The Neilsen Corporation released its quarterly report about TV viewing, and as we can already guess, it’s going down on traditional TV sets. This doesn’t mean Americans don’t watch video, however. They watch more of it than ever, and more and more on mobile. Smartphones are the new portable TVs.

As a result, ZEDO is offering several innovative formats to run real 30 second TV spots on the web.Here are some highlights.

o   After several years of consistent year-over-year growth, traditional TV viewing declined one half of one percent or roughly 46 minutes per month. This may be the result of leveling off after a period of sustained growth, weather and economic factors or of other viewing options.

o   As more homes adopt DVRs and transition to timeshifted viewing, timeshifted TV growth has offset the bulk of live TV declines. Other potential factors include time spent using game consoles, tablets and other emerging devices. The average American watches nearly five hours of video each day, 98 percent of which they watch on a traditional TV set.

o   Although this ratio is less than it was just a few years ago, and continues to change, the fact remains that Americans are not turning off. They are shifting to new technologies and devices that make it easier for them to watch the content they want whenever and wherever is optimal for them

o   As of February 2012, smartphones now represent half of all mobile phones in the U.S3. With improving screens, Internet connectivity and the advantage of being “the best screen available” while on the go, smartphones are increasingly becoming portable TVs.

o   33.5 million mobile phone owners now watch video on their phones—an increase of 35.7 percent since last year. While mobile phones won’t replace other screens anytime soon, they are part of the ever-increasing number of ways in which consumers can and will consume content when and where they want.

The enormous popularity of Apple’s iPad and the spread of smart phones throughout the world have caused an accelerated shift to mobile. We all knew it was coming, but we may have underestimated how quickly. In the future, we can see the disappearance of the desktop machine almost completely, and the dominance of simpler internet-enabled devices.

Although many in the industry feel otherwise, we believe that tablets will become the biggest, most dominant way to access the web. Yes, smartphones will be important for casual and convenience purposes, but we are less bullish on smart phones as Internet access devices. We’re even less bullish on them for advertising, since no one has yet figured out how customers “on the go” will feel about receiving advertising to their phones.

On the tablet, we believe that the browser will emerge as the “super app,” the one that gets most volume and the one we need to support above all others. Eventually, the app economy will give way to HTML5, because it’s too difficult to develop different apps for all the smart phone and tablet variations coming on to the market. Android, especially, drive app developers to distraction.
We believe that advertisers will benefit from new ad formats on tablet browsers because:

1.  The way people use tablets and other mobile devices is different from the way they used desktop PCs.People on tablets are often moving from room to room, or watching TV at the same time. “Generation C,” the connected generation, spends its time with three screens at once: the TV, the phone, and the computer. And users of tablets consume more content on mobile devices than they produce, so different types of ads will work for them.

2.  We also know that tablet browsers are technically different from traditional browsers, because they shrink the site to the screen size, and allow users to zoom in. As users zoom in many ads are no longer in-view, which will make traditional display ads less effective.

We are therefore developing new formats for the tablet browser. We have prototyped 2 so far:
1.  A version of the 160×600 or 728×90 InView. We will be testing this to prevent it getting too big as a user zooms in
2.  A bigger ad, probably a 300×600 or 300×800, that shows on page load, rather thanon scroll. This format will be for big brand advertisers.

We’re at the point where we need to finish the prototype for this second ad and test publisher interest. If you would like to become a beta tester, please let us know!

I fully believe that TV ad dollars will move online as soon as we can prove that online spots work as well as TV spots. We are engaging in research to see if we can prove this. And because I have a strong personal and corporate commitment to making online advertising as good as TV advertising we are also developing new and better ad formats. ZEDO will keep trail-blazing until we get it right for our publishing partners, which also means getting it right for advertisers.

And as we all know consumers are already fully online and probably moving away from TV – so advertising has to follow. According to Heidi Browning, SVP of Strategic Solutions at Pandora,

We also have data on how news viewing is moving very quickly to the tablet on evenings and weekends. Pandora corroborates our own research. We therfore have a unique TVAds OnPage format that, as the name suggests, puts regular TV ads on the web without any work from the advertiser.

The bottom line is still that brands want to reach consumers, and eventually the money will go where it is most effective. What the online publishing industry needs is new ways of proving the effectiveness of its advertising formats and programs. And it also needs to allow media buyers, brands and agencies to easily buy online media without getting lost in the intricacies and jargon.

People in advertising know that TV Ads work. We in advertising technology need to improve our offerings and educate advertisers on why and how online can be as good as TV.

As we travel around the world launching the new InView ad formats at conferences from Washington DC to San Francisco and Sydney to Singapore, we hear many of the same complaints from our publisher customers and prospects: it’s really difficult to handle ad operations.

First, most of them have staffing headaches. It’s difficult for them to find qualified resources, to train them internally, and then to retain the best performers for a sustained time period.  Because the industry is young, many of the people they already had on staff aren’t really comfortable or familiar with new ad tech offerings.

More problematic is the inefficient team structure that comes from the unpredictable nature of  the ad operations workload.  Most companies find themselves either over-staffed or under-staffed, and we hear this from the largest and the smallest publishers we service. And even from those we don’t service yet.

