“The industry has to be more nimble about how we approach video … [There’s] a need for new creative units that show ads differently – in sleek ways that are still lightweight, not intrusive [and] not roadblocking your content.” – Garrett Ward, Director of Digital Operations, NY Daily News
Garrett dropped this gem and a few others onstage at AdMonsters OPS New York in June, giving the audience a real, unfiltered glimpse into the opportunities (and challenges) currently top of mind for digital publishers. Unsurprisingly, mobile and video – the two leading areas of growth for media companies, and the most intriguing for advertisers – were front and center.
Garrett shared the stage with Nikao Yang, our SVP of business development, where they discussed and demoed Instant-Feed™ HD, AdColony’s newest product and something that we believe is one of the first (and only) in-feed native video opportunities for publishers today.
Feed Me!
We developed the Instant-Feed™ Native Video Beta Program to give publishers another simple, gorgeous way to monetize their content. With the success of social apps and the persistence of feed- and scroll-based interfaces
, we thought that all publishers should have the opportunity to generate more revenue – even if they didn’t have a ton of existing video content.
So Instant-Feed™ works like this: Users scroll through the content feed, browsing stories and images, and when they move over the Instant-Feed™ ad unit, the sponsored content auto-plays instantly. It’s visually engaging, it’s relevant and it’s far less intrusive than a banner ad or interstitial.
Like many heavily-trafficked sites, NY Daily News is focused on monetizing without sacrificing a high-quality user experience. Although the intention is to scale up the amount of video content, the publication “is not YouTube and has no intention to be” – meaning they don’t have a constant stream of video inventory readily available.
What they do have is an audience that’s engaged with their news feed, but before Instant-Feed™, they were largely limited to static display ads or click-to-video banners, which could clutter the feed and diminish the user experience. Instant-Feed™ works with how the audience consumes the content, making it far less interruptive.
As Garrett told the AdMonsters audience, the “native feeling” videos are intriguing to users, working with the content instead of against it. This can lead to more scrolling, more browsing and more interaction for both the NY Daily News and its advertisers.
As a result, users will get HD quality, TV-like ads along with their regular doses of New York’s news and information. And AdColony is one of the only companies outside of Facebook offering this kind of innovation, essentially democratizing mobile native video for all publishers that have apps.
- The View from Q4: Android Gets the Traffic, But iOS Gets the Money - February 4, 2015
- The Opera Mediaworks Native Video Fund: Backing Next-Gen Creativity in Mobile - January 30, 2015
- Three Tips from the MMA: Mobile Marketing Should Be Personal, Multifaceted & Most of All – Ongoing - December 9, 2014
