Content Archives

Garden centres to cat cafes: What lockdown easing says about us

There is rarely a fast-moving news event that is truly global and you’d think getting out of lockdown would look fairly similar across the world.

Think again.

I was pulling together videos showing “first steps out of lockdown” and it revealed nations are doing it in ways which, well, are so them.

The first thing sun-kissed Californians did when their “stay in place” order was lifted was to grab their surf boards and head to the re-opened beaches. Of course they did.

In sensible Finland, they got their kids back to school.

In Spain, the ramblas were again filled with busy tables as cafes reopened, while in neighbouring Italy, queues were round the block for beauty salons.

Parisiens, who during one of the strictest lockdowns had to explain themselves to gendarmes every time they left home, took to their bikes and running paths with gay abandon.

In football-mad Germany, the Budesliga restarted in empty stadiums to the delight of fans, not just in Germany.

In the UK, we opened garden centres.

In trendy Seoul, there were huge queues outside Chanel ahead of expected price rises as the economic impact of the virus bites.

In India, where a tough lockdown persists, the only easing has been the opening of liquor shops to non-socially-distanced near riots.

Haircuts have been a major preoccupation in many countries, and in New Zealand restrictions on barbers were among the first to be eased. Australia re-opened its coffee shops first. After their surfing beaches, naturally.

International news organisations shared reports from Bangkok showing cat cafes and dog pampering salons opening. They’re very cute, but I’m willing to bet Thais also wanted restaurants and hairdressers to open too.

Really, everyone affected by coronavirus is waiting for the big one, the true return to normal.

And that video will look exactly the same everywhere – when grandparents get to hug their grandchildren again.

Can I make a face mask? Oovvuu explainers answer the important questions

Content, Customers, Insights, News

The top question when you start to type in “What is…” in the UK, where I live is: What is coronavirus? Never underestimate how simple the information readers are seeking.

Here’s my cut-out-and-keep list of explainers on Covid-19 from Oovvuu partners. They are updated as the virus story progresses and there will be new questions to be answered, but the key to all of them is simplicity. They’re clear, informative and shareable.

Oovvuu is supporting publishers with premium video for free

Content, Customers, News, Uncategorized

Publishers find themselves in a conundrum amid the COVID-19 outbreak.

Reporting the news has never been more important and page views are surging, yet advertising has gone into hibernation with the public in lockdown.

“Publishers are rich in audience yet poor in revenue at a time of unprecedented global demand,” said Oovvuu founder Ricky Sutton. “We felt we had to do something,”

Oovvuu emerged from the video team at Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald with a mission to help publishers put a trusted and relevant video in every article.

A few years later, it is VC funded and unlike the media companies it serves, it is not exposed to the advertising headwinds.

As a result, the company is offering video from its broadcast partners including Reuters, Associated Press and others to publishers for free.

“These are strange times for all of us in news, but we find ourselves in a particularly unusual and unique position,” said Sutton, a former reporter and News Corp executive.

“We are well funded and incredibly deep in the quality video that every publisher needs to report the biggest story in a century. We can do some real good here.”

More than 100 broadcasters distribute video through Oovvuu, with a one-click embed code made available exclusively to premium publishers. Thousands of videos are added daily.

To support the initiative, Oovvuu has created an online portal for publishers to access the videos. There are feeds on the virus, as well as 70 other genres, from parenting to climate change.

Oovvuu then helps publishers integrate their pre-roll advertising, and provides backfill advertising support to generate vital revenue for publishers at this difficult time.

“We help publishers make money from video doing what they do best, reporting the news,” Sutton added. “Our goal in common with everyone has always been to make money, but in this time, we can step up to publishers’ needs and provide all our video to them for free. All we seek is a revenue share from any advertising revenue that is generated.”

Publishers can sign up for a no cost no strings trial at https://portal.oovvuu.com/login. Advertising integration queries can be made to Oovvuu via ricky@oovvuu.com

News costs money, not having it costs more, as we are all learning

Advertising, Content, Customers, Insights, News, Technology

When I was a journalist, media was elementary. Binary. If you didn’t have the best front page, millions of paying readers missed the scoop their money deserved. The pressure was intimidating and taught me the concept of survival of the fittest. Moaning just didn’t cut it.

Later, I was news editor with a global team and the most-read front page on the planet. I rubbed shoulders with smart, uncompromising editors, whose names and reputations were indelibly linked to their papers’ century-old brands. Together, we toiled under a shared anxiety for ever-bigger scoops.

