Automatic creation of interactive video to double video advertising revenues whilst decreasing inconvenience for viewers

Project Information

Interactive Video

Grant agreement ID: 666570

DOI

10.3030/666570

Project closed

EC signature date 26 March 2015

Start date 1 April 2015

End date 30 November 2016

Funded under

• INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP - Leadership in enabling and industrial technologies - Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)

Total cost

€ 1 352 175,75

EU contribution

€ 946 523,00

Coordinated by

ADWAYS
France

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - Interactive Video (Automatic creation of interactive video to double video advertising revenues whilst decreasing inconvenience for viewers)

Reporting period: 2016-01-01 to 2016-11-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Adways is a fast-growing, cutting-edge startup company specializing in interactive video. The project involves commercializing interactive video technology for specific adaptation to the advertising monetization requirements of major media outlets.
With video advertising formats becoming more considerate of Internet users and more lucrative for media outlets, interactive video is increasing the profitability of videos whilst decreasing the inconvenience for surfers. This smarter advertising format has real disruptive potential on the online video advertising market. Yet production process still needs to be industrialized in order to address media outlets' current monetization problems on a large scale.
At the end of the project, Adways is aiming to be in a position to commercialize an application that enriches videos fully automatically. The solution will automatically add relevant interactive content based on video context analysis. The objective is to provide new added-value information to Internet users whilst the videos play. This interactive content will be monetized as an additional advertising inventory. The enrichments, which will be easily deployable on a very large scale but incorporated into the content of the videos, will be widely accepted by Internet users despite the occasional similarity to advertising.
The objective of this project is to double the advertising inventory and video revenue of media outlets and obtain 50% market share among French media outlets after eighteen months. As a technology provider, Adways earns a fee on the advertising revenue generated for target sales exceeding €2 million in the first year. The revenue forecast is more than €100 million five years after the project's start, thereby creating a new interactive video advertising technologies market led by Adways in Europe. Therefore, Adways would create 300 direct jobs and hundreds of indirect jobs amongst its clients.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

During the first periodic period, Adways has been focused on developing an alpha and beta version of the product the aim of which were to add contextual native interactive ad or editorial content on any video.
Meanwhile, the marketing has been busy on analyzing how those advertising formats could be introduced and with which pricing model.
The main objective was to segment the market to find our early adopters and understand their true needs.
In the second step, we did produce a prototype for some beta tester and we were then eager to get feedback from them. As a matter of fact it was the first time that our new disruptive interactive advertising formats were used in a live environment.
During the second period, we started getting tracking data (click rate, completion rate, …) which did help us to fine-tuned the formats.
We did integrate the semantics algorithms in our Adways Studio to contextually add extra content or ads relevant to the content of the video.
We refined our pricing policy and found partners and first clients to plan first real campaigns.
Last we worked on press release under various formats: breakfast with Media Agencies (Digiteka), international launch in event (Interact Lisbon) or communiqué with our partners or clients on a successful business case (Swiper, Dailymotion, Prisma…).
We are now ready to span the solution in Europe and then US.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Interactive video for advertising has never been so relevant for our society.
The entire media economy is now talking about adblockers and the saturation of advertising on the web.
The media companies are looking for new ways to monetize their content without being intrusive with advertising.
Interactive video is really an answer to current problem in the advertising industry : by suggesting instead of imposing advertising content to viewers, Adways interactive format answer to the problem of intrusive advertising by offering a way for the viewer to interact within the video.
Adways is expecting to create hundreds of jobs and help the media companies to find sustainable revenues.

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Visual interactive content