COLOGNE — Native video is the fastest growing format in mobile advertising today, according to Nikao Yang, SVP-Global Marketing and Business Development at AdColony, a unit of Oslo’s Opera Mediaworks.
“Publishers are looking for new innovative ways to monetize their content feeds,” he observes in an interview with Beet.TV recorded at DMEXCO last month. As a result, many have followed in the footsteps of social platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to develop a native offering.
However, latency has been a problem in native video advertising. Users who are scrolling quickly through a content feed may just see a buffering signal where an autoplay video is trying to load, and no impression is recorded for the advertiser, which signifies a lost opportunity. He says Opera has technology “that instantly places a video ad.”
In a recent study with ComScore, Opera developed creative best practices for native video. They include hooking users with “thumb-stopping content” in the first two or three seconds instead of developing long 30-second story arcs that may work for TV, as well as not being reliant on audio, since many users are bound to be scrolling without sound enabled.
“Make sound secondary,” Yang says. “Sight and emotion are the primary heroes in native video ad creative.”
Opera Mediaworks was acquired AdColony last year.