Over this past decade, the Fourth Estate has been battered. Relentless attacks from Google and Facebook, hiding behind Section 230, have left their mark. Fighting a one-sided battle has left the once-proud media lion resembling an injured gazelle.

We are seeing the consequences. The near-collapse of local news reporting, the ensuing crisis in public trust, the rise of fake news and political polarisation, a spike in hate speech and intolerance, clickbait and collapsing CPMs. These are symptoms of a neutered media – felt most keenly in local news – and caused by the unchecked rise of Google and Facebook.
Ricky Sutton, Oovvuu CEO

Now this is changing. Scales have been removed from our eyes and we are in the dawn of a media revival, driven by the unerring human values of trust, brand and truth. Facebook is blinded by tech and a myopic perspective that doesn’t care. History that will judge them. Google knows it though, and let me tell you why.

When I first wrote a version of this article in 2017, I proposed a plan. It was before Cambridge Analytica, before we knew the shocking extent of Facebook’s data abuses, before YouTube’s paedophilia rings, Google’s sex scandals and billion-dollar global advertiser boycotts.

We had created Oovvuu a few years earlier to help journalism by partnering broadcasters and publishers to put a relevant video in every article in the world. Every broadcaster was handpicked as a trusted source. Every publisher too. Together, we would create a new, video-led way of reporting the news, and create trust on a scale that would rival the duopoly.

Once achieved, we would use it to repatriate billions from Facebook and Google back to the journalists and broadcasters reporting the world.

We went public in a keynote at The International News Media Association, announcing 100 broadcasters had joined our mission, providing feeds of breaking news video and long form programming to publishers. More than $2 billion of constantly-updating news video, available to any trusted publisher via a simple-to-use, one-touch technology.

Partners included the BBC, Bloomberg, The Associated Press, Reuters, Agence France Presse, PBS, Deutsche Welle, ITN, Euronews, Press Association, Canadian Press, AAP, Techcrunch, The Guardian, ABC Australia, 24.com Africa, NDTV India, TRT Turkey, VPRO Holland and many more.

Publishers there to listen included Schibsted, The Guardian, News Corp, The New York Times, The Irish Times, Trinity Mirror, Sanoma, RussMedia, Mail Online, The FT, Axel Springer, The UK Telegraph, Archant, Newsquest, Newsweek.

At the time, the media industry resembled two elephants in a sea of ants. The New York Times and Guardian were vanishingly small in comparison to the duopoly, yet just the top 26 publishers working together had a larger audience than Facebook. It felt like there was something we could do.
Ricky Sutton, Oovvuu CEO

Oovvuu set out to mobilise the media industry to work together to create a new, bigger and better elephant, this time based on truth, brand and trust. A few years on, we are gaining traction.

Many of the world’s largest publishers have since joined, and we are in contract negotiations with more than 100 more. We have opened offices in New York and London, we have staff in San Francisco, Mumbai and Cape Town.

Our tech has also transformed. In 2015, when we launched Compass, a tool that embeds in reporters’ workflows that can read articles, watch videos and match them together in less than a second, it so impressed IBM Watson and Amazon, they both funded us. Soon after Intel joined.

Now, tens of millions of people in 143 countries benefit from breaking news video they could not previously access. News articles are being enhanced, publishers have access to the video they need and broadcasters are distributing to new markets in an instant.

More videos are going in more articles more quickly, with more than 250 journalists using Compass daily to make better recommendations. We didn’t set out to be a poster child for machine learning, and be invited to speak at the largest conferences in the world, but it happened.

You see, we are journalists, and it is in our DNA to learn. When we keynoted at IBM Think in Las Vegas (above) to 35,000 engineers I opened by saying: “Technology can be learned, but trust must be earned. I know that because I am speaking at the world’s largest AI conference, and I can’t write a single line of code.”

We are not alone in learning. The world has also learned what Facebook is all about.

The truth was revealed by six devastating exposes in The Guardian, Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Wired and Der Spiegel, and more are emerging every day. Billions have been wiped off the company’s value, Zuckerberg has terrified the world with robotic apologies to the US Congress, and across the world, demands for anti-trust action to break them up are gaining momentum.

The likelihood of which, Dina Srinivasan, entrepreneur turned anti-trust specialist told the Digiday podcast, is “imminent and very high. The market is spewing out warped outcomes and tweaks at 10,000ft need to be made”.

Facebook will continue to make money, like bad companies before it, but it has been exposed. The halo has tilted and now, well, it’s just another greedy company hiding behind a friendly logo.

Facebook’s woes have been a heat shield for Google, which does all the same things on a far bigger scale. YouTube has taken some hits, and responded with the usual empty apologies and promises, but Google as a whole is just six headlines from the same fate. Mountain View is worried, as it should be.

