Ricky Sutton

Publishers usually ask us to help them increase the amount of video they deliver, because they want to be more competitive, or report the news better, but the more we delve into the detail, it eventually boils down to money.

Oovvuu has a proven track record of growing publishers’ video traffic by as much as 30x, which is the right strategy as the video advertising market is already US$52 billion and rising 40% year over year (source: Interactive Advertising Bureau).

Many publishers though have a shock learning as traffic rises, which is that getting to those buckets of advertising gold is harder to access than it first appeared. The are several reasons:

• Facebook and Google’s YouTube have used their monopolies to soak up as much as 90 per cent of the advertising supply.
• Publisher sales teams have failed to recognise the complexity of selling video ads, versus say display.
• Agencies and buyers are often overly bullish, promising to divert spend to publishers, which then doesn’t happen, and
• Programmatic advertising, while appearing to be simple, is in fact entirely reliant on the Google ad stack and rarely provides commercially relevant CPMs.

It sounds hopeless, but it’s not. Publishers are actually well set for a video future, for four indisputable reasons:

It’s this last point that Oovvuu realised needed a different solution.

Typically, publishers’ video ad sales fall into two groups:

About 30% of ad inventory is sold at premium CPMs by the internal sales team, known as direct sales. This is high yielding, but expensive and time-consuming to do.

Another 30% is sold programmatically, that is automatically delivered via integrations with third party ad supply companies. This is easier and cheaper to integrate, but the ads are typically low yielding. More often than not, they are uncommercially useful to publishers.

The rest of the ads go sold. A disaster.

Oovvuu realised publishers needed a third way to sell ads, to fill the unsold inventory via a backfill solution, so we took a playbook from the more progressive publishing groups around the world.

Publishers have begun to realise that to compete with the scale of the duopoly, they must work together, to create a consortium that can collectively bargain for a share of ad spend. Negotiate once at scale, with distributed benefits. A good example is The Ozone Project in London.

In South Africa where Oovvuu has grown publisher video traffic more than 30x in the past two years, agencies and publishers dropped historical enmities to ask Oovvuu to create a single advertising solution for them.

Now, Media24, The Local News Network, Business Insider SA, All4Women, Caxton Magazines, TisoBlackStar, The Independent, The Daily Maverick and across more than 100 publications have joined forces in Oovvuu’s first video private marketplace.

Run by Oovvuu’s head of advertising success James Fisher, and powered by Rubicon Project, it makes it easy for marketers to access premium brand safe and highly viewable video inventory across all the publishers and genres, within a single deal ID and a click of a button.

Since June 2019, local agency groups including Group M, Dentsu Aegis and IPG Media Brands have been actively running video deals through here.

Most importantly, they are seeing better results in key performance metrics like viewability, completion and click through rates than they are on other ad formats and partners.

Feedback includes:

Wow, this is really impressive, haven’t seen such good performance in a while – Group M South Africa

When compared to other partners the Oovvuu click through rate achieved is quite above theirs, which is great to see – Dentsu South Africa

We are really happy with the performance of view rates, this is a fantastic cost per view – IPG Media Brands South Africa

Oovvuu achieves market leading results by delivering a great user experience.

• All Oovvuu videos are user initiated. That means they are click to play, rather than autoplay. While this means video views fall, it requires an engaged audience to earn a play, and therefore commands higher yields.
• Oovvuu video is premium and highly engaging. We only work with broadcasters like the BBC, Bloomberg, Euronews, The Associated Press and more meaning people trust what they see, and
• We set a high bar on contextuality, meaning the Oovvuu video you find in a page will relevant. We can do this because we have one of the world’s largest content catalogues across more than 60 genres.

The proof is in the numbers.

This service is currently only available via programmatic unreserved deals, for any bespoke, direct or guaranteed video deals. Oovvuu inventory is also available for the publishers to sell directly.

For more information or to submit your interest please contact james.fisher@oovvuu.com, chris@oovvuu.com or adops@oovvuu.com