Adobe adds live video ad insertion and tighter video stream measurement

Image by Adobe

Online video/TV’s evolution into a mature advertising channel continues, with this week’s announcements that Adobe can now dynamically insert ads into live video, and can measure any video stream down to the nearest ten seconds.

The announcements were made at the International Broadcasting Conference (IBC), now taking place in Amsterdam.

Adobe Primetime, the company’s tool to support multiscreen TV, can now replace a broadcast ad with a dynamically targeted ad in a single live video stream. This is focused on the type of online video Adobe calls TV Everywhere, which is Net-delivered video that requires a cable subscription logon, such as Xfinity programming delivered online. (Adobe describes Over-the-Top or OTT TV as online TV that doesn’t need a cable logon.)

Before, Adobe Primetime Marketing Director Campbell Foster told me, his company didn’t offer this kind of ad insertion for live broadcasts, which was employed during a pilot phase during the recent Olympics.

When NBC’s live stream was shown online to cable subscribers, for instance, Adobe could replace in real-time the ads that were used for broadcast. The inserted ads could then be targeted at specific users, using data from cable systems, third-parties like Oracle’s data management platform BlueKai, device types, and other sources.

That is, targeting TV ads in live online TV as if they were web site ads.

“Nobody else can do live ad replacement, whether or not it’s authenticated, at our scale,” Foster said.

Adobe has also announced that its Analytics product can now analyze any video stream in ten-second increments.

Previously, Foster said, the company could only measure in 25 percent increments related to the nearest server call for starts and stops, such as the number of people watching during half of a video stream. Now, it can measure the number of watchers in ten second chunks, thus providing a more finely-tuned measurement of video audiences.

In March, Adobe added a TV Recommendation Engine to its OTT version of Adobe Primetime, and announced a tighter integration with its Marketing Cloud. Last month, Tru Optik unveiled an OTT Data Cloud to offer web-like segment targeting to OTT video.

About The Author

Barry Levine

Barry Levine covers marketing technology for Third Door Media. Previously, he covered this space as a Senior Writer for VentureBeat, and he has written about these and other tech subjects for such publications as CMSWire and NewsFactor. He founded and led the web site/unit at PBS station Thirteen/WNET; worked as an online Senior Producer/writer for Viacom; created a successful interactive game, PLAY IT BY EAR: The First CD Game; founded and led an independent film showcase, CENTER SCREEN, based at Harvard and M.I.T.; and served over five years as a consultant to the M.I.T. Media Lab. You can find him at LinkedIn, and on Twitter at xBarryLevine.