Once again, because of the nascency of the industry, most publishers lack specialized ad ops workflow and processes. Sales people are constantly looking for execution status, inventory availability or someone with the ability to troubleshoot if something goes wrong; often, they can’t get that in a timely manner.

And ad operations is predominantly a facilitator, not a net revenue generator for the business, so, management usually categorizes it as a cost center rather than value addition, and is reluctant to spend scarce resources on improving it, and that leads to the lack of extended coverage and service : what do you do when you need your ad ops team at 6pm on a Friday evening?

At worst, there’s a lack of accountability, even though errors made in the Ad Operations execution cost the company actual dollars that no one wants to lose. Ad Operations need to to be accountable for the quality and efficiency of its work, and that’s difficult to achieve if you are short-staffed or experiencing constant churn. The nightmare of every ad ops director is the launch of a new product, which is only slightly more painful than the vagaries of increased workload during the holiday season, unexpected turnover, or someone on staff who gets married or takes a long vacation.

We started to see this a long time ago, and developed a suite of outsourced ad ops services that can take all this off the backs of our customers. Some of the benefits they see include

- Decreased cost structure

- Increased coverage and service

– Increased accountability

– Decreased staff headaches (no retention problems)

– Increased Scalability and efficiency

As online advertising becomes a larger and larger portion of a publisher’s revenue, and as it moves to more sophisticated formats on multiple platforms, outsourcing ad ops to someone like us who is staffed to handle it sounds better and better to the people we know.

Related articles

• ZEDO’s New InView Slider Runs on Any Ad Server (zedo.com)

A layer ad server manages potential migration and/or mitigates risk in having 100 percent dependency on one ad server. We now offer this capability to our customers as a traffic load balancer.

A “layer ad server” is a lightweight ad server tag that is served from the cloud. It essentially counts and forwards the ad request without any delay being introduced from complex logic.

Essentially, the layer ad server tags are called each and every page load and then forward the request to the primary ad server. When called, the layer server determines which ad server tags to serve for the page.

The purpose of the layer server is only to act as a primary barrier between the ad layer and the CMS. It is not to serve ad campaigns. It is therefore a lightweight, fast and globally distributed ad server that acts in a similar way to a load balancer or DNS system in directing traffic to the correct place.

Moving to a new primary ad server becomes infinitely easier as the layer tags never change – only the tags served up by the layer server do. This offloads the entirety of the migration from the CMS (and its team). Migrating tags in a layer server is far easier than physically touching a CMS and all third party co-brands.

Additionally, using a layer server brings immediate reporting benefits:

1. Verification reporting2. Continuity of core level inventory data throughout a migration
3. New reporting views

It won’t be long before video ads will be the most important form of advertising online, gradually replacing banners for marketers who want real engagement and results. EMarketer has had some interesting articles on the way in-page video ads perform as compared to the performance of banner ads. Not surprisingly, the differences are dramatic.

We have noticed this at at ZEDO for a long time, and we’re developing new formats for in-page video, and measuring the effectiveness of our Inview ad formats through our partnership with comScore.  We’ve gotten the numbers to 99% in view for the slider, and now we’re working to guarantee that our video ads are brand safe, which is more important with video than with banner ads, because video is more fully integrated into content and also more engaging.

Marketers will usually consider the content of a given website upon which they place a banner ad, but less frequently will they consider the context – the actual nature of the text, videos, and/or pictures against which the ad is juxtaposed. This is because most people will create a natural disconnect between a banner ad and a piece of text.

But video is far more integrated, and a video advertisement can often bleed directly into the hosting video itself.

EMarketer’s articles say that while the standard banner may be increasingly seen as an underperforming  format, other newer formats, such as takeover and video ads will help advertisers get  higher engagement. When MediaMind compared dwell rate and average dwell duration for polite banners to several more interactive formats, such as homepage takeovers, interactivity and creativity won out. A homepage takeover lifted dwell rates 32% over those for a polite banner, and lifted average dwell duration 67%.

Another article talks about dwell and duration rates for Rich Media ads with and without video. Of course, they’re higher with video.

As the leading independent advertising technology partner for publishers, we are announcing the signing of our latest media partner, Advance Internet. Advance Internet is a leading expert of local websites, is affiliated with over 25 newspapers, and reaches over 18.9 million consumers every month.

We welcome Advance Internet  as our newest publisher partner and we look forward to helping them increase their revenue with our innovative products such as the Inview Slider. We know we can help them increase revenue with no extra work.

“We decided to work with ZEDO because it has best in class products that enable us to offer our customers more creative solutions through monetizing a new segment of our inventory.” says Sandy Lohr, Vice President of Sales for Advance Internet.  ”We share ZEDO’s vision to improve online advertising for brand advertisers.”

A bit about Advance Internet: (www.advanceinternet.com) based in Jersey City, NJ, is a leading creator of highly interactive, online community-based news and information websites created in alliance over 25 newspapers affiliated with Advance Publications Inc. Advance Internet.s websites are the number one local news and information online destinations for the markets they serve. The websites include al.com, cleveland.com, gulflive.com, MLive.com, NJ.com, NOLA.com, OregonLive.com, SILive.com, syracuse.com, MassLive.com, PennLive.com, and lehighvalleylive.com.