Time Warner and ScanScout Announce A Strategic Investment for Video Advertising

ScanScout (www.scanscout.com), a company that specializes in offering unique contextual ad placement software for video advertising, announced a major deal today with Time Warner. Time Warner has made a strategic investment into the company.Rachel Lam, Sr. VP of Investments for Time Warner stated that the reason for the investment is to address the growing need for video advertising and publishing solutions. They position video as part of an overall content strategy on their interactive destination sites and plan to utilize ScanScout's technology across their extensive network.

ScanScout's solution is unique in that it offers what it calls, Brand Protector technology. Their ad serving solution therefore can work to serve some of the larger, premium brands that advertise with Time warner. And because ScanScout's flexible ad model is built around contextually relevant video ad serving, it more closely aligns with the needs, preferences, and behaviors of internet video viewers as well advertisers and publishers.

One of the problems with the current popular video ad format, pre-roll ads, is that research and user studies suggest that users not only ignore the advertisements, they often abandon the video all together. A report that was released by Burst Media (pdf here) states that 27.9% of their survey respondents, when asked about their approval of video advertisements, responded that they would not only abandon the video but would abandon the website hosting the video altogether.

However, we all know that not only is video HOT right now, so is the desire to monetize it. This comes only a few weeks after Google's YouTube announced they would be offering contextually based video overlay ads on their video search platforms.

The Kelsey Group Blog has a good post and summary - Time Warner Gets in the Game

The Press Release can be found here: ScanScout Secures Strategic Investment from Time Warner and Announces Board of Directors

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