I know this personally because they reached out to me, and media leaders I work with, asking what they should do.

This creates a point in time opportunity for the media, Google and the world, and it starts with maths. Google is meant to be good at maths, so there’s hope.

A billion people watch news video daily. Typically, they watch two videos each a day. Non-Oovvuu publishers only have video in seven per cent of their articles. Oovvuu increases it to 40 per cent.

The Oovvuu solution means more people, watching more video. With US publishers boasting enormous numbers of page views, and years of trust, this is a perfect marriage to create brand safety, with engaged audiences at the duopoly’s scale.

Google had 172 billion page views in November 2019. Facebook had 42 billion. The top 50 publishers in America combined had 98 billion.

Trusted videos, in trusted environments at these scales, with the premium CPMs of video, represents a business-changing revenue of $100 million a year in new revenue for the larger publishers. That’s be the difference between more closures and mergers, and a sustainable future reporting the news.

Google wrote $42 billion in ad revenue in 2018. Facebook a further US$34 billion. One in every four dollars came from video, and eMarketer says it be one in three soon, so, shifting billions to publishers and broadcasters for reporting the news in video can be done.

That sum is sufficient to end the scourge of fake news, reboot the media earnings, make truth and information free and distributed, and it is in the best interests of Google to help as the anti-trust clouds gather.

There is nothing safer than a Reuters video in a New York Daily News article, or the latest on a virus pandemic from AFP in The Chicago Tribune. The world needs trust for our society to maintain stability.

Media is our mission, technology is just our tool. Brands and agencies hurt by the scandals of the past two years also know they need brand safe content and engaged audiences at scale. We know this because the three largest in the world, Group M, IPG and Dentsu Aegis all have trading deals with us.

All that is needed now is for publishers to step up…

Oovvuu’s documentaries will transform your video earnings and engagement

Advertising, Content, Customers, Insights, News

Oovvuu believes that news media reporting will increasingly reliant on video, that is why we work so hard to ensure every publisher has a relevant video for every article.

Typically, this involves embedding a short clip to a news article, telling the story in greater depth, and creating a lucrative new monetisation method via a pre-roll ad.

Pre-roll video ads – ads that run before a video – command ad prices up to 20x that of standard display, meaning the value of every page view is transformed when video is added.

People love it. Editors love it. Advertisers love it.

Some progressive publishers though are going a step further, and creating Netflix-like video hubs where their visitors can access brilliant and thought-provoking documentaries.

Oovvuu provides thousands of long form films, across multiple genres, to enable any publisher to make the leap into long form.

Play Stuff

The best execution we have seen with the Oovvuu catalogue has been Play Stuff, the video section of New Zealand’s premiere publisher Stuff.

visit play stuff

Oovvuu has also built video on demand hubs at West Australian Newspapers in Perth, and Media24 in South Africa.

Average viewing time on our hubs across the world is 16 minutes, and with mid-roll ads adding to pre-rolls, they can generate 4x the revenue of a standard pre-roll.

Hubs also extend reader engagement with news sites into the weekends and evenings.

If you are interested in exploring a hub solution, drop us a line.

To set the scene, these are 10 most watched Oovvuu documentaries so far in 2020.

The Whale

The true story of Luna, a young, wild killer whale who tries to befriend people on the rugged west coast of Vancouver Island. Filled with love and bitter sweet, it charts the difficult relationship between man and nature. Narrated by Ryan Reynolds.

More Than Bees:

Fifty years ago, Einstein warned: “If bees disappear, mankind has only four years left to live.” Without bees, there is no pollination, and fruit and vegetables could disappear. Billions of bees have died in the past 15 years. How worried should we be?

The Thread:

In the aftermath of the Boston marathon bombing, social media became a factory for accusations and rampant speculation. The Thread pieces together interviews, posts, Tweets and YouTube videos to reconstruct the terror attack through the hysteria of the internet.

Vlast:

When Russia’s richest oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky challenged Russian President Vladimir Putin to be more democratic, he was arrested, convicted and his oil company seized. The film traces his dramatic rise and fall at the hands of Putin’s secret services.

Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story:

Lee Atwater is a political rogue who mentored George W Bush and led the Republican party to historic victories, make liberal a dirty word and transforming the way America votes. Viewed through the lens of Trump’s Presidency, it explores his role in America’s shift to the right.

How Kevin Bacon Cured Cancer:

Six degrees of separation is a fascinating idea, that everyone in the world can be connected in just a few steps. What if this isn’t a myth? What if a network theory also applies to viruses, terrorism and fashion trends? How can we use such knowledge?

