Digital video authority BBE CEO Matt Wasserlauf announced today that VINDICO™, established in 2006 as the first video ad-serving platform in the industry, is officially a separate division of BBE. As such, the unit will be called VINDICO™ Group and will be headed by newly appointed President Matt Timothy.

Timothy, drawing on his depth of experience across television, cable, interactive and broadband, will lead VINDICO™ Group in providing top advertisers with state-of-the-art video ad-serving, tracking and analytics. “The power of online video isn’t just the audiences it reaches and how it reaches them. Its strength also derives from its ability to track ad campaigns and to precisely measure their effectiveness,” notes Timothy. “Not only are we able to quantify and analyze the data, but also essentially drive the industry’s standardization – the last step in the acceleration of digital video.”

VINDICO™ Group participated in The Pool, a VivaKi-led research initiative designed to align the industry on engaging ad models of the future. In its first wave of research, several online video industry elites worked together to name The Ad Selector a proven and superior new advertising format for online video. According the Tracey Scheppach, SVP, Innovations Director, VivaKi, VINDICO™ Group was a “vital partner” in this research.

“VINDICO™ Group is a leader in video measurement technology,” Scheppach said. “Measurement is one of the key elements for standardizing the online video advertising industry and making the web desirable for advertising dollars. VINDICO™ Group has provided invaluable insights to drive our industry forward in the direction that is critical for our collective success.

Designed with the buy-side in mind, VINDICO™ Group services leading agencies and holding companies like Starcom MediaVest Group, Universal McCann, Barkley and Moxie among others. Through detailed reporting and data analysis, VINDICO™ Group helps marketers best leverage the capabilities within the online platform. In so doing, VINDICO™ makes video advertising vastly more efficient and more relevant to advertisers’ goals.

According to Wasserlauf, this revolutionary, new industry standard optimizes online media buying and eliminates wasted media impressions. “The bottom line is that we listen to our customers,” Wasserlauf said. “So when they came to us, asking about the relationship between our media group and our technology group, we responded. By creating VINDICO™ Group, our clients are reminded that we operate with the highest level of integrity in all areas of our business.

For more information, please contact:
Janine Gordon Associates
Jodi Bannerman: jbannerman@janinegordonassociates.com; 212.871.3020 x. 107
Lauren Banyar Reich: lreich@jgordonassociates.com; 212.871.3020 x. 115

My son doesn’t care where he watches his video — and neither does most of his generation. In fact, 178 million viewers are now watching 33 billion videos online, according to comScore Video Metrix, December 2009. I have to wonder if Dave Morgan (author of last week’s “The PC Will Not Beat the TV For Video Ad Dollars“) has seen those numbers lately.

The fact that this viewership online is only capturing $1 billion in video advertising is a short-term issue. Some factors do need to be worked out. These include serving and tracking standardization, measurement — and most of all, economics — in order for our industry to close the revenue gap with TV. In order for more content to get on-board online, the means of tracking and measurement have to be worked out. I agree with many of the voices out there, from writer Daisy Whitney to Mindshare’s Cary Tilds, that standardization is the last hurdle.

Once our industry organizes around common standards, the potential becomes unlimited. Hulu just announced that its audience has exceeded 100 million viewers. I’m proud to say that so did BBE’s (yes, that’s my company.) But viewership is not the barrier. The masses are tuning in, despite the lack of compelling, high-quality content. Cable TV suffered from this same fate early on.

The real barrier is content and the model necessary to make more of it. In order for the creative community to produce future hit shows for the online medium, they must understand the metrics around success. With common currency, the industry can scale in a way that TV has enjoyed since its ascent to the top of the media funnel. Ratings and share, brought to you by Nielsen, have allowed the TV industry to reign supreme for 50+ years — and they’re all that that stands in the way for Online Video.

The next generation of viewers, from my son Theo to the new Facebook generation, are ready to watch “TV Everywhere.” Jeff Bewkes, CEO of Time Warner, may have coined the phrase, but the next generation of viewers live by it. IPhones, iPads, laptops and Xboxes — they will all do. With a common standard of tracking and measurement, these devices will deliver the next wave of content, never seen before on a TV or on Home Box Office. The future of TV is digital, and the future of digital is online video.

