We all think we know what pre-roll video ads look like. We click on a video clip and the 0:15 or 0:30 second ad that plays in a large video player in the top left part of our screen is a pre-roll ad. That’s what most brand marketers think they are getting when they buy pre-roll video ads, but it’s often not the case.

Many video advertising vendors are using “Fake Pre-Rolls” to fulfill campaigns. Fake Pre-Rolls are video ads that auto-play on a web page where the viewer has shown no intent to watch the ad or the content after the ad. They are typically run within banner ad units or in small, syndicated players below the fold.

FakePreRoll.com will showcase instances where vendors have run “fake pre-rolls”. By shining light on the issue, we hope that marketers and agencies will demand more transparency from their vendors to better understand what type of pre-roll they are buying.

TubeMogul has multiple controls in place to ensure that its clients’ pre-roll video ads never run in these auto-play banner units, unless they have specifically chosen this format. Our SiteSafe system includes manual screening to flag sites that use this ad unit and our PlaySafe technology is continually screening for video player size to ensure we do not serve pre-roll ads within these units.

Despite these controls, TubeMogul has suffered the rare instance where we have mistakenly served a client’s pre-roll ad in one of these units. However, we always take immediate steps to address the mistake and provide the advertiser with make-goods on the impressions. The first example on FakePreRoll.com will show an example of one of our own ads within a “fake pre-roll” ad unit (also shown below).

This practice – delivering auto-play pre-roll when an advertiser thought they were buying user-initiated pre-roll – is detrimental to a brand’s video campaign and our industry can do better. We hope FakePreRoll.com can play a role in reducing this deceptive practice.

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If you haven’t heard of TubeMogul yet, that’s about to change.  Today we celebrate recognition as the world’s largest buyer of real-time video advertising.  What does this mean? 5.54 billion ad auctions flow through our system per day - and one in six Americans who watched video online last month saw an ad served by us.  We’ve been cited as a market leader for brand marketers that want a simple, effective platform to deliver their messaging.

See TubeMogul’s year in statistics here:

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TubeMogul and Nielsen announced a joint partnership today, bringing Nielsen’s gross ratings point (GRP) measurement — long the standard for measuring television advertising — to real-time media buying of video ads for the first time. Part of Nielsen’s Online Campaign Ratings suite, the reporting simplifies the media buying process for brands and trading desks by letting them compare targeted audience buys within TubeMogul’s platform directly to TV.

Mark Wagman, Product Manager at Accuen Media (Omnicom Group’s trading desk), had this to say: “GRPs change the calculus by letting us allocate budgets purely based on where viewers are and make apples-to-apples comparisons with television. And unlike television, where ratings can vary day-to-day, advertisers can know exactly what they are getting for a given budget given the optimization available online.”

To get GRPs for your video campaign, contact us today.

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We are proud to announce the industry’s first real-time buying of social video. Developed in close partnership with Trialpay, brand marketers can now serve video ads to specific audiences across games within Facebook, using demographic or behavioral data to reach their potential customers. As always, the new format comes with TubeMogul’s optimization and analytics capabilities built-in, which measure and adjust campaigns on the fly to deliver the best campaign performance possible.

We continue to push the industry towards greater transparency and social video bought in real-time will be no different. Advertisers will see exactly how many views occur within each game and will be able to see the performance of their video ads on a game-by-game basis while their campaigns run.

To see the ads in action and add to your campaign, follow our step-by-step video guide or contact us to start your campaign today.

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Today, we are happy to formally introduce Stephen Hunt as TubeMogul’s head of regional operations, working out of the company’s Sydney office. Steve will lead business development, sales and strategy throughout Australia and New Zealand, a region where TubeMogul’s media buying platform for video advertising gained significant market share in the past year.

An online advertising veteran, Steve hit the ground running last week, publishing a candid editorial in ExchangeWire about the future of digital video advertising.

Beyond advertising, no blog about him would be complete without this fact: Steve is one of few worldwide to have successfully swum across the English Channel and Gibraltar Strait.

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We are pleased to announce that Paul Joachim is joining our team as Chief Revenue Officer. Paul is a seasoned veteran with decades of experience in digital advertising, sales leadership and technology. He joins TubeMogul from Vibrant Media, a leader in textual advertising and a company he helped grow to over $100 million in annual revenue. An engineer by training, Paul started in Silicon Valley working for IBM and after that was an investment banker for a decade in the tech space.

At TubeMogul, Paul’s mission is simple: continue the rapid growth of the company’s media buying platform for video advertising.

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Our media buying platform for video advertising added additional consumer privacy safeguards today, receiving Network Advertising Initiative certification. NAI gives consumers a simple and effective way to manage their online privacy, including a global opt-out for viewers that do not wish to have data collected about them for use in digital advertising. Certified companies also agree to numerous safeguards, such as protections against invasive forms of tracking (only browser-based cookies are allowed, for instance), extensive regulations on how audience data is used and a ban on collecting any personally-identifiable information.

This is in addition to a wealth of protections already set up by TubeMogul, including TRUSTe icons on all ads targeted using third-party data, a global opt-out that launched before our media buying platform platform (we have our priorities straight) and certification against multiple voluntary IAB guidelines for digital video.

More broadly, our platform was built with the philosophy that when a brand marketer has complete transparency and control over what sites their ad runs on and whether to use third or first-part data for targeting, privacy problems are less likely to happen (and, for the record, never have in our multi-year history) since public perception can mean everything to a brand.

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Today, we moved TubeMogul’s video syndication and analytics service to its own site: OneLoad.com. The impetus for the move is to give OneLoad its own identity independent of TubeMogul, a brand that steadily shifted its meaning in the past year as the company’s real-time media buying platform for video ads grew rapidly with brand advertisers and trading desks. OneLoad will no longer be accessible from TubeMogul.com, which is now exclusively dedicated to the company’s flagship video ad platform.

For marketers and video producers using OneLoad, nothing is changing other than where accounts live, and old login information works seamlessly on the new site. An internal team — a small “company within a larger company” — will continue to evolve the product to meet ongoing needs, as TubeMogul.com focuses its efforts on making the world of real-time buying safe, effective and simple for brand advertisers.

The move is made possible by OneLoad’s over quarter of a million users and hundreds of paying clients, and we thank them for the continued support. Feel free to reach out to OneLoad’s customer support team at support@oneload.com with any questions, comments or feedback.

More information here.

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