The first, 30 second spot – to be shown to Britain’s Got Talent’s 10 million viewers – will alternate shots of individuals’ experiences with groups of people running, to show fighting cancer should not be a lone battle, and “if you take me on, you take on all of us”. It will then ask viewers to send in their own tweet-style messages to cancer via oicancer.org, a dedicated website. Then the messages be broadcast during the second, 60” spot, sharing personal experiences nationwide to inspire further viewers to register.

To broadcast the messages in real-time, the campaign will use Monterosa’s LViS platform which can aggregate and moderate mass-volume content, so the producers will be able to control the second screen and push compliant data back to air through ITV’s playout centre.

The TV spots will be also supported by a press campaign in Metro, which will invite readers to send in their “Message to Cancer”, with a call to action on the Friday reminding readers to look out for the ITV spots. On Monday, Metro will carry a page with some of the messages generated from the Saturday night show.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Tom McDonnell, Commercial Director at Monterosa, added: “Combining event-style TV with instant second-screen response gives brands a way to leverage the benefits of TV, digital and social simultaneously. This campaign is a great example of how press, radio and second screen TV can intersect with a common objective of achieving sign-ups. Monterosa is proud to be involved with such an important cause.”

Anyone interested in participating in Race for Life can sign up here.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

The study found there are 447 film VoD services (or 18% of the total available, but only the larger media markets appear able to sustain a large number of film VoD services. 48 of those are established in the UK, 34 in France and 33 in Germany. Four countries have a relatively large number of services compared to their size, mainly because they play host to services that are targeting multiple markets. Luxembourg, for example, has 86 services, Sweden has 36 and the Czech Republic has 31.

The main reason Luxembourg appears to be a European VOD powerhouse is because it hosts the iTunes Stores for all of the other European markets (apart from Romania), and also serves Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Netflix, which thus far has only been rolled out in the United Kingdom and the Nordic countries, is also based in the Grand Duchy.

TheMadVideo.com

The Mad Video’s technology say that in a beta test with El Corte Inglés, a Spanish retailer, the average viewer clicked on one or more video tags to learn more about a featured product, with a click­through rate to the “buy” button that almost doubled the industry average. Other beta participants included The Prado Museum in Madrid and the Iberia Division of Sony Pictures Television.

Koldo Garcia, The Mad Video CEO and co-founder, said. “Videos aren’t being optimized for shareability: although they usually contain multiple people, places and products and touch on an array of topics, meta tags apply to an entire video rather than specific parts. The Mad Video now makes videos so easy to tag, index and share that viewers can engage with content like never before and brands can grow their following.”

“The Mad Video’s platform has enabled us to pinpoint the moments in our videos that feature our products and tag them with links to the product pages, making it easy for viewers to not only see our products in context but also follow up on their interest and go directly to the point of sale,” said José Maria Fernandez Ortega, Internet Director for El Corte Inglés. “We believe that working with The Mad Video could make our video campaigns as high­performing as our photo marketing campaigns on Pinterest and Facebook.”

TubeMogul, a video ad buying platform,

Reid will lead business development, sales, and strategy for TubeMogul. He said, “When you talk to the largest brands and agencies, there is an increasing recognition that real-time buying and optimisation of video ads can better deliver on branding goals, simplifying what was once a dizzying array of vendors, ad networks and publisher relationships. Viewed in that context, joining TubeMogul was an easy move to make and I am incredibly excited about the company’s vision.”

Tubemogul say they have been making great inroads into the UK market and cite successes such as a campaign run by DraftFCB, who recently ran a video campaign for the Jamaica Tourism Board which they say doubled the number of British viewers that listed Jamaica as the “Caribbean Island they would most like to visit.”

Have a Weekly Summary of Industry News Delivered to Your Inbox

In the ad, the user is invited to hover their mouse over a point on the timeline to cleverly illustrate the value of Volkswagen’s slide assist feature:

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Martin Dräeger, founder and CEO of Shareifyoulike, will assume the role of Unruly Managing Director in Germany, and staff at Unruly’s Berlin office will be offered relocation packages to move to Shareifyoulike’s Hamburg office, which currently employs eleven full-time staff. Dräeger and Christoph Thielecke founded the platform in 2010.

Scott Button, co-founder and CEO at Unruly, said, “This acquisition not only accelerates our international growth but marks the start of consolidation in the market as social video technology is sitting high on the merger and acquisition agenda of large technology companies.”

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

So, for example if you wanted to find out what kind of reach and frequency the Apple iPad TV Campaign was getting, and wanted to find out how much share of voice it was achieving in comparison with a key competitor – take the Microsoft Surface, for example – you’d get something like this:

Simulmedia say it will be be expanded over the next month to include more than 300 national advertisers and data from more than two years of TV campaigns. Users will be able to access reach and frequency charts for each campaign by month and by different target audiences, the share of voice comparisons for each market competitor, the reach contributions by each TV network on the campaign as well as the cost-per-reach points for each network.