Missing Presumed Dead:

While passing an Australian antique shop, filmmaker Gerard Reed happened upon a wallet belonging to a World War 1 German soldier. Fascinated by the find, he decided to investigate and learn the fate of the German soldier through the mists of time.

Frontline Fighting: Battling ISIS:

Three untrained British volunteers with no family connections to the Middle East heed the call to take up arms with Kurdish fighters to reclaim a besieged town from ISIS. Like many called to arms, they find themselves entirely unprepared for the raw atrocities of combat.

Inside The Russian Info War Machine:

Russia’s information war machine is gearing up. From state owned media to shadowy hackers and trolls, a new army is pushing the agenda, manipulating public opinion, undermining democratic governments and attempting to alter world events, but how does it all work?

Digital Addicts:

Children are becoming addicted to mobiles, harming their development and causing possible long-term damage. That’s the story, but what are the facts? Medical experts follow young patients to explore how their brains are affected by constant exposure to screens.

Five disciplines to make your video strategy profitable and sustainable

Advertising, Content, Customers, Insights, Technology

Oovvuu’s founders ran video for global media companies for almost a decade. Viewing was rising, ad rates were frothy yet all our businesses made multi-million dollar losses.

We asked peers for their secrets but found they were all in loss too. How could it be? What were we doing wrong? Was something endemically broken in our industry?

In 2014, we quit our jobs to create Oovvuu to find out. Our mission was to put a relevant video in every article and create a profitable video model for media.

We have been dissecting the global video economy ever since; streams, ads, devices, viewer behaviours, engagement.

We have traced the shifting consumption of a billion consumers, the fragmentation of devices, the evolution of content from short form to long, the evolution of ad yields and the importance of trust, all against the backdrop of Facebook and Google’s dangerous duopoly.

We have attracted powerful partners. More than 100 broadcasters including the BBC, Bloomberg, Reuters, AP, AFP, Business Insider and The Guardian now trust Oovvuu to distribute their programming daily.

IBM Watson and Amazon have invested in helping us develop our tech. Now Intel have joined too.

What we have learned together has uncovered some core disciplines that publishers can take advantage of to become profitable in video.

Audience:
If content is king then distribution is queen. Acquiring an audience is expensive. It costs Netflix ~$125 to acquire each new customer, but publishers already have huge audiences. Audiences who trust news brands and are engaged. That makes publishers well placed to succeed. If you have a big audience, are you really making the most of that advantage?

As a rule of thumb, two million monthly video viewers will generate $1 million in gross ad revenue annually. Think on this though. It only takes the top 26 content providers and publishers to work together to have an audience comparable with Facebook. Isn’t that worth doing?

Content:
Oovvuu has streamed 100,000-plus videos, across 60 genres, hundreds of millions of times, to news hungry audiences in 143 countries for more than five years. We know what audiences want to watch, how they are willing to engage, and which ad formats drive the best returns for publishers and agencies alike. It’s one of the reasons the content providers work with us.

Our Compass tech can literally read stories at the speed they are published and get the right video to your news team in less than a second.

Technology:
Oovvuu’s founders have been working in video since before YouTube, Facebook, and the iPad. We have devoted tens of thousands of hours to solving its challenges, to become deep subject matter experts.

From online video platforms, to content mix, to ad tech, to storage and tech, from CMS integration, reporting and analytics, we have done it all. At our core, though, we are journalists. Passionate about supporting our industry. We have lived your challenges, that’s why you can trust us as a partner.

Sales:
A billion people watch news video every day, and still want more. We have grown video inventory for publishers by as much as 30x, but hitting video KPIs is only half the battle. Google’s YouTube and Facebook now dominate the ad market, commanding as much as 85 per cent of video ad revenue in some markets.

Oovvuu works hand in glove with your ad sales teams, offering market insights, actionable insights from peers and even backfilling ads with programmatic solutions if you need. If you grow traffic, we will help you grow revenues alongside it.

Positioning:
All videos are not equal, and where you position them in the article is critical. The right video in the right position can command a 34% click to play rate. That is, if your article has been ready 10,000 times, 3,400 of those views will lead to a video view, and an ad.

Using the wrong video in a grab for volume, or putting the right video in the wrong spot, can cost you millions over the course of a year, and deny your audience access to video they want. We can help. Oovvuu has won multiple awards for its work, being described as a gossamer thread for publishers to follow through the often confusing fog of video.

We roll these learnings up into our world-leading Compass suite, giving you the video, tools and insights you need to get to video profitability.