent success we’ve seen with this format over the past few years. Our clients rely on us to not only provide the data, but to provide it in a meaningful way so brands can come away with valuable insight to optimize their campaigns.

Lastly, with the introduction of the Interactive Advertising Bureau [IAB] VAST and VPAID standards, Unicast has worked very closely with our partners to seamlessly migrate our flexible In-Stream solution over to these emerging standards. Through VAST and VPAID, Unicast has been aggressively certifying our product offering in order to help brands expand their reach and scale their message. We are certified with a wide range of publishers, networks and complementary technology companies and are seeking out new partnerships daily. If you’re interested in becoming a certified partner, please feel free to contact us.

Since its inception, the art of watching television has traditionally been a more passive experience where we sit and stare at the tube while consuming hours of video content. Yes, we regularly watch our favorite shows with family members, and we’ve all invited a friend over or chatted with them on the phone while watching a particular episode, but for the most part television has been more of a lean back experience.

With the increased adoption of smart phones, tablet devices and connected TV’s, users have been consuming media across multiple screens simultaneously. These devices are becoming more sophisticated and interconnected, which is opening the doors to new possibilities. For example, Social Viewing apps have the potential to change the way you watch television by creating a virtual living room where you can connect with others who are watching the same thing you are and who want to talk about and share that experience with you. Instead of having water cooler discussions hours or even days after watching a particular program, social viewing apps can bring these dialogues to you and your friends in real time.

Most of these social viewing experiences are supported via downloadable apps for smart phones and tablets. Users can let their friends know which TV shows they’re watching by “checking in” to shows, in much the same way you’d share your location with a check-in on Foursquare. Once checked in, users are typically presented with a variety of features such as pulling in social streams from Twitter and Facebook. In particular, Twitter regularly sees spikes when popular shows or live events air on TV like the SuperBowl or the Academy Awards. Some apps are even trying to listen to the shows audio track to determine how far you are into the episode, making it possible to deliver time sensitive, contextual information.

I was recently at SXSW and attended a panel where there was an open discussion about Social Viewing. First and foremost, the panelists mentioned that there are, at least, 3 important elements which are necessary for a Social viewing experience:

1. Content – users need to have a legitimate reason to check in and talk about a show or event
2. Community – a group of loyal followers who share a particular interest in the Content
3. Technology Platform – a means to connect the Community with the Content so users can share their views and opinions, answer polls and trivia questions, debate what will happen next, etc.

TV is inherently social, but we haven’t tapped into the full potential of bringing communities together to share these experiences as if we were all sitting in the same living room. Social viewing apps have the promise to make television experiences much more interactive, fun and even educational. I find myself pulling out my iPhone to google the name of an actor or to find out what movies / shows he or she has played in… also makes for great trivia too.

It’s not all peaches and cream; however, as there are still a number of questions about what the right approach should be so it complements the actual viewing experience and doesn’t disrupt it. There are also technical hurdles and challenges that still need to be addressed such as integration with set top boxes and how DVR’s factor in to real time communication. That being said, I am eagerly optimistic about the prospects of a more interactive, lean-forward viewing experience where we find ourselves immersed among friends who share a common interest.

The IAB had their latest case study road show in New York this past Monday, and are “on tour” at the moment in other cities across the country. The format for the case study road show is very pragmatic, consisting of one-hour sessions showing real-world partnerships between brands and online advertising companies.

My main takeaway: as is the case with Internet content nowadays, advertising content on the Web is becoming, well, more web-like. Nothing is an island anymore – whether driven by publisher data (LinkedIn), fed by publisher data (IDGTechNetwork or Associated Press), targeted by third party data (Audience Science) or shareable to personal networks (everybody and Facebook), less and less advertising content is standalone isolated creative.

While on the one hand you could take that as being potentially threatening to a rich media company like ourselves, on the other hand it makes us more valuable, since we act as central integrators of the wide range of technologies available to agencies and publishers as well as experienced consultants in what technologies to choose and how to best utilize them. Our ad formats and Ad Kit provide an easy starting point for rich media creative design and development, while feature components and classes add new capabilities. Plus, we’ve picked up a few tips in our years of experience in clearing operational hurdles and analyzing results for campaigns that total billions of impressions.

Here at Unicast certainly a lot of our work recently is either establishing new partnerships or extending our technology to leverage third-party APIs like Facebook and Twitter. I don’t expect that to slow down anytime soon. The other easy takeaway from the IAB conference is that no one in the industry is going to get bored waiting for new technologies and new ways to leverage them anytime soon.