Today’s busy moms are time-stressed and tech savvy, which is why online distribution network BBE created its original branded series, Jen and Barb, Mom Life. Each five-minute episode, available 24/7 at www.jenandbarb.com – offers viewers the chance to join in the conversation about modern motherhood. On March 16, BBE will launch Season Two of this hugely popular show, proving once again that original online programming is here to stay.

Jen and Barb, Mom Life, follows two real-world women as they navigate through motherhood while maintaining successful marriages, careers and social lives. The show features original video content focusing on issues from child sports safety to play-date etiquette. For Jen and Barb, along with the 1.5 million viewers who tuned in to each episode last season, life isn’t over when you have kids – it’s just beginning.

“We focus on having real conversations about issues that moms care about,” said Jen Pate, Producer and Co-Host of Jen and Barb, Mom Life. “Barb and I look at ourselves as contemporary moms. That means knowing how to be a good mom, but also having a sense of balance and learning how to adapt your life around your family.”

As the first show ever produced for moms, by moms, Jen and Barb, Mom Life is filling a void for millions of women, as evidenced by the 45 million views garnered in the show’s inaugural season. No other original show in the “mom” space, or the entire online space, has shown this kind of reach. What’s best is that busy moms can access each episode at their leisure, without the rigidity and time commitment of daytime television.

“Research increasingly shows that moms get their information online, which means the opportunity for advertisers in the digital branded entertainment space is limitless,” said BBE CEO and Founder Matt Wasserlauf. “Our data shows that there are 35 million moms with children under the age of 18 who control 85% of the estimated $2 trillion dollars in household spending. That’s a huge, highly-targeted consumer audience.”

“We’re all in this together,” said Barb Machen, Producer and Host. “The gloves are off. Viewers get to see the good, the bad and the ugly. We’re glad to show other moms they’re not alone.”

CHICAGO; January 28, 2010— The Pool announced today the results from its first “Swim Lane.” The Pool is a VivaKi-led research initiative designed to align the industry on engaging ad models of the future. The first Swim Lane, focused on online video, has named The Ad Selector the winning model. The Ad Selector, which was created, designed and implemented by Hulu, is a format that allows the user to select a preferred ad from a group of brand messages prior to viewing online video content.

The results conclude a 16-month initiative that brought together clients such as Allstate, Applebee’s, Capital One and Nestlé Purina PetCare with publishers that include AOL, BBE, CBS Interactive, Discovery Communications, Hulu, Microsoft Advertising and Yahoo!. These participants spent over 8,000 hours evaluating 29 ad models and 43 unique executions. Overall, the collective team spent 230,000 hours with over 25 million consumers to determine the Ad Selector as the optimal ad model for advertisers and consumers. Research partners Alternate Routes, comScore, Knowledge Networks and VINDICO also helped facilitate qualitative, quantitative and field trial results.

“We have seen great results from The Ad Selector on our site.” said JP Colaco SVP, Advertising, Hulu. “We are very excited that The Pool has helped us identify a way for a broader array of advertisers to engage people in the video viewing experience of their choosing.”

Compared to the Pre-Roll industry benchmark, The Ad Selector provided click-through rates for advertisers that were 290% higher than for Pre-Roll. Additionally, the lift in consumer top of mind awareness was 288% higher for the Ad Selector format than for Pre-Roll.

“We went into this initiative knowing three things,” said Tracey Scheppach, SVP/ Innovation Director, VivaKi. “Consumers have an insatiable appetite for online video content, they dislike the irrelevant disruption of Pre-Roll and the industry was simply struggling to adapt the advertising model to keep pace with the evolving consumer behavior. The Pool demonstrates the power of industry collaboration to identify more efficient solutions and more effective ways to interact with people.”

“Nestlé Purina believes in the importance of driving innovation. We were thrilled to participate in The Pool to achieve a competitive advantage for our brands while assisting the digital industry,” said Michael Crawford VP/Consumer Communications & Insights, Nestlé Purina PetCare.

