Insights 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.

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.

How Oovvuu’s quality video ensures your ad gets the attention it deserves

Advertising, Insights

User experience has always been a top priority for Oovvuu, but in this day and age it is more important than ever. That means not only telling the news in a better way than ever before with video, but by making the way users consume the video enjoyable and seamless.

This means the user experience is key.

With ad dollars shifting away from ad formats like display or rich media, and into video, many publishers who have lacked video content, or the resource to do more video, resorted to switching on auto-play to increase ad inventory or to roll-out poor experiences like in-banner video and out-stream video to try to remain competitive.

This has often put consumer experience last in a race for short term revenue.

The cost of this is clear to see. While auto-play typically results in lower brand metrics like viewability and time in view. It also upsets users, as it is an uninvited demand for attention, drains battery life and costs mobile data. For many, it has led them to install ad blockers or move to a ad free paid subscription or worse where publishers may lose that audience altogether due to a bad user experience.

Oovvuu provides publishers a new solution that grows video views and advertising inventory while satisfying consumers and avoiding the need for cheaper, nastier alternatives like auto-play.

Oovvuu provides editors with a rolling feed of hundreds of thousands of videos from the world’s best and most trusted providers, including The BBC, Bloomberg, AFP, Reuters, Associated Press and many more.

This is integrated with publishers’ own technologies, and uses machine learning to identify the best video for any article, and then empowers any reporter to embed the video in their page, with an ad opportunity attached, in a single click.

It enables journalists to embed more user-initiated click-to-play videos into articles faster than ever before, delivering a greater user experience and higher engagement metrics for advertisers than they see with auto-play or out-stream.

Is mere exposure enough?

Oovvuu’s solution takes on added importance with the emergence of initiatives like the Coalition for better ads, and with browsers like Google Chrome and Apple Safari that now block auto-play video with sound on.

It means the $45 billion question for advertisers now is how much impact does your ad really have if it is never heard?

According to a recent Think With Google study viewers who see and hear an ad simultaneously are two to three times more likely to have an increase of brand awareness, consideration and ad recall.

So it’s not surprising to see more and more advertisers and ad agency groups pushing for better measurements standards for video – for example a viewable impression is only counted when the creative is 100 per cent in view with sound on for at least half the duration.

As Oovvuu video content is user initiated via click-to-play this allows for the advertisement’s audio to be on by default, delivering the advertiser’s message to audiences in a better way. It also returns better engagement metrics for advertisers than environments that use auto-play with sound off.

Content Is King

The user experience also requires the video to be good and relevant. Not all video is equal. Viewers have to be engaged and committed to sit through an ad to watch the video.

That’s why Oovvuu only partners with trusted, quality publishers and broadcasters. This include The BBC, Bloomberg, Australia’s ABC, The Guardian, Cheddar for business news , America’s PBS, AFP, Reuters, Business Insider, The UK Press Association, Canadian Press, NDTV in India, Euronews and many, many more.

The video we distribute is only premium and highly engaging. We vet every provider and publisher to ensure our video and advertising can only be seen in brand safe environments.

Multiple studies prove the value of advertising within premium publishers. According to a 2018 Group M and NewsWorks study advertising in quality online environments resulted in campaigns being 42 per cent more cost effective, based on levels of engagement, viewability and dwell time.

Advertising in premium publishers v non premium environments results in:

+10.5 per cent on brand awareness
+19.2 per cent on ad recall.
+9.7 per cent on brand perception
+10.3 per cent on recommendation intent
Ads are 58 per cent more likely to be 100 per cent in view, and
Ads are 98 per cent more likely to be placed fully above the fold

So what results does Oovvuu see?

Current quarter results for key video metrics on ads running against Oovvuu provided content are below.

Viewability rates are averaging 83 per cent for all impressions deemed as viewable based on the IAB/MRC standards. That is 19 per cent above global benchmarks
The average time in view for a 15 second ad is 13 to 14 seconds
Ad completion rates are averaging 80 per cent, which is 13 per cent above the global benchmarks based on 15 second ads
The average click through rate on Oovvuu video in premium publishers is 5.83 per cent – a massive 4.3% above global benchmarks based on non-skippable ads, and
The average cost per completed view is AU$0.023, US$ 0.014, or ZAR0.24 (CPM cost model applies).

If you are a publisher, marketer or advertiser keen to learn more, please submit your interest to adops@oovvuu.com

Oovvuu and publishers launch global ad solution for video monetisation

Advertising, Customers, Insights, Technology

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:

A billion people watch news video daily, and want more.

Publishers need more video to meet demand.

Broadcasters have video but needed global, instant distribution.

Advertisers wanted brand safe environments, and engaged audiences at scale.

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