Have you been working on something so hard that you worked straight through lunch, and totally forgot to eat? Well, that’s a little bit where we’re coming from in being so relatively late to the market in announcing our in-stream product line. We built what could be called our first in-stream product back in 2003. It wasn’t running in a Flash video player, since Flash video had only been introduced the year before. It was built for a particular publisher, and we followed that year after year since doing custom video advertising solutions for publishers – head down, building solutions for a wide range of customers including the major US television networks.

And it’s not like we weren’t aware of the fact that in-stream advertising is a totally different kind of animal in many ways – we bumped our heads against various technological hurdles specific to the in-stream world, experiencing the joys of wandering variables and cached classes in Flash-in-Flash advertising environments, and duked it out with a wide range of media players in DHTML environments, from Real Video to Windows Media.

But somehow it wasn’t until the VAST and VPAID standards really started to get traction that we picked our heads up and looked around and decided that we needed to separate out all the video player work we have been doing under a separate in-stream product line, now that the distinction between these ads and display ads were really becoming well understood by the market as a whole.

So that’s what we’ve done today, and we expect to do more to show people how we have distinguished and will continue to distinguish ourselves as a rich media and video company in the in-stream market. Hats off to the IAB for pulling these standards together and continuing to drive their adoption. We look forward to being part of their ongoing evolution.

Please visit us at unicast.com/instream to see what we’ve done so far and to keep up with future developments. We’re going back to work…

Part of our product team spent Feb 9-12 at the annual interaction design conference put on by the IxDA (Interaction Design Association). This is the fourth year of the conference, and may be the fourth year for it to sell out. Each year it seems to get a little more popular than the year before, which is not surprising given Apple’s ongoing assault on the market and along with it the business world’s increasing admiration, in print at least, for the value that good design can add to a company’s bottom line.

What IS surprising is that, although the conference seems to get more popular, I still see so few business-to-business companies like my own represented there or at similar conferences. The lion’s share of attendees seem to be either from consultancies small and large, or large companies that no one would be surprised to see in attendance - consumer-facing websites (eBay) or hardware and software companies that have no choice but to understand the value of software design (Dell, Microsoft, Adobe). This year there also seemed to be an exceptionally large number of students, which is a nice addition, and one that is only now becoming more feasible, given the slow progress of interaction design as a course of graduate and undergraduate study at any but a few universities.

The conference is jam-packed with sessions, some of which explore recently developed user interfaces (like NPR’s iPad app, Adobe’s Photoshop.com and the Windows 7 phone UI), and others of which explore the role of various factors and their affect on user interface design (like complexity, fun, aesthetics, the engineering department, etc).

All of this would seem to be as relevant to business-to-business companies as it would be to either consultancies or companies who are producing software directly for consumers. Particularly if you are in a complex business space, it’s easy to imagine paying a consultancy a lot of money just to get up to speed on the work being done before they can fully bring their expertise to bear, when perhaps you’re better off preparing your own internal experts to make good product design decisions. Or why only big consumer-facing companies – does that mean people are less interested in using efficient and enjoyable tools in a work environment than as part of a buying or entertainment experience?

Of course not – the company OXO comes to mind, which reworked utilitarian kitchen tools into something more elegant and ergonomically pleasing, and made a killing as a result (in that instance, with help from industrial design consultancy Smart Design).

The current focus on design in the consumer marketplace is quite obvious, and I’m sure nerve-wracking to many consumer company managers due to the big stakes and seemingly subjective and possibly entirely foreign challenges design presents for them. In many comfortable (and large) niche markets however, design is a relatively unsung competitive advantage, and the competition from a design perspective is as a result markedly less fierce. It would seem to be an excellent time for savvy business-to-business companies to try to pursue it as a market differentiator. Maybe I’ll see more of them next year. I AM glad at least we were able to be there.

Video advertising continues to be one of the fastest growing opportunities to reach and engage consumers online. Over 66% of Internet users are consuming online video and when given a choice between paying for video content or watching free ad-supported content, viewers are four times more likely to choose the ad-supported option. Only 6% say they won’t watch video if there’s advertising.

In this discussion we touched on several hot topics and future growing trends that are looking to dominate the market. By downloading or reading the PDF link below, you can learn more about online video advertising and see for yourself why video is online advertising’s #1 growth area.

View or download the presentation here: http://www.unicast.com/Pdfs/ERA_Presentation_Unicast_Final.aspx

Disclaimer: Given the fact that Leonard Nimoy cancelled only to have William Shatner host, I was required to put a Star Trek-y title on this article.

Star Trek is a good touchstone for tech conferences, since they are for the most part both utopian in their outlook. Technology rarely fails on Star Trek, except when you ask too much of it, and even then it comes through in the end. The problems the crew of the Enterprise face in Star Trek are usually solved or left behind on whatever planet they happen to have stopped off on.

