“Poor ad workflows holding back VoD industry” says IMD

IMD, the media logistics specialist, has published an independent research paper outlining the shortcomings of current VoD advertising workflows and setting out its vision for helping the market as it grows. This follows a unique, in-depth review undertaken amongst major media owners, including Channel 5 and Sky.

As the number of connected platforms and the audience for VoD continues to increase, advertising across all online video is mirroring this growth, with the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) recording a £109 million UK spend in 2011. One of IMD’s key conclusions is that the industry would benefit from a more streamlined and standardised ad delivery workflow, in order to improve output quality and remove some of the complexities and costs that are being incurred by publishers and brands.

“As online advertising grows in importance, advertisers and their media buyers are demanding more from their video campaigns, yet web publishers are struggling to deliver the same service to their customers that they would get for broadcast TV advertising,” says Ross Priestley, commercial director. “At IMD we have recognised that workflows need to become more organised and managed to guarantee audiences the highest quality viewing experience and we are working closely with publishers to help them overcome the workflow issues they face by creating a trusted pathway to reduce their cost in terms of time, money and reputation.”

The report highlights the key VoD advertising workflow issues as:

• Absence of a consistent quality standard – when the technical format of the ad doesn’t conform to a publisher’s specification, especially the size and resolution.
• Poor quality video – frequently due to multiple encodings taken from files which are not of a master quality.
• No standard delivery path – ads can arrive at publishers via many different routes, or sometimes not at all.
• Multi-platform delivery – ads are not versioned to fit the technical specifications of all platforms.
• Lack of transparency – ads arrive with no clearance information to confirm compliance with industry codes.

“It’s increasingly about quality, especially as more and more TV-like devices enter the market,” says Kirsty Roos, Traffic and Analytics, Channel 5. “You have to balance the demands of getting it live with the need for quality of experience for the user. Every time you encode or edit an already compressed file you are losing quality. If an advertiser has spent £100,000 on an ad, you don’t want the last step in the chain to ruin it.”