Inventory management platform SpotX has launched a video advertising unit, designed to helps publishers boost their video ad inventory beyond standard in-stream units.
SpotX’s “In-Content Ad Unit” lets publisher insert video ads within content across their sites, benefiting those with shortages of video inventory.
The unit only plays while in view and typically appears in between paragraphs of text, making it an engaging yet non-disruptive experience for the viewer.
Considered by many in the industry as highly effective, in-content video ads address both inventory constraints and viewability concerns, according to Allen Klosowski, VP of Mobile and Connected Devices at SpotX.
“Our new In-Content Ad Unit places compelling advertising content outside of the traditional video stream, enabling publishers to cater to unmet demand for more video,” Klosowski said.
“Traditional print publishers, many of which offer premium brand placements for advertisers, are jumping at the opportunity to provide more video placements on their digital properties that are typically difficult to populate with enough video to support large pre-roll campaigns.
“And with viewability a current concern for advertisers, this new ad unit allows publishers to charge a premium as well as boost their inventory availability.”
In-content video ads, sometimes referred to in the industry as out-stream video ads, create new opportunities for advertisers to increase campaign performance, with several studies showing strong performance across brand recall and message retention measures.
The ad unit has been engineered to be respectful of the user, to guarantee viewability and to be especially effective on mobile devices. Premium publishers can deploy the units in both HTML5 and Flash environments to deliver more video ads even if their pre-roll inventory is oversold.
The units can be sold programmatically, in conjunction with in-stream ads through SpotX’s platform, as well as directly by publishers’ own direct sales teams.
“Publishers are using the SpotX platform to blend in-content and pre-roll advertising into a single direct or programmatic direct buy that can run on both formats,” Klosowski explained. “This approach will create the most brand lift and gives publishers much more inventory to sell while giving advertisers the greatest reach.
“SpotX is the only player in this space that has a complete video offering for publishers to both create these new opportunities as well as manage their existing pre-roll inventory across devices.”
The Denver based company rebranded from SpotXchange to SpotX recently to highlight its evolution from an ad exchange to a holistic inventory management platform, providing publishers with an ad server, SSP, and programmatic infrastructure for both open and private marketplace capabilities.
www.spotxchange.com