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Video content is flowing onto the Web, and the video-watching audience is growing correspondingly. So it's not surprising that direct marketers are showing interest in attaching ads to that content and reaching this online audience.

Marketing research firm eMarketer forecasts that ad revenue from online video will hit $775 million this year, an 89% increase from the $410 million spent in 2006.
But creating and placing online video ads can be a pretty daunting task. Recently, however, a number of ad companies and networks have come up with solutions to help marketers add sound and motion to their Internet messages.

Last November Atlas, the digital marketing division of aQuantive, debuted a feature for its third-party ad server dashboard that automates the process of inserting ads before or after a streaming video clip. As with the graphical and interactive ads the company delivers, Atlas In-Stream Video will let DMers and ad agencies manage their creative, plan campaigns, and then get back analytics reports on those campaigns.

“Video is a very challenging media form,” says Scott Ferris, senior vice president and general manager of Atlas Emerging Media. “Every publisher has its own nuance in terms of the player they're putting in front of consumers, the formats they support, the bandwidth and bit rates they require. That's how video makes it onto the Web today.”
Atlas In-Stream Video will let advertisers and agencies upload their video ad content to the Atlas console, where it will be automatically encoded for 16 different format variations. Atlas will then circulate the ad throughout its network.

Rival DoubleClick took care of the agency end of video ad serving with its purchase last June of KlipMart, a company that began delivering online video back when most users were still logging on via dial-up. But during the last ad:tech New York show, DoubleClick unveiled Dart Motif for In-Stream, which will give Web publishers more control over video ad performance on their sites.

Using the new platform will allow publishers to track not just impressions and clicks on video ads but more video-specific metrics such as mutes, pauses, average viewing duration and full-screen views. Publishers also will be able to offer a number of special video ad products beyond the usual pre-roll or post-roll spots: for example, video “roadblocks” of display ads synchronized with video, ads that telescope to a longer form at the user's request, and others that float above the video.

Growing interest in online video advertising has become a pain point for large Internet media companies, according to Ari Paparo, DoubleClick's vice president for rich media. “It just wasn't sufficiently integrated into what they did,” he says. “Our Motif In-Stream product allows publishers to traffic, target, report and forecast on streaming video ads through DoubleClick's ad server. It brings video closer to the core of what people want to do to monetize their sites.”

Not to be outdone, in early December competitor ValueClick took the wraps off a beta test of its video serving platform and ad network which lets advertisers insert a video ad before or after video content. Interestingly, those who don't have video ads can drop in a static banner or rich media ad instead. On the publisher side, ValueClick estimates that 25% of the publishers in its 13,500-site network offer video. The firm says that figure may rise to 50% in the first quarter.