At Adobe MAX, the problem that was assumed by omission to be well behind us would be Apple’s iOS, which steadfastly refuses (so far) to run Flash in its browser. Adobe introduced a new tool to allow users to generate interactive HTML5 experiences, but the target for this tool is graphic designers, and the goal of the tool (in addition to making designing websites easier for them) seems to be to get those folks onto an Adobe hosting platform.

Blackberry, Motorola, and Google were there to show off new Flash-based UIs running on their devices, and, in the case of Motorola and Google, were so eager to get Flash developers on board developing for their platforms that they gave away free hardware (Droid, Google TV). If the Blackberry Playbook had been finished enough that they didn’t have to display it entirely enclosed in glass, we might have walked away with one of those too.

The statistics (if such things are to be trusted) are indeed in Adobe’s favor – within 2 years, the Android platform alone is supposed to eclipse Apple’s iOS, not to mention Windows Mobile 7, Blackberry, and Symbian all joining Android as platforms that support Adobe Flash.

Given the projected fragmentation of computing across multiple devices – mobile, tablet and TV (at least), in addition to the sudden stepchild PC – Adobe has a compelling story to tell around its author-once, run-anywhere Flash technology. If the only alternative is learning Objective C or building HTML5 apps by hand-coding, then I think a lot of people are going to be happy to keep Flash around for a while.

Of course Apple is not going to stand still, and, along with other invested parties – perhaps Microsoft – they will almost certainly build better tools to create applications using HTML5 and web standards. While Adobe would love to have us see HTML5 as a blip on the radar on their approach to multi-screen dominance I expect there will be further chapters in the HTML5 v Flash saga.

The easy takeaway however, is that mobile is in no way synonymous with HTML5, and Flash still has a lot of life left in it. Flash has a well-developed and proven toolset, a huge developer base, and is adding capabilities like 3D that HTML5 can only dream about. Since the introduction of the iPad, mobile has become bizarrely synonymous with HTML5. Given Flash’s history and strengths, and the fragmenting marketplace, I expect we will start to see the pendulum swing back towards Flash without (and perhaps even despite) significant news from Apple or others in the HTML5 camp.

For quite some time, advertisers and agencies have been hearing about the promise of dynamic ads. Usually people like to start out with the hyperbolic example – ads that are tailored for YOU, the individual viewer. Ad content that is so specific to your needs that, by gosh, it’s not even like an ad anymore – it’s like your 300x250 dream banner.

Unfortunately the reality of using dynamic content in this way is unrealistic for many companies, if not undesirable. So far the one-word reaction to advertising generated based on a profile or on past behavior is, all too often, “creepy”. Witness this recent NY Times article on the phenomenon. And, there’s the other side of targeting thousands of different versions of an ad – trying to digest the reporting on thousands of different versions of an ad. It’s not for everyone.

So, while there are certainly great examples of how you can utilize dynamic content in extremely sophisticated ways, I’d like to start out with what I think is the neglected “low-end” of the market – uses of dynamic advertising that can effectively meet business needs without requiring a full-time data analysis department. Uses of dynamic ads that can actually reduce complexity on certain campaigns, rather than introducing a new level of complexity for an as-yet-determined payoff.

First off, we have a simple entertainment campaign that runs in multiple “flights” – a teaser trailer that runs for the first month, then a preview trailer in the second month, and finally the full-length trailer from the release date forward. If the video is the only thing that differs, why make 3 different creatives? Why make your trafficking more complicated? View demo.

Next, how about the fast food advertiser who is running a simple offer that needs to switch out depending on the time of day (breakfast, lunch or dinner)? Once again, if it can be handled in a single creative execution, and delivered with a single tag, why not? View demo.

Speaking of delivering with a single tag, if you’re a retailer, maybe you want to buy lots of space on an ad network in advance, and you don’t know yet what items will be selling like hotcakes in 3 months? Traffic the ads now, and change the content on the fly based on market developments. View demo. 

And, for global markets, it’s certainly cost-effective to build one ad and change the language content dynamically based on where it’s being served, assuming that will work with your creative (yes, we support different backup images as well). View demo.

Hopefully you can see from these examples how you could perhaps use dynamic content yourself to generate new creative possibilities as well as new production and media-buying efficiencies. We believe our solution offers some unique strengths:

      - An integration with our Ad Kit in Flash that is closely tied to what Flash developers already know about dynamic content, and is not tied to the timeline.

      - A dynamic ad “version” model that scales to the high-end of the market without also bringing the same complexity to simple use cases. Not only do all versions report separately, but they also rollup into aggregated reporting across all versions.

      - Our everyday dedication to providing the necessary support for your creative efforts, either as a partner or as a full-service solution.

Contact salesteam@unicast.com to receive more information on Unicast’s dynamic ad solution, or to set up an appointment for us to walk you through authoring, trafficking and reporting for dynamic ads.