We are excited to let you in on the new features we rolled out this week. Log into your Mixpo campaign and try them out!

Mobile Ad Enhancements

As consumers spend more time consuming content on smartphones and tablets, our clients have begun to focus more of their ad dollars on mobile executions. We are seeing more and more requests for mobile-specific video ad campaigns as each month goes by. We try to learn from each campaign and incorporate those findings into our tools. This month we increased the creative capabilities of the Mixpo platform so mobile ad executions can include:

• Seamless device rotation – Whichever way users hold their devices, your ads look great.
• Lightboxing – On tablets, full screen ads have a semi-transparent background.
• Auto-expand – Mobile banner ads can take over the device screen. No tap required.

Seamless device rotation – Whichever way users hold their devices, your ads look great.

Expanded Display Ads

Many Mixpo customers have utilized in-banner display ads that expand to larger video ads, and seen their engagement rates increase. This month, we added the ability for in-banner display ads to expand to larger display ads. These expanded display ads can be images or Flash-capable files. You can add custom close buttons directly from the Media Library or by building them into the expanded Flash file.

In-banner display ads can now expand to larger display ads.

Advanced Real Time Analytics

Mixpo customers have been enjoying real time analytics since our inception. The Mixpo Dashboard delivers up to the second reporting on all of your live campaigns. For the media analysts using Mixpo we offer advanced analytics options that enable in-depth research on how ads across campaigns have been engaged with and driven advertiser success. This month we expanded our real time data to include Mixpo’s in-depth research tools and keep your media analysts on the forefront of your multi-screen video advertising efforts.

Our real time data now includes Mixpo’s in-depth research tools, keeping your media analysts on the forefront of your multi-screen video advertising efforts.

Audio on Rollover Play Mode

Video ad play modes enable publishers, agencies, and advertisers to control how a consumer begins their in-banner video ad experience. In-banner video ads can start playing when a viewer rolls their mouse over the ad, opens the webpage, or taps on the ad. With this release Mixpo in-banner video ads will include a new audio on rollover play mode option. The video will begin playing silently when a viewer opens the webpage. When the viewer rolls their mouse over the ad, the video will start over with the sound on.

Mixpo in-banner video ads will include a new audio on rollover play mode option.

And Also…

We didn’t stop there! We rolled out updates for:

• Better management of complex, highly targeted campaigns that update their videos frequently mid-campaign.
• Enabling custom logos for client-facing reports to be used across your organization.
• Mobile alert options that protect you from spamming customers on their phones.

We’re always looking for ways to improve Mixpo. If you have ideas, we want to hear them!

Posted by:
Matthew Feeney, Senior Product Manager, mfeeney@mixpo.com

We compiled a report of key findings and insights collected from tune-in campaigns during this Sweeps period.

Download Mixpo’s February Sweeps Report and learn:

• How campaigns increased their engagement and exposure by 8% by using a feature in our platform that 90% of campaigns ARE NOT USING.
• What ad format grew the click to view rate by 27%.
• Which overlays generated a 20% higher CTR.

Click here to get the report and read more best practices for tune-in campaigns.

Gear up for May Sweeps!

Your viewers are online – your tune-in promotions should be, too. Join other stations, networks, cable programmers, and syndicators using online video ads to drive viewership. It’s easy, and it’s effective. Broadcasters and programmers are seeing a 20% increase in audience intent to watch and recommend shows.

Mixpo provides broadcasters and programmers an easy, turnkey service for online video advertising – one that fits right into your creative workflow.

• Reach your target demographic in your DMA during the day when they’re not otherwise reachable (but they are online!).
• Transform on-air spots into online video ads in minutes.
• Schedule day-parting so that each ad is placed at the exact time you want it.
• Make changes on the fly. Update topicals instantly, automatically swap in an ad for that night’s 10p news as soon as the 6p news is over.
• Get straightforward campaign performance metrics to see how your online video ads fared.

Based on campaign goals and objectives, Mixpo will create and execute turnkey media plans across premium, local and contextually relevant sites. We can also make strategic buys to target specific audiences or hyper-local geographies regardless of what site the target audience is on. All inclusive cost includes media inventory, creative, and campaign management with guaranteed performance.