“Audience fragmentation across channels, timeslots and devices has made TV advertising much less efficient than it used to be. Two-thirds of TV spots today in the U.S. are wasted and don’t need to be” says Dave Morgan, Simulmedia’s CEO. “Our mission is to show exactly which ones they are and how brands and agencies can avoid that kind of waste while continuing to harness the power of TV’s reach capabilities. This kind of information with this granularity and transparency has never before been offered to the advertising and media marketplace.”

“TV advertising is about to become a lot more open, transparent and less wasteful,” said Dave Morgan, CEO of Simulmedia, whose company’s core product is based around data-driven TV advertising. “TV’s capacity to reach US consumers with impactful messaging is still unparalleled, but it needs more openness and to better leverage data to achieve its full potential.”

Have A Summary of Industry News Delivered to Your Inbox Once a Week

One of the highlights of last week’s Digital Content New Fronts in the US was the announcement that FreeWheel and Mediaocean are to start working together to unify the TV and video buying process with FourFronts, which enables publishers to sell to TV media buying agencies through existing workflow and systems. VAN caught up with Jonathan Heller, FreeWheel’s Co-CEO, to find out about the partnership works, which markets the service will be available in, and the FreeWheel business model.

Congratulations on the launch. Could you give an overview of how you’ll be working with Mediaocean, and explain AOL’s role?

We’re very excited. We’ve been saying for ages that there’s no such thing as online video – it’s just television. Consumers know this already, but now we need to update the back office processes in terms of how agencies plan and buy, and how they execute, bill etc. We need to get the pipes hooked up so it runs smoothly as a business.

We’re trying to make the whole ecosystem flow more smoothly, from beginning to end, so when an agency is determining what to buy and when they put what they’d like together and start executing against it.

AOL is the first media partner and their will be others. So AOL, in this instance, is the entity that’s going to be selling into the TV buyers. Mediaocean is the system the TV buyers use for their planning, buying and billing. And we’re the infrastructure supporting AOL on their half of the buy.

‘FourFronts’ is the FreeWheel component that uses our existing platform. So we’ve a product called Revenue and Payments Management (RPM), and a companion platform called Monetization Rights Management (MRM), that span the processes from proposals and orders to the execution and delivery of the ads, back into the billing again. We’re just using the same tools that we offer many of our clients, but now the service is connected to the TV buyers. That solution is called FourFronts, which works in partnership with Mediaocean and AOL as our first media partner.

Ultimately, all we’re doing is enabling the way people need to plan and buy for television work in a world where television happens in a lot of different places, and in a lot of different ways, but it still needs to add up to being the audience people want to reach, on the content they want to be on.

There’s also a second component to the service we provide. We have a number of clients who use our platforms that are not media sales companies, so they might be studios or labels for example, who – if they elect to participate – can actually supply in some additional audience reach to someone like AOL, just to get the scale up even larger for TV buyers.

So think of it from the beginning of the contract, through to the execution of the contract, to the results and the generation of the bill, and the transmission of the bill back to the agency. That whole chain has to work easily at scale. And that’s exactly what we’re doing.

In terms of measurement, does this solution help buyers measure on an ‘apples to apples’ basis?

In practice I think it does. Consumers have already made their choices and they’re watching more and more premium content on partners like AOL, and advertisers need to reach them and they’ve made their choices by trying to follow. All of the stuff in the middle is hammering itself out.

So what people needed was a common currency, and I think that what’s happening is that currency is becoming the current currency, as long as the metrics are apples to apples, but it might be a Macintosh and a Granny Smith, so there are different flavours of the Nielsen rating in the way they’re mechanically executed but they all effectively boil down to a gross rating and a target rating. So I think the stuff that Nielsen is working on at the moment dovetails with this very nicely, as it helps bring all of the pieces together in order to construct a buy, execute it and receive an accurate bill — and all at TV scale.

Are you going to be focusing mainly on the US market, or will it be made available in Europe?

We’re going to start with the US. I believe both we and Mediaocean have a strong presence in the UK, so we’ll certainly be learning and looking at when that might make best sense.

FreeWheel tend to focus more on the TV side of the industry. Could you give an overview of who you work with and how? 

Well we have clients from a wide variety of backgrounds. So NBC, ABC and Fox are customers of ours, but so is Discovery and Turner and the other traditional cable networks. Then we work with DirecTV, Dish, AOL and a number of other portals and device manufacturers, and even Warner Brothers, the studio.

So we see entertainment as a supply chain, from the actors and the guilds and the studios and the sports leagues, who feed into the programmers and networks, that then get distributed through traditional methods like the cable companies here in the US or through newer methods like AOL or some of the device manufacturers, but it’s still a supply chain.

So in order for the whole thing to work, it needs to work together smoothly, which is why our first product was called Monetization Rights Management, because one of the main things it does is determine if this user is watching a basketball game on the Xbox inside a Comcast app, there could be seven to nine companies who need to have contracts honoured regarding who’s allowed to do what and who gets paid what.

Are FreeWheel doing much in Europe at the moment?

Sky are a client of ours and we work with a number of the UK television companies and customers. It’s our first and biggest market after the US, and we’re now looking at the rest of Europe and picking where to go next.