ad units

Why London is poised to lead the way with native advertising

With native advertising the buzz phrase among marketers for 2014, London is poised to lead the way in innovation in what is one of the most creative digital ad formats to emerge in recent years. 

In November AirBnB co-founder Nathan Blecharczyk claimed that London was ‘stuck in a Silicon Valley Roundabout’ and held back by its failure to produce a ‘billion dollar’ online business. 

Many in London found the comments annoying. Phil Cooper, a digital veteran who launched the UK’s first video ad network and was until last year European MD of Brightroll, was one of them. 

Cooper, who launched his latest digital venture six months ago, London based accommodation platform Kippsy.com, a competitor of AirBnB in the London market, believes that what London does best is innovation; taking an established model, technology or platform and turning it on its head. 

What are the possibilities with online video ad creative?

Online video has always felt to me like one of those technologies where brands have varied massively in their commitment to innovate.

That was kind of understandable until the last couple of years, as YouTube and video streaming (NetFlix, NOW TV,4OD etc) are now so pervasive.

With brands committing to more online video advertising, it’s obvious the technology will be maturing. In effect, what’s possible on your website should now be possible in an online video ad.

As web viewers aren’t captive in the same way live TV viewers are (even they can go and make a cup of tea), advertisers have to get cuter at delivering changing and tailored ad content that is essentially fun or useful enough to be voluntarily engaged with. A tall order?

Well let’s look at what can be achieved? Here are a few examples, mostly taken from Innovid, who I chatted to last week.

Advertisers want new ad units, but aren’t quick to embrace them

For many advertisers, when it comes to ad formats, bigger and bolder is better. And for good reason: many consumers are blind to ads, so to get their attention, ads really have to stand out.

But as much as advertisers say they want new ad units that will stand out, they apparently aren’t impressed with the bigger and bolder units the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) unveiled in 2011.

AOL succeeds, struggles with its new ad formats

A year ago, AOL was prepping plans to launch new ad formats. Its initiative, codenamed Project Devil, was designed to provide ads that are more eye-catching and engaging than ‘normal’ ads.

As we detailed at the time, the ads would be up to four times larger and “be enabled with new functionality, with room for a photo gallery, a video, coupons, Facebook or Twitter updates or maps“.

Project Devil was seen as crucial to AOL, which had been seeing significant double-digit declines in ad revenue. If AOL CEO Tim Armstrong was going to turn the company around, it seemed that the new initiative’s success would be crucial.

Last week, however, we learned that AOL’s new ad formats aren’t finding as much tracking as hoped.

The IAB’s guiding principles of digital measurement

As wonderful as the internet is for marketers, the digital media landscape is still very challenging.

From a lack of standards to metrics that don’t really seem to provide much in the way of insight, marketers often have to balance the power of the internet with the flaws present in marketing.

But the IAB doesn’t think it has to be that way. It recently collaborated with Bain & Company and MediaLink LLC to develop Making Measurement Make Sense, “an ecosystem-wide initiative” that seeks to improve digital media measurement.