June 11, 2024
The World Media Group hosted its annual Innovation Forum this week, where the organisations creating the very latest publishing, ad-tech and insight solutions came together to share their knowledge with World Media Group members. It was noteworthy that three of the five companies presenting this year were offering solutions to help publishers to diversify their content offering through video, reflecting the demand from audiences for richer, more engaging, multi-platform media experiences.
Below, we outline the latest developments from these innovators, who are helping publishers to tell engaging stories and measure the effectiveness of their output with international audiences.
SeenThis
SeenThis has built an adaptive streaming technology that loads ad creative instantly, in the highest possible quality and with less data waste. With vertical video booming (last year it surpassed horizontal video in terms of time consumed on mobile devices), SeenThis saw an opportunity to help publishers move advertising budgets back from Meta, TikTok and YouTube and onto their own sites.
The company’s latest development, ‘Storylines’, is designed to attract a new generation of readers to editorial content through vertical video. The technology allows publishers to use the existing content they produce for Instagram, YouTube or TikTok to increase reader engagement and video views on their main website. In the Nordics, SeenThis has driven more than 200 campaigns with advertisers including Pepsi adopting recurring campaigns.
Key Takeout: SeenThis saw a huge opportunity to move spend back from Meta to publishers and the open web by enabling the immersive vertical video format that audiences love.
Brand Metrics
Brand Metrics’ philosophy is that advertisers deserve measurement data that shows the real effect of digital advertising on their brand for every campaign. Their innovative SaaS platform uses advanced scripts and algorithms to automate the process, enabling the measurement of much smaller campaigns, quickly, easily and cost-effectively.
What sets Brand Metrics apart is that it measures campaigns “In the wild”, in other words, capturing audience data on the site where they first see a campaign, rather than via panels. They combine exposure data – how many times people have seen a campaign and how long they’ve seen it for – with data capturing how people feel about the advertised brand. Brand Metrics’ algorithms then calculate Brand Lift, producing an automated report for the client. They also provide comparisons based on data from more than 30,000 campaigns across 122 categories, so brands can benchmark themselves against the competition.
Key takeout: Brand Metrics helps publishers to measure brand lift at scale, turning brand lift measurement from an ad-hoc piece of research into an always-on campaign metric.
Membrana Media
Membrana focuses on text-based publications, helping them to produce tailored videos at scale, and in real time. The new Google / IAB video rules that came into force last year implementing a new taxonomy for video classification are causing problems for publishers. Instream ads must now start with the sound on or show clear user intent, or risk being reclassified to lower CPM formats with potential revenue loss.
Membrana’s video advertising ecosystem supports publications of all sizes, regardless of existing video strategies or tools. For traditionally text-based publishers that are trying to adopt a “video-first” strategy to remain competitive, the solution offers a video production platform to help these publications create tailored video content at scale and in real-time in line with the new instream rules.
Key takeout: Membrana Media’s solution reduces video production time and cost, making it feasible for publishers to accompany a large portion of their articles with videos as they transition to a video-first approach.
Dianomi
Dianomi is a native content and marketing platform specialising in the financial services, business, tech and luxury lifestyle verticals. They help advertisers and publishers to target a highly engaged, affluent and C-suite audience in a brand safe and contextually relevant environment, while providing scale on the top 300 business, finance and luxury lifestyle media channels.
Dianomi’s ready-made distribution platform can extend the campaigns coming out of international publishers’ content studios beyond their own environments. The ability to target global cohort audiences, as well as create tailored cohorts, allows for precise targeting based on clients’ individual needs. Additionally, Dianomi’s custom, high-impact, smart Content Hubs allow publishers to scale outside their ecosystems, enhancing deal sizes and guaranteeing global traffic to advertisers.
Key Takeout: Dianomi offers a platform that empowers publishers to scale their branded content and revenue strategies, reaching their audiences where they are most engaged.
Vialog
Vialog is designed for creating and sharing video dialogue to encourage engagement, creating unique content. It allows people to record, upload, and share video messages, fostering conversations through video responses. Within media organisations, reporters on the ground can create short videos discussing the major stories of the day, and editors back in the newsroom can add to the conversation with their own expert analysis.
Vialog allows everyone to participate using their own device, replying across time zones, to create unique content that can be shared with audiences at a fraction of the cost of traditional video production. The one-minute videos are easy to record and share without the need for an app, download, or login, and the video player recorder can be embedded into websites with just one line of code.
Key takeout: Vialog empowers editorial teams to record video comments, replies and discussions from wherever they are in the world, so publishers can create dynamic ‘behind the scenes’ content at a fraction of the cost.
If you’d like to find out more about any of the companies above, or would like to know how you can take part in our next Innovation Forum, please get in touch.