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Data overload for video ads: Liquidus, TubeMogul, and Visible Measures

Three companies at Demo look at ways to improve the distribution and analytics behind video advertising, on TV and the Web.

Erica Ogg Former Staff writer, CNET News
Erica Ogg is a CNET News reporter who covers Apple, HP, Dell, and other PC makers, as well as the consumer electronics industry. She's also one of the hosts of CNET News' Daily Podcast. In her non-work life, she's a history geek, a loyal Dodgers fan, and a mac-and-cheese connoisseur.
Erica Ogg
2 min read

Video advertising online is certainly becoming more common, but it's still difficult to get a good handle on exactly the kind of impact those types of ads are having.

Three companies came to Demo to push their individual strategy on how to improve the placement of video ads and the information gathered about them.

Liquidus: This 6-year-old Web marketing company has come up with a quick way for digital cable providers to produce and push video classified ads to the Web and TV screens via video on demand. Liquidus' video publishing platform aggregates video ads from a variety of sources and allows cable or broadcasters pick ads for specific local markets. The platform turns each ad into a Flash video, which can be altered depending on the market it's intended for. The appeal Liquidus is emphasizing here is volume: the company says they made more than 1 million video ads last year.

TubeMogul: TubeMogul has devised a way to put a single video on multiple platforms at once, and a comprehensive dashboard set up to to track who views the video ad and more. Once uploaded, a video ad can be distributed to a variety of platforms simultaneously--YouTube, Yahoo, MySpace, etc. The results for that one ad across all platforms are aggregated into a single display, so no need to track each platform's performance individually. Trends for who is viewing each video, for how long, and how often, as well as comments audience demographics, and comparison statistics to competitors are available for free.

Visible Measures: This company promises to give more detailed information about measured behavior of a Web video ad's audience. Specifically it gathers and displays data regarding what happens after a video is played. The coolest function is an animated graph that shows an advertiser or publisher, as a video is playing, what viewers are doing--rewinding, clicking back, or leaving the video. The company gets its detailed data by integrating directly with the Flash video player. In addition, Visible Measures tracks when a video has been linked to or picked up by other sites.