Rhythm NewMedia, a mobile ad network, is leading the charge with mobile video, having executed successful campaigns for Unilever’s Lynx and Mazda earlier this year. The campaigns have run in Europe with the cooperation of European carriers, and now an agreement has been reached with an American carrier, so the company will begin running mobile campaigns in the U.S. soon. In this week’s iChat, Rhythm’s CEO Ujjal Kohli discusses how the company executes mobile video campaigns that CBS and other publishers will use.
iSPOT: You’re working with phone companies and publishers in the mobile video space. What is the role of each in making mobile video advertising work?
Kohli: Consumers get to watch free short videos, we use the term video snacking. The ads are pre-roll and post-roll video ads. The main roles are to market the service and make it highly visible to mobile subscribers. The people who are in the best position to do that are either operators such as Verizon or publishers who have big brand names like CBS. Smaller publishers would be more challenged to get large groups to come to their sites.
That’s one role they play, then there’s the role to sell the ads. We’re doing that in all of the deals, including CBS.
Then there is the platform role. The platform integrates the right advertising with the right content and delivers it to a phone. There’s a lot of technology that goes into that. For example, the ads are inserted in the moment of request. Two people requesting the same video might see different ads based on their profile [as could] even the same person–if she wanted to view the same video multiple times, she can end up seeing different ads. We don’t want to show the same ad to the same person more than a certain number of times. So there’s a lot of technology.
Then of course there’s the phones. Unlike computers they don’t have play lists. On a PC you can tell it to play the ad and then play the video. That doesn’t work on the phone, you have to stitch them together as one video stream in real time. We fetch the ad, we fetch the content, we stitch it and deliver it in real time without any latency. Phones are different from PCs in that there is very little standardization in terms of browser, operating system and screen sizes so we have to figure out which phone is at the other end and make it a nice video experience.
We also do the programming. I believe video experience on the phone is much different from the experience online. When you go to YouTube, it could be a 30 or 40-minute session so it makes sense to have hundreds of thousands of videos and you can use search as a paradigm to find stuff you like. The mobile experience is different, the typical session length might be less than 10 minutes so it doesn’t make sense to have a selection of hundreds of thousands of videos. We have programmers that feature a hundred or so videos that people want to watch that day. The nature of what they watch in mobile is topical stuff, the number one category is news, weather and horoscopes that change daily. Entertainment is a significant category but it’s not the number one category like it is online. Another difference is because the session is so short, the experience can’t be like YouTube where there isn’t quality control. We guarantee that any video on our service has been watched by an employee and is guaranteed to play nicely on mobile phones.
iSPOT: What do you mean when say you do the programming. Aren’t you playing content provided by the publishers?
Kohli: We are the integrator who puts content and advertising together on our platform. We only work with top tier professional publishers, no user-generated stuff. They produce the content but our programmers are scheduled to see it so we know it plays nicely on a mobile phone. We have editors that can tweak the content if needed to play better on a phone.
iSPOT: That brings up another question about the kind of ad content that plays. Do you play straight TV ads or made for mobile ads?
Kohli: There are very few made for mobile ads at this point. Most of the ads are repurposed online video or TV ads. We’re making tweaks to make them good enough. They aren’t as good as if they were made for mobile but they’re very good. An example of a tweak is if there’s a url or toll free number at the bottom of the screen, we take it out and make it a full screen shot. We’ve done things for top brands where we take a :30 and cut it down to :15. I’ve done a lot of TV ads in the past and it costs a lot to produce an ad and mobile isn’t big enough to do that.
iSPOT: All the work you’ve done is in Europe. What’s your plan for the U.S.?
Kohli: We have a U.S. launch coming in the next quarter with a very large operator. U.S. operators are very particular about not pre-announcing things so I’m not at liberty to say who it is, but it’s one of the major ones. It will be on air in less than a quarter and we’re very excited about launching in the U.S. because it’s the biggest advertising market.
iSPOT: Can you give us an example of a specific mobile ad campaign you’ve run?
Kohli: For BMW we combined brand advertising and call to action using video and banners. If you’re at the menu and looking for a video to watch, you’ll see a BMW banner; then if you pick a news video, you’ll see a pre-roll ad for the same car. After you watch the ad and the video and come back to the menu, there’s another banner offer from BMW; it might be a low financing rate or a test drive which you can click on. I remember the way we used to combine brand and call to action is run a brand ad on TV at night and an offer in the newspaper in the morning. The difficulty of traditional media is you never know if the people see them both in the right sequence. The beauty of mobile video is it’s at the same moment in front of the same person so we’ve seen very high click through rates approaching three percent. We call this a companion ad where you use brand and call to action in video hand in hand.
iSPOT: Can you tell us where it ran?
Kohli: It ran in the U.K. on two networks, T-Mobile and 3Hutchison.
iSPOT: Are you able to measure mobile video ads?
Kohli: If you have clickable ads, they are inherently measurable. An age-old problem with video ads on TV is how do you know who’s watching. After you run a flight of TV video, you have a research company call people up on the phone and ask them if they saw the ad and remembered anything. It’s after the effect and there’s many sources of errors. I’m not sure how people are measuring the effectiveness of video ads online, there’s no measurement. What we have done is in the menu I told you about where you select videos to watch, we put in a survey. At first I thought why would anyone want to take a survey on their mobile phone, but we have been really surprised at the response. We’ve run it six times with amazing results. It’s 20 to 30 seconds on your phone with multiple choice. We give the consumer nothing in return for answering, it’s voluntary. We need a statistical sample of 3,000 to make the results relevant. People are telling us that the ad recall rate is high, they get the message of the ad and the results have been good. We’ve published three case studies based on the results.
iSPOT: The reason why it’s positive is because it’s new and people are more eager to participate.
Kohli: I agree, but it’s been six months now so the novelty factor hasn’t worn off and I’m hoping it will sustain. As soon as they start running campaigns, they can see feedback in real time about how well they’re doing, they don’t have to wait for three months like TV. We’re proud of this because we think it’s a really effective measurement of brand advertising.
iSPOT: How old is the company?
Kohli: Two and a half years old. It started in Silicon Valley. We also have offices in London and Delhi and we just opened another office, our fourth, in New York.
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