Traditionally, the creative aspect of ads and content have been to engage audiences through script and production – the “lean back experience.” While we have traditionally enjoyed the results static video has provided, and branding has proven to create lift, it still needs more.
The History of Digital Advertising
Let’s take a look at the digital world as a whole. We started with a modem and a screen, and moved to higher-speed internet, extensive websites to interact with and clickable banners/ads. The mobile phone has become the primary tool for communication and interaction, and social media has brought a slew of new advertising opportunities.
Today, audiences are engaging with content as it becomes accessible, but the world of video has somehow remained static – a “lean back” and non-engaged experience.
The digital world has enjoyed enormous advancement with artificial intelligence (AI), virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and more. However, the video world has seen little advancement as it relates to interactive experience – a “lean in” and engaging experience – until now.
Interactive Video Making Headlines
Today’s audiences want to lean into your video and learn more about specific products, places, people, services, etc. Many media professionals have discussed the opportunity of interactive video within movies. Interactive movies, or television shows, allow viewers to select their path or learn about specific objects on the screen.
Amazon, in their prime experience, saw the value of providing educational information in their videos. Additional information about objects and/or features could include the IMDB web page of an actor and more.
The bridge between a consumer ad or a video ad, within an interactive experience, is the recognition of objects within the creative asset. Interactive technology allows the consumer to engage with the content, on their terms, by clicking-to-learn or even clicking-to-purchase the objects of interest.
Historically, this type of video advertising has been referred to as “product placement,” but it is actually more than that. Set design, costume design, location scouts, etc. can now enjoy a possible revenue stream from their same video asset without compromising the user experience.
Ad Tech Inspiring the Future of Video Marketing
The technology methods created to provide this interactive video experience have been varied. Some companies require a custom-made production of the video content, and the turnaround time takes a lot longer to complete the interactive overlay.
Recognizing this gap in the video marketing industry, KERV Interactive set out to create a more practical solution for advertisers who want to boost brand engagement.
We found a way that a static video could be automatically made interactive and consumer-friendly, while also not intruding on the brand’s content or user’s video experience.
These key pillars have been the driving force in the development of KERV’s systems, platforms, user experience and reporting. We wanted to create a platform that automatically identifies objects in a video, dynamically adds descriptions/links and provides player agnostic solutions for local or programmatic distribution and placement.
The genius of the interactive technology platform was to identify any object in a video by tracing its pixel edges using our proprietary technology. No other interactive platform has the ability to identify objects in video at the pixel-level.
This allows consumers to interact with detailed objects, people, places or things, in any scene in the video, and learn more or click-out to a website of the brand’s choice.
A single scene in a video can be very complex, and simply using the traditionally seen “bounding boxes” advertisers are extremely limited to what is made interactive. Using new AI techniques paired with unmatched processing speed, KERV can make an entire video scene and all of its components interactive within minutes.
These are the core points in KERV’s patents.
How Interactive Video is Helping Brands
Advertisers are finding great success leveraging the KERV platform and distribution. Our system allows advertisers to strategically track any action a consumer takes during their video experience. By leveraging proprietary, object-level, drill-down reporting systems, KERV is able to provide brands with never-before-seen data that explains each user’s engagement journey throughout their video creative.
Brands and advertisers are able to see which scenes, objects, products, etc. are resonating effectively with target audiences and re-work creative as needed to better serve consumers.
The KERV team are experts at the media game. These Austin-based media wizards can take any video asset, turn it into an interactive experience in minutes and traffic the player agnostic tag programmatically.
KERV’s methods are unique. Our optimization algorithms and our deep-data analysis allows us to generate wildly high engagement rates that have never been seen before from video ad placement. This fact along with our first party data make KERV a truly unique offering to the online video industry.
As we have been gaining broad use of our platform, and our highly skilled media team placing these video ads, we are seeing content owners reach out wanting to provide interactive features to their short and long-form content.
This includes not only making a video ad “shoppable,” but also providing Wiki information for consumer education. For example, but not limited to: 1) where was that shot? 2) Who is that actor(ess)? 3) Where can I purchase that product? 4) How can I learn more about this destination?
The applications are endless as we better understand the various market needs and continue to build this state-of-the-art interactive video platform and reporting. Take a test drive and see how KERV can work for you and your content.