In February, Scheppach and VivaKi Nerve Center President Curt Hecht will be publically sharing the complete findings from its online video Swim Lane at the IAB Annual Leadership Conference in Carlsbad, CA. The Pool has also completed the quantitative phase for its second Swin Lane of study, short form online video. The winning ad model for the second Swim Lane will be released to the industry in October 2010. The Pool is also in the process of launching Lanes internationally and will be announcing the next area of study in the coming months.

About The Pool
The Pool is a first of its kind industry program – developed by VivaKi – that unites the financial resources and thought leadership of its clients and a host of content providers to test and create industry standards for new advertising models. By “pooling” insights and resources, this initiative aims to identify future engagement models across a variety of emerging media platforms. Participating clients and content providers are given the opportunity to view and evaluate new advertising models and receive access to all proprietary research ahead of the marketplace.

About VivaKi
VivaKi is part of Publicis Groupe (Euronext Paris: FR0000130577) the world’s fourth largest communications group, the world’s second largest media counsel and buying group, and a global leader in digital and healthcare communications. With around the world activities spanning more than 104 countries on five continents, the Groupe employs as many as 44,000 professionals. VivaKi aggregates the marketplace influence of five autonomous brands, including two global media agencies: Starcom MediaVest Group and ZenithOptimedia; two leading digital marketing agencies: Digitas and Razorfish; and a premiere futures practice: Denuo. On behalf of its agency brands and their clients, VivaKi faces the market to help identify and build technology, message distribution, audience aggregation and content solutions for the future. Sitting at the core of VivaKi is the VivaKi Nerve Center, which serves as a think tank, R&D center and testing ground to activate new pathways for clients to connect with consumers in an increasingly digital world. VivaKi also includes a Talent & Transformation Practice, which leverages the scale of the VivaKi brands to develop and deliver tools and approaches designed to attract, develop, train, motivate and reward the world’s best people. (Website: www.vivaki.com)

BBE, the digital video authority, today announced that it has been ranked the number one digital media company in North America on Technology Fast 500, Deloitte`s ranking of the fastest growing technology, media, telecommunications, life sciences and clean technology companies in North America. BBE ranked number eleven overall on the Technology Fast 500 list. Rankings are based on percentage of fiscal year revenue growth during the five year period from 2004-2008.

BBE`s CEO, Matt Wasserlauf said, “From the beginning, BBE was formed to be a game-changer in the digital video space,” and added, “Our goal was to be successful on all fronts: technologically, artistically and financially. I credit the growth of our ad network, our original web series and our industry leading ad serving and tracking platform Vindico, as well as our staff, as key reasons for our winning this award. We`re grateful to the Deloitte 2009 Technology Fast 500 to have been recognized and honored in this way.”

“Technology Fast 500 recognizes innovative companies that have broken down barriers to success and defied the odds with their remarkable five year revenue growth”, said Phil Asmundson, Vice Chairman and U.S. Technology, Media and Telecommunications leader, Deloitte LLP. “We congratulate BBE on this accomplishment.”

“With its impressive five year growth, BBE has earned its position among the fastest growing technology, media, telecommunications, life sciences and clean technology companies in North America,” said Mark Jensen, Managing Partner, Technology and Venture Capital Services, Deloitte and Touche LLP. “Deloitte is proud to honor BBE for its achievement.”

As digital video evolved, and continues to evolve, agency media executives are continuously looking for more and better data on their media buys. Who are they reaching with their digital video campaigns? What are their demographic characteristics? Is there a way to learn more of the details of the audience?

Recognizing the growing need for this enhanced audience information, and being the leader in this space, we at BBE have introduced Real Demo™, a proprietary, enhanced targeting tool which provides our agency and advertiser clients with the opportunity to enrich the demographic makeup of the campaigns that they run on the BBE network. In conjunction with Quantcast, the audience insights company, BBE is now able to deliver more demographically defined buys to their clients.