Mixpo SmartVideo ads for tune-in run on any screen so you don’t have to worry about whether someone is watching the ad online, on a tablet, or on a smartphone.

SmartVideo ads can also run in any format: in-stream, in-banner, mobile web, and also in-app with our new MRAID certification.

Contact us to get started today.

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MRAID (Mobile Rich Media Ad Interface Definitions) is the IAB Mobile Marketing Center of Excellence’s project to define a common API (Application Programming Interface) for mobile rich media ads that will run in mobile apps.

“Mixpo enables content owners to run personalized, interactive video ads on any screen while delivering comprehensive, easy to consume cross-screen performance analytics and monitoring,” said Walter Harp, VP of Product Management and Marketing at Mixpo. “FreeWheel is a market leader in providing content owners what they need to manage the economics of their content across a multiplicity of devices. Plugging into their platform enables Mixpo to deliver greater value to our shared customers — the content owners.”

“With TV content and Web video proliferating on new emerging mobile platforms, it has become vitally important for content companies that want to reach consumers on the nearest available screen to be equipped with the most powerful advertising solutions,” said Brent Horowitz, vice president of business development at FreeWheel. “Partnering with Mixpo for in-app advertising gives our global media customers the flexibility to monetize their video with more rich, personalized, and compelling interactive video ad experiences.”

In tandem with a Press Release on the partnership, Walter Harp was featured on AdMonster, discussing the trailblazing nature of standardizing in-app mobile video ads.

“MRAID is a video ad standard recently released and endorsed by the IAB that will help open up a vast new trove of mobile inventory for advertisers, particularly now that 19% of Americans own tablets and another 100 million own smartphones, 40% of the total of which consumers use regularly as a second screen experience while watching television.”

Check out the full Marketwire Press Release, and the AdMonster article, “MRAID: A New Frontier For In-App Advertising.”

MRAID represents a new frontier for in-app mobile advertising, especially in-app video ads.

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“Win Elections: Best Practices in Using Online Video Advertising for Your 2012 Campaign”

Excerpt:

In its most basic form, online video advertising simply means taking a :15 or :30 TV spot and putting it online.  Take it up one level and it means adding interactivity on top of the video ad that appears as the ad plays like forms for volunteer sign ups, links to Facebook, additional video clips, and polling.  Sound like a lot of work?  It’s not.  Today’s video ad platforms can enable campaigns to add compelling interactivity in a matter of minutes.  Video ad creation can also be outsourced to broadcasters, publishers, and platform vendors that can provide superfast turnarounds.

If your campaign (or Super PAC) is going to invest in online video advertising, here are seven key tips to keep in mind:

1. It’s easier than you think.  There are plug-and-play web-based platforms out there that can help you ramp your video ad initiatives overnight and take advantage of best practices – all without incurring hassle.
2. Make sure you can measure campaign impact.  Every video ad network and portal as well as Facebook provides campaign reporting.  Clicks, percentage of video watched, etc.  But, campaign personnel need to be able to wake up in the morning and have one unified view of campaign performance across all campaigns media buys – aka “site by site performance.”  If a campaign is getting five different reports from five different media placements, it’s not easy to gauge performance.  Be sure to use a video ad platform that will give you all the reporting you need, all in one place, and in a way that will inform decision making.  It’s also important to have detailed reporting such as whether or not the interactive elements in the video ad are resonating or not.  Are viewers clicking on your Facebook link?  Good video ad platforms provide this level of detail.
3. Don’t forget about mobile.  7% of all web traffic occurs on mobile devices whether its smartphones or tablets.  Some video ads will “break” on devices, including the iPad.  It’s important to use a video ad platform that will avoid breakage; that will run the same ad successfully on any screen or OS.

Head over to MaxPoint to read the rest of Anupam’s seven video ad best practices for political campaigns.

About MaxPoint Interactive:

MaxPoint helps retailers and brands drive local in-store traffic with their innovative Digital Zip™ technology, delivering the most effective and scalable neighborhood-level digital campaigns. Maxpoint can pinpoint qualified customers interested in purchasing your product with more precision than using traditional zip codes, ultimately offering accurate neighborhood-level targeting with national reach and local results. Founded in 2007, MaxPoint has offices in New York, Chicago, Austin and Raleigh-Durham.

