Slate magazine wants to sell more video ads - it just needs to use text to get there. "What’s next is video, video, video - we need to get more video on the site," says Slate associate publisher Anthony DeMaio. "We’re doing four million streams a month - it’s still a very small percentage of our (total) inventory." Last month, Slate began [...]

Mountain View, California-based video services company Ooyala, has been acquired by the Australian telco Telstra, the companies announced today.   Telstra will own 98% of  the company which will continue to operate independently. Ooyala was founded by former Google executives in 2007. It has raised $122 million in funding which includes earlier investments by Telstra totaling $61 million which had been [...]

BuzzFeed's announcement today of a $50m new funding from Andreesen Horowitz comes with a new strategy for the wildly popular publisher's video ambitions. The release puts it best, in its own words: "BuzzFeed will expand its video division and become BuzzFeed Motion Pictures. Ze Frank will lead the division as President of BuzzFeed Motion Pictures and will expand to focus on all moving [...]

The world's biggest digital newspaper site wants to fast-forward its video ambitions - not just for editorial, but for advertising. "We're an absolute giant," says Mail Online sales VP Matt Kaplan. "We drive more video consumption than any other player in our space - upwards of 50m streams per month - and yet it’s less than 2% of our total page view consumption. "All of those pages [...]

Online video ad technology group Ebuzzing reckons nearly a third of its business will be made up from automated ad trading, as it increasingly creates private ad marketplaces with trading desks. "We work with Xaxis, Accuen, Vivaki and these trading desks to build our specific, high-quality marketplaces," according to the company's north America GM Jim Daily. "Our programatic side of the business is straight [...]

Automated trading of standard online display ad units is becoming commonplace. But fancier, more engaging new ad formats can also now benefit from this technology. "IAB rising star units are often though of as upper-funnel, very branding, engaging tactics that aren’t associated with programatic," says Sarah Warner, trading manager of GroupM's programmatic unit, Xaxis. "But we can do it. Xaxis was traditionally thought of [...]

There's "too many cooks", and then there's "not enough cooks pulling in the same direction". For the new branded content opportunity, multi-disciplinary teams must all work together on clients' creative projects, according to a Beet.TV panel of agency folk. "Creative by committee is death, creative by small SWAT team works really well," says Mindshare Entertainment’s chief content office and president David Lang, which [...]

Brands shouldn't just make content that reflects a particular message, they should create participative campaigns, says an innovative marketing exec. "Storytelling is something everybody talks about in this space," says JWT executive creative director Eric Weisberg. "I’m most empowered by story-doing and story-building The best brand campaigns are when a client "had a goal but they shared control of that with consumers - [...]

In the interactive era, just raising the initial profile of a brand using a campaign just doesn't cut the mustard anymore, according to media agency Havas' global strategy director Rori DuBoff. "I don’t think we have a single client who says, 'I am happy if you just get awareness'," she tells Beet.TV. So she is building "campaigns that go from awareness and move [...]

At this point, many brands will have heard enough about the "branded content" craze that they might seek out a "native" campaign. But decisions about which campaign tactics are used are best left to agencies, says one agency division exec. "Clients want to tell brand stories - they’re more open to us helping them figure out what are the best ways [...]

If marketers want to make a splash with their own own content, it needs to be socially shareable - and that means giving people something that can reflect their identity, according to a branded content production agency. "People are consuming content and thinking 'Is this something I’d like to share to reflect my knowledge of what’s going on in society, my [...]

The wall between editorial and and advertising is lowering a bit at  Time Inc, as writers and ad salespeople collaborate on native advertising, says the publisher's video and mobile sales director Mark Marvel. "The two can function in a way that’s meaningful," Marvel tells Beet.TV. "There’s no longer that separation - there’s a little bit of collaboration. "Editorial directors can sit down [...]

After agreeing to merge this spring, video ad tech firms Ebuzzing and Teads see a big future for publishers out there. "Publishers can put preroll ads in front of the videos content they create," says the companies' North America GM Jim Daily. "But a finite number of impressions are available - they sometimes struggle to get people to watch their videos." Teads' [...]

Branded content can stem from brands, or from an idea, says David Lang, Chief Content Officer of Mindshare and President of Mindshare Entertainment, in an interview with Paul Kontonis, SVP at Los Angeles-based Collective Digital Studio (CDS) for Beet.TV. As a content strategy and production group that happens to be inside an agency, Mindshare's approach is to study audience behavior first, and then work [...]

The 2014 Upfront were "slightly underwhelming" says Furious Minds' CEO and Founder Ashley J. Swartz. "The numbers weren't so great." Although television was up 3.3 percent overall, broadcast volume was down by 800 to 815 million and cable volume was down by 500 million. This was largely due to cuts by major advertisers like P&G, GM and Kellogg's. "Volume was down and overall [...]

SpotXchange, the video ad tech company that provides a technology platform for publishers and broadcasters to sell advertising on an automated basis, has sold a majority of its shares to Europe's RTL, the companies announced today. RTL, the giant broadcaster controlled by Germany's Bertelsmann, is acquiring 65 percent  for $144 million, giving the company a valuation of $221 million. SpotXchange is based [...]

In five months since its launch, VICE News on YouTube  is "one of the biggest newscasts in America and possibly the world," says Brian Dietz, SVP of Sales in this Beet.TV session video.   He says that the network has over 650,000 subscribers on YouTube and has had 70 million views of its videos.   The "success has been surprising [...]

The booming video advertising segment stands an even better chance of ringing up success on mobile devices than it has on desktop so far. That's according to one video ad platform boss. "Seventy percent of the video views we did were on mobile devices," says Jun Group CEO Mitchell Reichgut. "The performance is better, counterintiuitively, than the web (because) it takes up the [...]

Paid, owned and earned media can work well on a real-time basis, and brands need to rethink both their allocations for paid media and the timing too, says Pete Stein, CEO of Razorfish, in an interview with Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Minds, for Beet.TV. "It used to be that paid media was planned years in advance and marketing had been a very [...]

Collaboration with creators is vital for brands working with digital producers and talent, says Jason Krebs, Head of Sales at Maker Studios, in an interview with Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Minds, for Beet.TV. Maker Studios creates and distributes video content focused on millenials and its videos generate 6.5 billion views each month to more than 450 million subscribers. The talent that Maker [...]