Teads Hopes To Transform Online Video Ads
Watching video adverts is something that none of us like to do. Sitting through unskippable ads can be very boring when you just want to see the content you clicked on, and having to skip through adverts often seems like an inconvenience. A survey conducted by advert software company Strata suggests that more than a third of us find online video adverts more annoying than ones on television. It also found that young people dislike them even more than older people.
One of the most popular free plugins allow people to block adverts from showing up on webpages when viewed with the Chrome, Safari, Opera or Firefox browser and it has been downloaded over 50 million times. While people are thrilled that they are now able to block and avoid the annoying adverts they don’t want to see, plugins like this are having a big effect on the model of online advertising.
A company called Teads which was founded in 2011 is hoping to change the way that web visitors view video advertising. The company has received seven rounds of funding, made five acquisitions and raised over $80 million in funds, so Teads isn’t new on the block.
The company is trying to make online advertising part of the experience of viewing a webpage, rather than annoying, inconvenient or even spammy. This new advertising has a life separate from video content– these are adverts that are placed inside the text of an article rather than the type of ads that appear at the start of YouTube videos. This technology is called Outstream, and Teads claims to have invented it.
The UK managing director of Teads, Justin Taylor, has said that digital video advertising is the fastest growing sector of the market but it has had issues with fraud and customers becoming irritated. Adverts in the wrong location as well as poorly made ads are reasons for the videos being ignored and therefore the publishers lose out. Taylor went on to say that the industry should work to engage, not interrupt. Less invasive formats, creative adverts with better placements and more control for consumers should be the focus of the industry going forward.
Other companies have already tried the method of implanting video ads into text, such as those that allow site visitors to hover over linked keywords to be shown a video. However, these adverts can often prove irrelevant. Relevance plays a big part in how effective adverts can be, and that is likely to be one of the reasons that Google’s AdWords ads do so well- the software tracks the web views and Google searches of users online and then shows them adverts relating to topics and products that they have already autonomously and organically expressed an interest in.
Teads’ technology is being used by more and more publishers, and the company now has over 400 publishers around the world using Outstream on their websites. It offers different categories of advert formats from those dedicated to editorial content to others that are designed to sit at the top or bottom of web pages. In addition to showing videos, Teads also offers a number of options to brands and ad creators to make the content more interactive, for example by adding call to action buttons, product profiles that contain photos and specifications, or social media sharing buttons.
Teads currently boasts publishers such as Forbes, The Washington Post, Vogue and The Guardian, who post digital video content from brands such as BMW, Disney, Cartier, Sony and Coca Cola. The company has been involved in research focussing on the current and future trends for the online video advertising world and has recently launched the world’s first Outstream mobile SDK which will allow publishers to integrate Teads videos seamlessly into apps.
Online advertising is necessary in order to allow web visitors to use a site for free, but just because it‘s necessary it doesn’t mean that companies can’t work to make it less intrusive for a user. Digital advertising companies are finally recognising the problems with the industry and trying to do something about them. Teads is making a good start at helping advertising to be less disruptive and they have a large number of high profile clients on their side to boot. We can only hope that in the future more advertising companies and publishers follow suit to avoid shooting themselves in the foot with the ads that they rely on to keep their platforms afloat.
