When Rocketboom, a three-minute newscast on technology and culture, signed on to be distributed by blip.tv, blip developed the first clickable overlay ads on QuickTime versions of the show for Rocketboom’s sponsor, Comedy Central’s The Sarah Silverman Program.
“It’s important for a couple of reasons,” said Mike Hudack, blip’s CEO. “Blip focuses on serialized content on the web and a lot of people watch it in iTunes. They subscribe to it and it gets delivered in podcast, so a large percent of the viewers see it in QuickTime. If you sell overlays that only play in Flash, you only hit a percentage of the audience. Now you’re making everybody happy because you get an ad in front of the entire audience and people can click on it. If it’s not important, they can hide it which is important for the show’s creator and the viewer.”
Andrew Baron, founder of Rocketboom, said the sponsorship model is “a great system because we burn the sponsorship message into our master file and distribute across all platforms. Not just one Flash file, but all our files, everywhere, through our own site (iTunes, Facebook, YouTube, TiVo, etc.).”
The ads were sold to Comedy Central by Deep Focus/New York. Eric Druckenmiller, the agency’s media director, said QuickTime has a hard coded video delivery technology unlike Windows Media Player that makes it difficult to serve ads. “We figured out how to get the Flash overlay to exist in the QuickTime environment for the first time. So the ads are playing in the iTunes world, the coveted Apple platform.”
The two-week campaign, which ended Oct. 3, featured overlay ads to promote the second season of The Sarah Silverman Program.
Rocketboom was used because “its underground video has an irreverent quality to it, like Sarah Silverman,” Druckenmiller said. He noted blip.tv was a good place for the advertising for two reasons: “it mirrors the irreverence of the show and the ad delivery methodology of the overlays was the most effective way of reaching the audience.” He said overlays were preferable to pre-rolls and post-rolls and the ability to deliver them in QuickTime increased the views.
Hudack said blip.tv will play overlay ads in QuickTime again. “We’re talking to advertisers about using it in the future,” he said.
Supreme Court Allows Multibillion-Dollar Class Action Lawsuit To Proceed Against Meta
The Supreme Court is allowing a multibillion-dollar class action investors' lawsuit to proceed against Facebook parent Meta, stemming from the privacy scandal involving the Cambridge Analytica political consulting firm.
The justices heard arguments in November in Meta's bid to shut down the lawsuit. On Friday, they decided that they were wrong to take up the case in the first place.
The high court dismissed the company's appeal, leaving in place an appellate ruling allowing the case to go forward.
Investors allege that Meta did not fully disclose the risks that Facebook users' personal information would be misused by Cambridge Analytica, a firm that supported Donald Trump 's first successful Republican presidential campaign in 2016.
Inadequacy of the disclosures led to two significant price drops in the price of the company's shares in 2018, after the public learned about the extent of the privacy scandal, the investors say.
Meta spokesman Andy Stone said the company was disappointed by the court's action. "The plaintiff's claims are baseless and we will continue to defend ourselves as this case is considered by the District Court," Stone said in an emailed statement.
Meta already has paid a $5.1 billion fine and reached a $725 million privacy settlement with users.
Cambridge Analytica had ties to Trump political strategist Steve Bannon. It had paid a Facebook app developer for access to the personal information of about 87 million Facebook users. That data was then used to target U.S. voters during the 2016 campaign.
The lawsuit is one of two high court cases involving class-action lawsuits against tech companies. The justices also are wrestling with whether to shut down a class action against Nvidia.... Read More