Group M's trading desk arm Xaxis is aiming to expand its reach into TV-centric buying for online video via deals with Hulu, Viacom and ABC. Under the agreements, Xaxis will buy video ad inventory from those companies using its programmatic tools and insight, according to an Adeek story by Mike Shields. Xaxis will package the inventory and sell it based [...]

SAN FRANCISCO - Snappy TV, a small San Francisco-based start-up that ingests live events and allows publishers and advertisers  to immediately edit and publish them to Twitter, is working with Heineken as the sponsor of thousands of video highlights that have been published on Twitter during the U.S. Open On Thursday, we spoke with Snappy co-founder and creative director Stephen Weibel [...]

SAN FRANCISCO -  Hold on to your hats. The decades-old way advertising has been bought and sold could start to collapse in 24 months. "A lot of media companies have been good money with the old model," IPG Mediabrands' Magna Global north America president Kristi Argyilan tells Beet.TV in this video interview. "Our hypothesis is that that model starts to fall [...]

Irreverent publisher BuzzFeed's eclectic approach to web content may be paying off. In a staff memo published on LinkedIn (via TechCrunch), founder Jonah Peretti says the outfit "booked record profit in August". And Peretti opens up on BuzzFeed's video strategy, too, saying: "Ze Frank has recruited a talented team of video producers who have created 570 videos, with over a hundred videos passing 1 [...]

When Beet.TV filmed this video interview with Bloomberg's video development head Chris Berend in April, he gave an insight in to how the financial news publisher was producing a whopping 200 online clips a day. Now Berend's strategy seems to be paying off. DigiDay reports Bloomberg surpassed rival Dow Jones for global unique visitors and streams in July (source: comScore). And the growing [...]

NEW YORK -- AOL On operations VP Michael O'Connor used Beet.TV's Video Ad Effectiveness Summit to call on analytics firms to give advertizers more insight about likely wasted spend. O'Connor said: "Sticker shock is driven by waste ... metrics are still inefficient because they only measure a campaign after the campaign's launched … the publishers hate all that waste." "Digital [advertizing] has always [...]

Vimeo, the video publishing platform which is widely embraced by filmmakers  as a showcase for projects,  will pay filmmakers use the site to debut their final work, Kerry Trainer, CEO of Vimeo tells Janko Roettgers  of GigaOm.   He says that that the portal is paying $10,000 to debut films. Last year year we sat down with Trainor to discuss the various monetization [...]

With few international news organizations on the ground in Syria, the world's news broadcasters have had to rely on amateur video footage to report on the war.   Verifying the sources and managing the rights around much of that footage is being done by a small start-up in Dublin called Storyful. In today's New York Times, reporter Ben Sisario writes about the [...]

Twitter acquired social TV tracking service Trendrr for an undisclosed amount. The deal brings Trendrr's analytics in house and follows on the heels of Twitter's acquisition of Bluefin Labs earlier this year, also a social TV tracking service. Trendrr analyzes real-time conversations about TV shows. Real-time chatter about TV shows has been growing rapidly in the last few years. Mark Ghuneim, CEO [...]

Data-centric advertising firm Collective recently raised $50 million in equity and debt funding as part of its efforts to grow its cross-screen tools. The company is focused on using set-top box data to help blend TV and digital planning, says Travis Lusk, VP of Inventory at Collective, in an interview with Beet.TV. "We can find out what users are watching in a [...]

NEW YORK -- One common thread to emerge at Beet.TV's Video Ad Effectiveness Summit was how the new reality of online video consumption today is calling producers and measurers alike to reinvent their in-house toolsets. "Research used to be figuring out what worked and what didn't work after something ended," Nielsen client services SVP Andrew Feigenson told panel moderator Ashley J. Swartz during [...]

France Télévisions is the latest publicly-funded broadcaster to cut its big staff bill following Europe's cloudy recent economic climate. Having already shed 500, the broadcaster announced it will cut 600 jobs in the next few months following a €40 million reduction in its €2.5 billion ($3.3 billion) budget, bringing its headcount down to 9,750, reports RapidTVNews. The cuts follow others made [...]

Viewability of video ads varies widely depending on the ad environment. That's the finding of a just released report from Tremor Video's VideoHub unit, analyzing viewability of 2.3 billion video ad impressions in the first quarter. During that time period, Tremor found that the average viewability clocked in at 83%. Viewability refers, quite simply, to how visible an ad is [...]

Yahoo is gearing up to launch eight new original comedy shows in early September as part of the portal's plans to expand aggressively in original content. Jack Black will star in one of the shows and Yahoo will also launch a series of Saturday Night Live clips, according to Variety. The episodes will be available all at once, as Netflix [...]

Re-using 30-second TV ads as online video pre-rolls is a great way to keep costs down versus shooting new creative. But re-purposing such ads rather than producing online-native ones risks driving down engagement. Consumer research conducted by Millward Brown suggests this can be solved by bolting on interactive online elements over re-purposed TV spots. "Just the visual presence alone of these interactive [...]

New research by Dynamic Logic, a unit of Millward Brown, for video ad tech vendor YuMe has shed a light on the relative performance of different approaches. According to the viewer survey, original video ads shot specifically for the web outperform ads repurposed from TV three times for aided brand awareness, with similar uplifts for a host of brand metrics. YuMe's client [...]

Innovid CEO Zvika Netter has spent the last six years trying to help agencies make video ads interactive. Now he claims most video ads in that category pass through Innovid's systems - but the next challenge is looming. "Eighty percent of the interactive video being served … is run through our servers… used by our tool, iRoll, which stands for interactive pre-roll," [...]

NEW YORK – The results of research which has indicated strong characteristics in favor of tablet video were obtained using techniques cut from tablets' own cloth. IPG Media Lab's research for YuMe found tablet users are most likely not to multi-task whilst watching video. "We had a very large sample size of about 8,300 people," the research firm's consumer research strategy VP Kara [...]

Tablet devices could focus viewers' attention on video content - and ads - far more than any other screen, including TV, new research has found. Consumer polling by IPG Media Lab for video ad tech firm YuMe shows tablet users are least likely to multi-task whilst watching video. "[With TV], that primary focus is on very long-duration things like cooking. The tablet, [...]

Las Vegas-based startup blurbIQ has an exciting vision for livening up video ads. And now it it can bring that vision to a wider audience, following a deal with LiveRail. CEO Scott Reese tells Beet.TV in this video interview blurbIQ's technology, which adds games and other engagement features in to video ad inventory, plugs in to LiveRail's video ad management and [...]