V
video intelligence
Guest
We started in 2008 as a video publisher, Viewster, showing millennials TV series and movies, untill we realised that we had more demand for advertising than we had ad opportunities available.
In 2011 we started what’s today known as a publisher trading desk - what it meant was extending audiences off the publisher onto third parties.
So, we acquired other pubs and grew into what is video intelligence today. At the time, people started to watch more content on their mobile phones. From there, there were a ton of opportunities to follow.
If a platform is under-funded that means it needs intermediaries to create a business - and many companies took advantage. The only issue were the companies getting greedy. Premium advertiser would try to buy an impression that was full-screen, mobile, premium on a premium publisher, and effectively the inventory ran through various middlemen. In the end, the ad would land as a small player ad on some completely different site, sometimes even a slightly unsavory publisher. This obviously didn't benefit neither the advertiser, nor the publisher.
Big brands were the first to put their foot down and impose stricter rules. Media agencies gladly took advantage of the opportunity by starting trading desks, buying inventory, recycling it and selling it on to agencies. This led to 70% of the value of media budgets to dissapear somewhere in the middle.
Consumers, being swamped with too many ads, started increasingly using ad blockers, having another negative effect on the ad business.
Digital advertising is still in its growth stage, but with all these issues impacting it, it is easy to understand why brands and publishers alike are skeptical when it comes to the ad tech supply chain. Moving forward, our mission follows three aspects:
What's your take on current issues and what can be done to solve them?
In 2011 we started what’s today known as a publisher trading desk - what it meant was extending audiences off the publisher onto third parties.
So, we acquired other pubs and grew into what is video intelligence today. At the time, people started to watch more content on their mobile phones. From there, there were a ton of opportunities to follow.
If a platform is under-funded that means it needs intermediaries to create a business - and many companies took advantage. The only issue were the companies getting greedy. Premium advertiser would try to buy an impression that was full-screen, mobile, premium on a premium publisher, and effectively the inventory ran through various middlemen. In the end, the ad would land as a small player ad on some completely different site, sometimes even a slightly unsavory publisher. This obviously didn't benefit neither the advertiser, nor the publisher.
Big brands were the first to put their foot down and impose stricter rules. Media agencies gladly took advantage of the opportunity by starting trading desks, buying inventory, recycling it and selling it on to agencies. This led to 70% of the value of media budgets to dissapear somewhere in the middle.
Consumers, being swamped with too many ads, started increasingly using ad blockers, having another negative effect on the ad business.
Digital advertising is still in its growth stage, but with all these issues impacting it, it is easy to understand why brands and publishers alike are skeptical when it comes to the ad tech supply chain. Moving forward, our mission follows three aspects:
- full transparency
- a shorter value chain between publisher and advertiser
- inclusion of the end-user - better targetted advertising.
What's your take on current issues and what can be done to solve them?