Early testing results show that the new service delivers a significantly higher percentage of any targeted demographic group over traditional on-line ads which simply rely on contextual placement. This tool results in a buy with minimal waste. And, in a major step forward for the industry, this is all delivered to agencies in real time. This planning capability is fully integrated into Vindico®, BBE’s industry leading ad serving, tracking and reporting platform.

The Real Demo product is a dramatic departure from the broadcast television estimated audience delivery which the advertising marketplace has been forced to live with for so long. The significant waste which occurs with TV has now been replaced with a tool which much more tightly defines its audience.

Once campaigns have been completed, BBE is capable of providing its clients with reports which articulate key demographic information such as: gender, age, HH income, education, etc., all key considerations when evaluating their buys. As more and more advertisers add digital video to their media mix, this data is key in their decision making.

The goal of this new product is for BBE to provide its clients with more and better data about the campaigns run on its network of 2400 sites. Supplying clients, and the industry, with better measurement tools moves the entire medium ahead.

For many years, the television industry has operated a closed system that allowed TV stations and networks to administer advertising to meet their objectives. Often, those objectives were simply to maximize revenues. All this decisioning was done behind closed doors and without the input of the paying customer. The trafficker’s key exercise was that of identifying advertisers’ slots in commercial pods to meet ratings guarantees and protect pod exclusivity (or, said another way: to prevent competitve adjacencies). But as TV ratings have receded in recent years, more emphasis has been placed on impression-based media, and the rise of cable television has only accelerated that trend. Still, the traffic department inside of these global TV companies has maintained a low profile, often playing a pedestrian role in the operation of billions of dollars of spend.

Enter the Internet.

Overnight, the Internet has turned the role of the trafficker into one that takes center stage. An entire $20B+ industry of Internet advertising now trades on an ad-serving platform that assigns power to advertisers, with the trafficker as their gatekeeper. That power is irrevocable.

Companies like Doubleclick (Google) and Atlas (Microsoft) have democratized that process, and video is about to be transformed in exactly the same way. In this scenario, the advertiser controls the traffic department, a fact that the major TV companies will have to get used to as all video becomes digital.

In a July 21 article on iMedia Connection, writer Daisy Whitney called for the video industry to establish a standard video ad-serving system that would do for video, what Doubleclick did for the display business. With my company and its video ad-serving platform VINDICO, as well as others such as YuMe, FreeWheel and Eyeblaster, that day has arrived. Now, advertisers can seamlessly administer campaigns and collect metrics in real-time that validate their efforts. This is commonplace in online advertising in areas such as search and display, and very much needed in video. Even better, standardized ad-serving will help streamline ALL video ad-serving, as these assets move freely between digital TV, Internet and mobile. With this behavior going from what was formerly "estimated data" to Actuals, advertisers will enjoy real results and real ROI that before now, was unattainable. This is revolutionary for the video industry, which today is small by TV standards ($500m vs. $60B) but very soon, will loom large.

And all of this will be brought to you by the least expected place: your traffic department.

The company said it has been testing a new product that will enable digital buyers to target video ads based on specific demographic targets, much like TV. The new service, BBE Real Demo, is the result of a recent partnership between BBE and the Web metrics firm Quantcast.

According to BBE officials, online video ad inventory is typically sold in bulk across numerous sites, and advertisers target ads based on content and context rather than demographic data. But with BBE Real Demo, which the company began testing in August, the company is now able to provide demographic-level ad targeting by extracting up-to-the-minute audience data from Quantcast, which places a small piece of tracking code on a growing number of large and small sites across the Internet.

Selling audience demographics is closer to what happens in the TV business, where ratings points are guaranteed for advertisers targets such as men 18 to 34. That should theoretically make Web video more palatable to traditional TV brands, according to Matt Wasserlauf, BBE’s CEO. However, in the case of BBE Real Demo, the product should be even more efficient than TV.

“The real time delivery and optimization capabilities of BBE Real Demo will propel online video advertising past traditional media ads because they’ll sharply reduce the waste associated with broadcast TV ad campaigns,” said Wasserlauf.

