San Francisco -Vizu Corporation (www.brand lift.com), an online ad technology company whose solutions allow advertisers and publishers to measure and optimize Brand Lift in real-time, today announced the launch of its “Value in Video” initiative. The program’s objective is to provide the industry with the ability to leverage in-stream, real-time testing of consumer sentiment wherever and however video is delivered, addressing one of the key challenges facing the growth of the medium – a fragmented landscape of video serving technologies.

As a first step in this initiative, Vizu also announced enhancements to its brand advertising effectiveness platform to fully support the VAST/VPAID standards developed by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), allowing anyone serving video inventory compliant with these standards to leverage Vizu’s in-stream capabilities to measure and optimize Brand Lift.

“Our broadcaster partners utilize a variety of players and online video platforms, so putting together an all-encompassing measurement methodology was a challenge,” says Joshua Iselin, Managing Director of TVN, Australia’s largest in-stream video network. “With Vizu now enabling Brand Lift measurement and optimization via VAST/VPAID compliant inventory, we have multiple options at our disposal. The ability to survey viewers in-stream is a major technological innovation – as a result we’ve seen incredibly high response rates, helping to alleviate an issue that plagues the industry. We are proud to be working with Vizu to pioneer in-stream video measurement and optimization.”

“If advertisers can’t measure the performance of video on the entire media plan, they’re not getting the full picture. VAST/VPAID were developed to meet that challenge, and to bring more confidence to video advertisers,” says Daryl McNutt, BrightRoll’s Senior Vice President of Research and Marketing. “BrightRoll is a major proponent of standards like these that help move the industry forward, and we’re happy to see partners like Vizu support them as well.”

Leading brands, agencies, ad networks, and publishers leverage Vizu’s Ad Catalyst solution, part of the company’s brand advertising effectiveness platform, to measure and optimize the effectiveness of online brand advertising efforts in real time. Ad Catalyst measures the Brand Lift generated by online advertising campaigns, replacing click-through rates with a much more appropriate metric for brand advertisers. As Brand Lift data is available in real time, it also enables in-market optimization of campaigns. Leveraging an intuitive dashboard, the contribution of different creative, messages, targeting, and frequency to overall campaign performance can quickly be evaluated and adjustments made that ensure both Brand Lift and return on advertising spend are maximized.

“We strongly believe in the value of video, and that it has the potential to accelerate the flow of brand advertising dollars online. We are thus investing to ensure the medium reaches its full potential,” says Dan Beltramo, CEO of Vizu. “We’re excited to announce our support of the VAST/VPAID standards, but aren’t stopping there – we will soon be announcing integrations with many leading video player technologies, ensuring our customers can measure and optimize their video efforts anytime, anywhere.”

Vizu Corporation (www.brandlift.com) brings the same metrics used to measure and optimize brand advertising effectiveness in the offline world to the online medium. By providing the first real-time, enterprise technology platform that allows brand advertisers and their partners in the digital media ecosystem – publishers, ad networks, exchanges, and demand side platforms – to collaborate around measuring and optimizing Brand Lift metrics, Vizu enables its customers to move their target audience through the purchase funnel, from building awareness to creating intent and preference.  Vizu’s brand advertising effectiveness platform is used by over 60% of Advertising Age’s Top 100 Brand Advertisers and Comscore’s Top 50 Media properties to support all key aspects of the advertising lifecycle, including media buying, audience profiling, and Brand Lift optimization.

NEW YORK – The lightning-quick pace of innovation in digital video ad platforms and tools has resulted in divergent technologies and systems that impact the successful deployment of advertising campaigns. To resolve this friction point and continue its leadership role in standardizing digital video the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), released “VAST 2.0”, an update to the Digital Video Ad Serving Template that it created in July 2008 to standardize the communication protocol between video players and servers. The announcement was made at the IAB’s annual Ad Ops Summit in New York City.

VAST 2.0 includes critical updates that:

* Permit optional tracking of companion ads and other ad elements
* Provide support for multi-part creatives
* Allow for a broader range of digital video ad products
* Clarify many technical requirements to ease implementation

“As more and more marketers embrace digital video for its ability to engage consumers and showcase brands, standardization is critical,” said Jeremy Fain, vice president of Industry Services, IAB. “VAST 2.0 will allow publishers who use it to be able to plug into multiple third-party digital video ad servers and networks without additional development, making it easier for marketers to reach large audiences through digital video.”

“By standardizing ad serving on VAST we can open the floodgates of agency media spend and allow publishers to maximize their yield per video view,” said Ari Paparo, Group Product Manager, Advertiser Products of Google.

“Vast 2.0” is the latest addition to the IAB’s work over the past year dedicated to creating a common infrastructure across the digital video ecosystem. The IAB’s efforts have addressed specific concerns around technology, metrics and consistent terminology. This ongoing initiative has included the release of the following documents:

* Video Player-Ad Interface Definitions Guidelines (VPAID)
* Digital Video Overview Document
* Digital Video In-Stream Ad Format Guidelines and Best Practices
* Digital Video In-Stream Ad Metrics Definitions

All of these documents can be reviewed at: http://www.iab.net/digitalvideo

To review “Vast 2.0,” please go to: http://www.iab.net/vast

About the IAB’s Digital Video Committee:

The Digital Video Committee of the IAB is comprised of over 145 member companies actively engaged in the creation and execution of digital video advertising. One of the goals of the committee is to implement a comprehensive set of guidelines, measurement, and creative options for interactive video advertising. The committee works to educate marketers and agencies on the strength of digital video as a marketing vehicle. A full list of Committee member companies can be found at: http://www.iab.net/digital_video_committee

About the IAB:

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) is comprised of more than 375 leading media and technology companies who are responsible for selling 86% of online advertising in the United States. On behalf of its members, the IAB is dedicated to the growth of the interactive advertising marketplace, of interactive’s share of total marketing spend, and of its members’ share of total marketing spend. The IAB educates marketers, agencies, media companies and the wider business community about the value of interactive advertising. Working with its member companies, the IAB evaluates and recommends standards and practices and fields critical research on interactive advertising. Founded in 1996, the IAB is headquartered in New York City with a Public Policy office in Washington, D.C. For more information, please visit www.iab.net.

Joey Trotz, Senior Director, Strategic Advertising Technology at Turner Broadcasting will present and discuss with attendees how ad operations will benefit most from these online video ad initiatives – and what they should be doing now to take advantage.

The importance of getting online video advertising right is growing for marketers and publishers desperate for revenue. While the interest is there from all sides, operationally video advertising has proven to be a real challenge. The entire process is fraught with more complications than standard display ads processes and is weighing down Ad Ops team who are struggling to do more with less. VAST & VPAID has the potential to automate some of these processes. But as marketers and vendors work to adopt these standards, it’s time for Ad Operations teams to start doing a deeper dive into what VAST & VPAID can and can’t do and what they should be doing now to make sure they can benefit. Doing so will generate revenue and create efficiencies marketers and publishers need.

The Online Technical Forum is being sponsored by Auditude. For more information, agenda and registration: http://www.admonsters.org/ws/ws-us-03.php