So here you go, the first in a series of Mixpo Minutes, :59 seconds of relevant news and analysis.  (Let’s be honest, if it was much longer than that, you’ll tune out.)

Today’s Topic: Mobile video ad consumption trends. Enjoy!

Download: Mixpo for Tablets.

GRP (Gross Rating Point) has been the standard metric used by TV advertisers to measure the effectiveness of their TV campaigns for decades. As brands move more and more of their advertising budget to online video, many in the industry have been debating the need for an online GRP. Is the GRP the best metric to communicate the effectiveness of an online video campaign? What are the right metrics? Does the online video industry need standardized metrics to reach its full potential? As you can guess, Mixpo has a strong opinion on the matter and Anupam is looking forward to discussing it with other leaders and the OMMA Global attendees.

The panel will be moderated by Joe Mandese, Editor of MediaPost. Anupam will be joined on stage by key leaders in the online advertising world:

• Lindsay Dye, Digital Manager, Universal Pictures
• Anne Hunter, Vice President, Advertising Effectiveness Products, comScore
• Bryan Noguchi, Executive Media Director, T3
• Sankar Patel, Digital Media Director, Carat San Francisco

If you would like to see the discussion live, register for OMMA Global and check out the March 19^th panel.

OMMA Global, March 19-20, 2012

We’re excited to let you in on the new features we rolled out yesterday. Log into your Mixpo campaign today and try them out!

Read Only Accounts

Within any campaign, a variety of people need to monitor the day to day performance, whether they are account directors, media planners, or most importantly the advertisers themselves. While you may want to share the powerful monitoring and analytics tools within the Mixpo platform, you may not want to open up the campaign editing tools to everyone engaged in the campaign. Mixpo’s new read only accounts enable you to grant access to the Mixpo platform where only the Dashboard and Reports tabs are available. Users with read only access can see how impressions, views, and clicks are trending, how viewers are engaging with the ads, and where their ads are being viewed. All in real-time and on-demand.

With the new Mixpo Read Only accounts, you can give real-time reporting access to advertisers and non ops staff.

Assign a companion ad to each in-stream ad.

Rotate Companion Ads

Mixpo enables you to run display and rich-media companion ads alongside your in-stream video ad content. The Mixpo platform also empowers you to rotate multiple videos ads through a single placement to see which has the most positive result with each consumer segment you have defined and auto-optimize based on those results. Mixpo’s new rotating companion ads bring those two features together. Now you can assign a companion ad for each in-stream ad in rotation and the Mixpo platform automatically places the companion ad next to the in-stream ad throughout the life of the campaign.

More Ways to Hookup Your Twitter Feed

Multiple Twitter hook up options.

 

If you watched the Academy Awards and own an tablet, you might have been among the 40% of Americans who used their tablet while watching TV. This was in part driven by the availability of social TV apps, as well as apps created by show producers designed to provide a concomitant second screen experience.  The Oscars’ mobile app, for example, provided more camera coverage than the live broadcast.  Meanwhile, Social TV App provider Viggle partnered with Microsoft Advertising to make available a social TV app that leverages “Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, to offer live polls, quizzes and trivia questions specific to the show”.

As more and more networks, broadcasters, cable broadcaster, and producers create second screen experiences – and as adoption of Social TV apps increase – so will the inventory for in-app video advertising:  sight, sound, motion + interactivity, localization, and personalization.  An exciting area of growth for the industry.

Second Screen experience for the 2012 Oscars

All the best to Cobalt for a great conference!  Be sure to visit them to learn more!

Forward-leaning broadcasters and programmers – and, more specifically, the marketing leaders who own promotion – have already incorporated online video advertising (and have embraced the associated interactivity and localization capabilities) into their marketing mixes. The pioneers have blazed the trail. There is now the opportunity to follow a guided path established by others.

Learn more about:

• Reasons to incorporate online video ads into your marketing mix
• Current industry best practices
• Measuring campaign impact
• Impact of context on success
• Online video ads and mobile habits

Download The New Normal for Promoting Tune-In report from Mixpo. Let us know what you think about the report with a tweet to @mixpo or a comment here.