There’s increasing demand for mobile video ad inventory from both performance and brand advertisers. That’s good news for everyone, because more engaging ad formats generate greater benefits for all parties in the value chain: advertisers get more brand engagement from consumers and publishers get higher CPMs from video.

We are expanding our mobile video enabled ad inventory across ad exchanges for VAST, MRAID, Native and PRE-ROLL. Being able to support multiple video ad formats gives advertisers scale across publishers and exchanges and options for optimization. Across all ad exchanges we can now access over 10 billion video enable bids per month.

Supply is becoming a problem as pointed by the CEO of AppNexus in a recent article: the challenge and critical success factors for demand players will be getting access to global video supply  to support both performance and branding campaigns.

VAST mobile video

First and foremost, VAST is only available at scale on a number of ad exchanges. Secondly, VAST has not been as widely adopted as MRAID by publishers. For that reason, there’s limited non-skippable VAST inventory out there – therefore it follows that you can expect to pay a higher price. VAST skippable inventory has been more popular with publishers as they balance the trade-off between user experience (forcing users to watch an entire video) and monetization (higher CPMs).

The duration options of a VAST video will depend on whether it’s skippable or non-skippable. One of the drawbacks of VAST it that it only supports basic end cards – no carousels.

On the flip side, VAST is the established standard for video and integration between publisher, exchanges and demand players is relative straightforward. For ad ops teams, VAST tags hold all the attributes about a video campaign and that means detailed reporting and third party ad tag support. VAST works across mobile sites and applications.

MRAID mobile video

MRAID is the only viable option today to achieve massive scale across ad exchanges. MRAID has already been established as the standard for rich media since version 1 was released in 2011 and the updated version 2 in 2012. Videos can run in any MRAID compliant container that supports HTML5. For brands this particularly exciting because it gives them a white canvas to mix rich media interactive campaigns with videos in any combination or style. MRAID works across apps only.

Native mobile video

Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram and many more have already proven that native mobile video ads outperform other mobile video ad formats and brands are allocating advertising dollars to advertise on these apps. Smadex will be integrating with ad exchanges and direct publishers that support native video over the coming months.

To find out more about running mobile video campaigns with Smadex contact sales[at]smadex[dot]com