IAB Unveils Winners of First-Ever Digital Video Rising Stars Competition

Empowering brand marketers to better leverage interactive video ad experiences, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) today revealed the five winning Digital Video Rising Stars from its first-ever Digital Video Rising Stars competition. Built to work on a range of video players across multiple devices, the new ad units were presented at the sixth IAB Annual Leadership Meeting "Big Data & Big Ideas: Friends, Enemies, or Frenemies?,"held at the Arizona Biltmore in Phoenix. More than three dozen companies entered a total of over 70 submissions to the contest. The five concepts ultimately selected as IAB Rising Stars are intended to propel interactive digital video ad buys at the same scale and scope as typical online display buys.

The IAB Digital Video Rising Stars are a key addition to the larger IAB Rising Stars initiative, which seeks to create new canvasses for brand advertising on digital platforms, including display and mobile ads. Once a Rising Stars unit has been selected, it will go through a testing process and, with success, be inducted into the IAB Standard Advertising Unit Portfolio, the definitive standards for the digital advertising industry.

The winning Digital Video Rising Star in-stream and linear interactive digital video ad product concepts are:

Winning submitters included CBS Interactive, Celtra, DG MediaMind, DoubleClick, Innovid, Jivox, Microsoft Advertising, Mixpo, Spongecell, Tremor Video, Yahoo! and YuMe. These winning companies will now collaborate with IAB, the Agency Working Group and digital video ad operations experts over the next 90-120 days to create detailed specifications for the units to run across screens and players.

"The dynamic fusion of sight, sound and motion plus interactivity offers marketers an unbeatable package," said Peter Minnium, Head of Brand Initiatives, IAB. "To date, too little of digital video advertising has included an interactive component, owing to a lack of standards. With the release of these new Rising Stars units, this is changing today."

"Digital video advertising has experienced explosive growth across the interactive advertising landscape, bringing in a little more than $1 billion in revenue in the first half of 2012 alone," said David Doty, Executive Vice President and CMO, IAB. "These innovative digital video ad units will propel the sector's growth. In addition, the widespread deployment of the IAB Video Suite - a comprehensive update to in-stream video advertising standards - will surely help pave the way for the rapid adoption of these formats."

Marketers have already begun leveraging the Digital Video Rising Stars with great success. According to Katrina Cohen, Senior Brand Manager, Ritz, the well-known snack food brand, "Ritz had a 360-degree communications campaign, 'Kick Up the Kickoff,' which was all about amping up the fun at your game-day party with the spirit, food and fun of New Orleans. The campaign extended into multimedia celebrity partnerships, a recipe contest and social media - and the IAB Full Screen Digital Video Rising Star ad unit, which we used in partnership with Tremor Video, allowed us to reach and Engage consumers with all the program elements in a compelling and visually appealing manner."

The Digital Video Rising Stars contest was announced at the IAB Digital Video Marketplace in April 2012 when IAB put out a call for ad units that could foster digital advertising creativity and to boost larger ad spends across multiple screens.

The winners of the Digital Video Rising Stars initiative were selected by a cross-disciplinary group that included agency creative directors, media executives, publishers and ad operations specialists, who judged the ad units based on user experience, branding capabilities, functionality, integration between ad and publisher content, and ease of adoption across the digital video ecosystem. Each of the in-player units were required to be VAST and VPAID compliant, with an emphasis placed on the format's behavior within the player, regardless of device.

Participants in the Digital Video Rising Stars judging panel included:

For additional information on the Digital Video Rising Stars, please visit www.iab.net/digitalvideorisingstars.

About the IAB

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) is comprised of more than 500 leading media and technology companies that 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.

SOURCE: BUSINESS WIRE

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