Under the Hood: YuMe’s Relevance Engine

By Carla Rover • March 30, 2011 •

Video advertising technology company YuMe has revamped its video ad publishing platform and is releasing its “relevance engine”, part of the ACE for Publishers 3.0 suite. While behavioral targeting for display is an ad industry staple, video ad targeting has taken hold only in the last few years. According to comScore’s Video Metrix, 170 million consumers are watching online video content each month, with 1.7 billion minutes being spent watching video ads. YuMe’s platform aims to tap in to advertisers’ growing awareness of the format with features that go beyond YuMe’s previous offerings.

“The online video advertising market is the fastest growing segment of digital advertising,” YuMe CEO Jayant Kadambi said. “As more high quality video content comes online and more consumers turn to the web, mobile, or a connected TV device for their entertainment, TV brands will increasingly incorporate online video as a key part of their advertising campaigns.”

The relevance engine, the analytics core of the ACE Suite, is geared to support the monetization and syndication of content producers while facilitating ad spending optimization for advertisers. The platform looks at advertiser’s impressions goals and device strategy benchmarks along with metatags, consumer’s connection speed, and standard demographics. It also permits a user to employ a device-specific strategy based on a consumer’s device at the time of ad impression, whether mobile, online or connected TV.

The platform allows for ad sales automation that adjusts inventory pricing according to content and distribution attributes. It isn’t, according to the company, chained to a cookie- based model. “Privacy needs to be balanced with ad efficacy or no one will be served well,” Kadambi stated. “That being said, we are hyper-focused on delivering video ads in the right context, so even without cookie-based targeting which is relied on more heavily by performance-based networks, we know the content the consumer is viewing and can ensure the brand’s ad runs in a relevant environment.”

Privacy issues aside, YuMe’s products are entering a crowded field that sees video-ad targeting start-ups launching weekly. The platform offers some good basic elements that can be found in many DSPs, but the draw of YuMe’s product range is the user-friendly structure that brings ad sales management tools as well as inventory management and targeting data onto a single platform.

“Some advertisers and online advertising companies are treating video just like display inventory,” Kadambi said. “The medium is entirely different and requires a different set of parameters that look at the page, the content and the consumer more closely. Companies that can deliver that relevance to all parties will help move the industry forward.”

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