Headquartered in Atlanta, Ga., EyeWonder is a leading provider of interactive digital advertising solutions. Its products, services and innovative technology enables advertisers, advertising agencies and content publishers to leverage the most comprehensive and effective campaigns to connect with the audiences they desire to reach. Understanding that every campaign is unique, EyeWonder employs a team of professionals dedicated to measuring and tracking performance while lending the technology and expertise needed to achieve individual success.
DMB’s Contel Bradford recently spoke with EyeWonder CEO John Vincent, to discuss the company’s involvement in the world of digital advertising, the importance of video standardization and what else this vibrant industry could possibly have in store.
Please explain how your products and services benefit advertisers and publishers looking to reach their targeted audience online?
As the industry leader in online video advertising, EyeWonder offers in-page, in-stream and custom ad formats with a variety of features that connect the most effective interactive digital advertising ad campaigns to targeted audiences. We are a service-leveraging technology organization, meaning we work with agencies and their advertisers during the entire campaign process - from creative consulting [and] traffic optimization to interpreting metrics. Agencies and publishers utilize our technology solutions as well as leverage our service experience and expertise throughout their campaigns - ensuring they produce the most effective campaigns, driving the best results.
What makes your ad campaigns more effective in regard to interaction from the end-customer?
All our products and solutions are focused on enabling the most engaging, measurable and informative ad experiences for users and advertisers.
What are some of the most notable features of your advertising formats?
EyeWonder offers a wide variety of innovative rich media ad formats that leverage the power of social media, viral components (widgets, send-to-a-friend and SMS), geo-targeting and geo-locating, coupons, dynamic polling, live chat and in-banner purchase power. Our video formats give advertisers the ability to reach the broadest audiences with impactful creative that can include live video, high-definition video and long-form video. Coupled with our multitude of custom ad formats, we offer our clients these products as well as our expertise to ensure agencies and advertisers meet and exceed their campaign objectives, from driving brand metrics (awareness, likeability and message association) to direct response.
For example, social media integration is popular among online ad campaigns today. EyeWonder recently powered a campaign for Fox Home Entertainment that allowed users to sign into their Twitter account, post a Tweet and see that Tweet appear-all within the ad unit. Live video is another hot feature. Last spring, EyeWonder delivered a campaign with agency Beeby Clark + Meyler for GE that utilized live, in-banner video to announce the launch of its Healthymagination initiative.
Why is it so important to establish standards in the online video industry?
Standards are essential to provide meaningful scale to drive “critical mass” of audience and ad inventory that advertisers demand in order to spend a significant percentage of their budgets online. For publishers specifically, standardization helps monetize video content by creating ad placements that are quickly and easily pushed out, ultimately offering clients an easier way to buy and create efficiently. On the agency side, creatives can “create ads once and play them anywhere”, maximizing their production time and cost. Media agencies gain standard and consistent reporting metrics across an entire buy with one central reporting system across all publishers. Once standards are in place, in-stream advertising will become a revenue-driver for all parties involved.
How close are we to seeing standardization across the board?
The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has made great strides with regard to standardization of in-stream video advertising. However, online publishers must still universally embrace these standards - adoption across the majority of sites will take some time. Our hope is that the industry has learned from past challenges like in-page rich media standardization, which took several years to get where it is today. Hopefully we have all learned that scalable solutions are the most expedient path to growth for all publishers, not proprietary ad solutions.
Please give us a little insight on how EyeWonder has been working collectively with the Interactive Advertising Bureau to develop standards and best practices in the online video realm.
Several members of EyeWonder are active on the IAB’s Digital Video Committee, which in July of 2008 released its Digital Video Ad Serving Template (VAST) guidelines, designed to standardize communication protocol between video players and servers. In addition, EyeWonder has a presence on the Video Player-Ad Interface Definitions (VPAID) subcommittee, which released a set of guidelines this past February to define a standard method for video ads to communicate with video players and enable ad compatibility across all VPAID-compliant players. We will continue to partner with the IAB whenever possible to ensure the successful implementation of standards across all areas of video advertising as it evolves.
What role has the EyeWonder Universal In-Stream Framework (UIF) played in helping those standards evolve?
UIF is an IAB-compliant, open-standard platform that allows publishers to deliver any next-generation interactive in-stream ad within a site’s video player. UIF fully supports Adobe® Flash® and Microsoft® SilverlightTM players with open-standard benefits, including adaptability to changing industry needs, greater ease in isolating and fixing bugs and the ability to easily modify the platform to suit specific publisher needs. EyeWonder saw the need for a scalable solution for in-stream, which is why we worked to create the UIF before there was a formal standardization process in place. However, we are fully on board with whatever solution the IAB and the industry develops to drive scale and adoption of in-stream advertising.
Where does video and rich media advertising go from here? What is your outlook on the future of the industry?
Rich media and video advertising have been garnering increasingly larger share of advertisers’ interactive marketing budgets in recent years, and we see this trend continuing in the future. Many business verticals or sectors that are leading ad spenders in traditional media are just now really starting to embrace rich media and interactive video as they become more comfortable with the change in consumers’ shifting media consumption to interactive. We see exciting growth and innovation ahead. In-stream video, IPTV and mobile advertising will make quantum leaps in the coming years as well, leading to the long-promised convergence utopia for advertisers and publishers.
Advertising as a whole will become more of an active rather than passive experience, which creates a win not only for advertisers, publishers and agencies but consumers as well. Ads will continue to target the best possible audiences, providing value for everyone in the interactive digital advertising ecosystem.
