Insights Archives

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

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

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.

Publishers share 16 brilliant steps to win, and win big, at video

Advertising, Content, Customers, Insights, Technology

Over years of trial and error, and sharing data and learnings with publishers all over the world, we have discovered a sustainable business model for video.

Rather than us share it with you, we asked our publishing partners across the world to share the details of the specific strategies they are employing via the Oovvuu platform to win, and win big.

It starts with four fundamental truths:

A billion people are watching video on news sites every day, and they want more.
Publishers have the audience, but until Oovvuu, lacked enough video to meet demand.
Broadcasters had the video, but until Oovvuu, lacked global, ubiquitous, instant distribution, and
Advertisers are seeking brand safe content, watched by engaged audiences, at scale, after a slew of terrible scandals at YouTube and Facebook.

Oovvuu pulls the threads together.

Our technology, called Compass, reads articles, watches video and matches them together. It recommends the right video to journalists at just the right moment, when they are publishing their story.

One video, in one article, in one click, watched by 10,000 people, per article, per publisher, across 500 publishers, unleashes a network effect. It’s that scalability that led to us being funded by IBM and Amazon, and more recently Intel, as we leverage the cloud and A.I to accelerate.

Four years on from Oovvuu’s modest beginnings, TV is becoming video and heading online, and publishers share an ambition for every news article to feature video. The video ad market is now worth US$52 billion, so the time has come to pay attention.

Here, we and our publishers share the core disciplines we have discovered together are essential for anyone aiming to be profitable in the emerging video economy.

Focus, focus and… focus.

We can provide you with the tools and tricks you need, but you will only be successful if your team focuses on winning.

So aim for a video in every article.

The mobile-centric future means news will be increasingly video-led. Now is the time to get in the game. Set your team’s expectation that EVERY article has at least one video in it.

Oovvuu has been created to provide a one-click solution to put the right video into the right article. We provide the video you need, and the tools to make it simple, meaning a video in every article is now possible for the first time.

You need LOTS of video, and all the time

With major media companies publishing 2,500 stories an hour or more, you need access to a critical mass and never-ending stream of video.

Doing rights deals with broadcasters is time-consuming, complicated and expense. Oovvuu has done all this for you. We provide all the content for free too, in return for a revenue share.

That means you can use Oovvuu as a powerful video wire.

We deliver more than 1,000 new news videos every day, covering the big stories as they happen and much much more. Our catalogue numbers hundreds of thousands of titles, long and short, across more than 60 genres.

Consider Oovvuu as a video wire service. Dive in whenever to find new story ideas, knowing you have a video ready.

It couldn’t be simpler.

We put an Oovvuu button in your content management system (CMS) and you can browse latest and trending videos, or search by keyword or genre. Any which way, you’ll find something.

Ensure great videos get top billing.

All videos are not equal. Their relevance to the article, and their position within it, impact on success.

Relevant videos need to be published in the hero position, right at the top. This typically leads to a 35% click to play rate, which means 10,000 page views will convert to 3,500 video streams. Some publish as many as 2,500 stories an hour.

Do the math. It’s huge.

Some videos are explicitly relevant. That is they are about exactly the same thing. Others are implicitly relevant, which might be an explainer, or background, or a biography, of the main person in the article. These should be published too, but perhaps four paragraphs down the story.

These implicit videos, if they come from a reputable source like the ones Oovvuu supplies, attract an 11% click to view rate.

We also provide a carousel tool, that automatically creates a list of related videos for the foot of articles. This can be a timeline, or more videos, or viewpoints on the same topic. This footer position typically has a 2% click to view rate.

You reap what you sow.

If these play rates look high to you, then you have probably be relying on substandard video. People are smart, and crappy, clickbait fare will underperform. Just get better video from us.

Deploy Strap for fast breaking news video in every article.

Modern news moves fast, so catching the breaking news as it happens results in traffic spikes.

Oovvuu Strap was created to mirror rolling news services like Sky or CNN.

It embeds at the top of all webpages, and updates automatically every 60 seconds, as news breaks, needing no editorial touch.

It works seamlessly in homepages, section pages and articles, meaning no reader need ever miss big news as it breaks.

Every video runs with a pre-roll, and it automatically plays on to the next video with an ad between each. This converts page views to video views at a rate of 11%.

Strap’s feeds can be tailored to your needs. For example, a world news feed in world news, or business, or tech, or lifestyle, or motoring, or travel and so on.

We provide feeds across more than 60 genres, and we can even blend feeds too: Lifestyle, health and fitness and travel for example.

Strap straddles the language barrier.

As Strap delivers feeds, it can use APIs to support any language.

If you publish in Hindi, or Cantonese, no matter. So long as Strap has a native language feed, it can embed in that page.

We just need the feed, the URLs and we can deploy Strap in an hour. And it still delivers ads, generating new revenue on every page.

Strap is the fix for monetising your wires.

Most sites rely on wires for sections they do not staff. This might be world news, world business, and so on.

Oovvuu has video feeds for all these, and Strap can deliver breaking news feeds into all of them dynamically.

It means you can have a video in every wire article by default without any editorial effort, and make money every time.

Don’t overlook your AMP pages.

It is common for publishers to have as many as 30% of their page views in AMP pages. Oovvuu supports AMP. Just tell us you want it, and we’ll add it at no cost.

Find and empower an Oovvuu champion.

Oovvuu provides the tech and content, but success is really down to you, your focus and your people.

Appoint a person we can work with to check every article and start growing the traffic.

We will ensure they shine, and success wins a lot of friends.

Once you are up and running, more of the team will want to join in, and that will create sustainable momentum.

It is not uncommon for publishers who do it well to grow video traffic 30x or more in the first year.

We can provide online training, weekly updates, we can even embed members of our editorial team in your office.

Set attainable targets and measure them.

It’s important to know what success looks like from the outset.

KPI your entire editorial time on a monthly video target, and select a single champion to own it.

You can safely set this as 11% of the total views of the pages where Oovvuu is being used.

Your team can ensure they meet the targets by focusing on the number of videos embedded, which positions they are embedded in and deploying Strap in as many spots as possible.

If you are falling behind, you can backfill by writing unique articles are written using Oovvuu as a video feed.

Share this KPI with the broader editorial team and ask them to contribute. Done positively, this will bring new champions to the surface who want to help.

Set very clear targets for commercial.

As Oovvuu is global, we have oversight of video ad yields in every major market in the world. We will discuss with you, and agreed projected streams, CPMs and sell through, relevant to your market.

Through that, a revenue budget will be agreed and this will set the sales team’s targets.

If you are falling behind on ad sales, Oovvuu has a backfill sales solution, called Connect, that can help close the gap, but for this to work, we need you to be delivering a minimum of 10,000 video ads a day, or 300,000-a-month.

Zero in on performance with Oovvuu dashboards.

We provide analytics to help your teams, which show video performance on a daily basis.

It displays video views versus target, what people watched, which broadcasters proved most popular and how you are tracking to your monthly goals.

We provide multiple logins for your key team members.