What does that mean for those of us in the media business? Well…it certainly isn’t business as usual. There is pressure on our clients, and their clients, to make every dollar work harder than ever before. While that corporate point of view is likely never to change, if you really think about it, why should it? There’s certainly nothing wrong with advertisers looking for a better return on their media investment.

What they have been pursuing is the chance to speak to their audience as close to one-to-one as they can. They are looking to focus their media spend in vehicles that minimize waste and bring their well honed message to the right people at the right time.

Digital video affords media planners and buyers the opportunity to invest their client’s money in a medium that minimizes the audience waste that they are buying. It presents them with actual audience numbers instead of the estimates that they are used to accepting with their television buys. Also, because there is an ever increasing number of web sites, attracting audiences based on a combination of demographics, and in the case of many long tail sites, psychographics, they can buy the enriched audiences that they seek.

Look for this precision in buying to get more and more focused. Again, this very demanding year has put pressure on all marketing spending, and digital video removes much of the guess work from the process of identifying where the audience is.

So which way will the arrows be pointing at the end of the year, and into the next decade? According to a recent Communications Industry Forecast by private equity firm Veronis Suhler Stevenson, despite all the bad news, the media industry could be one of the fastest-growing economic sectors over the next five years. Not surprisingly, most of the growth won’t be generated from traditional media, but instead result from areas like branded entertainment and the Internet.

Being in the media business we all tend to be glass half full people, so we assume that the second half of 2009 will be the turn around that we are looking for.

While that may or may not be true, they miss the point entirely. Length is not the measure of maturation for a medium or its audience. Form and content are.

Consider radio. By the time "The Shadow" and "Allen’s Alley" came along, movies were a pretty mature (and popular) medium. We had talkies. Full-length features. But radio comedies, dramas and variety shows were all shorter than movies; half-hour and one-hour blocks of entertainment were standard. So why, in the face of competition from movies, did radio succeed — even though its content was shorter?

The content was unlike anything in the movies. The beauty and brilliance of radio drama was that you could create an entire world in one room — with voice, music and sound — by getting your audience to shut their eyes and imagine the action. And you didn’t need two hours to do it. Best of all, it was free — completely paid for by advertisers. This was a novel approach to entertainment: provide free content, paid for by sponsors, who get paid back when people buy their products.

Then came TV. In its early days, it mimicked radio — even to the point of airing the same content and advertisers. And then along came "I Love Lucy," the most-watched show of its time. It redefined the medium’s direction. That, in turn, led to a changed advertising format that ultimately included multiple advertisers in longer ad pods (rather than shows sponsored by a single advertiser) and ushered in the heyday of the greatest mass medium the world has seen to date.

Almost three decades later, cable TV started with a subscription format that combined channels that carried advertising and those that didn’t. Early on it introduced MTV, a channel that offered music videos — content that simply couldn’t be seen on broadcast TV (not in that form, anyway). And that content was shorter than any existing content on broadcast TV. MTV invented a new content form which, in turn, attracted a tough-to-reach (teen) cable TV audience and ultimately created a new approach to advertising. Again, length had nothing to do with it.

Today we’re faced with a similar challenge in online video. It’s still in the early stage, but people are following it in growing numbers. So what are we giving them? Much of what you see in online video, as in any other medium in its early stages, is either (long-form) content brought over from another medium (broadcast TV) or amateur content — "dogs on skateboards."

But somewhere in between are people — professionals — who are trying to create a game changer like music videos or "I Love Lucy." Original online shows such as "Mom Life," "Cube Fabulous" and "The Fantastic Two" are all attempts to find a form and content unique to the medium — something that doesn’t merely steal or mimic what’s been done in other media, something that defines a whole new way of entertaining and creates a new opportunity for advertisers. In the end, it’s going to come down to the quality of the entertainment that will attract an audience, no matter how long or how short.

Admittedly, we’re not quite there yet. But we’re on our way. What gets in the way is the slavish insistence, in some quarters, that we have to imitate what’s been done before (or steal it outright) to make the medium grow, to attract advertisers and audiences, simply by using the same content and advertising pod lengths that have worked in other media (hey, it worked there, so it’s gotta work here).

As history shows us, "it ain’t necessarily so."