Home Publishers Washington Post Enters Ad Tech With FlexPlay Video Product

Washington Post Enters Ad Tech With FlexPlay Video Product

SHARE:

WaPo ad techThe Washington Post on Tuesday released a video product called FlexPlay that loads videos faster in diverse environments and customizes them to extract more engagement.

Advertisers can use FlexPlay for video ads that run on the Post’s website, as well as those that run offsite, in exchange for a premium on the CPM. The idea is to solve for a better user experience by enabling video content like pre-roll to keep up with different video styles, such as vertical, in-feed and mobile.

“Many consumers skip videos after seven seconds or they turn the volume off,” said Jarrod Dicker, director of ad product and engineering for the Post. “With this technology, we can understand consumer behavior and the different options to deliver the best experience, which will help pioneer the next evolution of advertising.”

The solution is a nod to both ad tech and creative collaboration, according to Dicker, who previously helped design the Huffington Post’s native ad experience. He joined The Washington Post a few months ago to create ad products for use there and elsewhere.

“Especially since Jeff Bezos bought the Post, we want to become an ad tech company,” he said. That means designing proprietary ad products instead of relying on third parties to develop them.

The Post encodes the videos using FlexPlay’s ad tech component. The first five to 10 seconds of video are turned into GIF and MP4 formats for faster loads, especially on mobile. FlexPlay can also add text for a muted video solution and encode it to load more quickly, and can add features to encourage sharing.

The creative collaboration piece is the “white glove” part, Dicker said. The Washington Post will take a 30-second pre-roll spot and cut it down to a seven-second vertical video format that could appear on the mobile device of a Post reader or offsite on Snapchat. It will repeat the process for other video formats, creating multiple versions of each ad designed for each experience.

The publisher will use its engagement data to make editing suggestions, such as the optimal video length for completions.

“I don’t think publishers are thinking about how to help the advertiser by adjusting what they’re doing,” Dicker said. “The mentality is that the advertiser wants to do it how they want to do it. We hope we can optimize what the agencies are doing and work collaboratively with them.”

The Post just started pitching the product to advertisers, so it doesn’t have any launch partners. Dicker expects that advertisers with rapidly expanding video advertising budgets will want to experiment with FlexPlay because of its promise to improve ad performance and engagement.

 

Must Read

The FTC's latest staff report has strong message for social media and streaming video platforms: Stop engaging in the "vast surveillance" of consumers.

FTC Denounces Social Media And Video Streaming Platforms For ‘Privacy-Invasive’ Data Practices

The FTC’s latest staff report has strong message for social media and streaming video platforms: Stop engaging in the “vast surveillance” of consumers.

Publishers Feel Seen At The Google Ad Tech Antitrust Trial

Publishers were encouraged to see the DOJ highlight Google’s stranglehold on the ad server market and its attempts to weaken header bidding.

Albert Thompson, Managing Director, Digital at Walton Isaacson

To Cure What Ails Digital Advertising, Marketers And Publishers Must Get Back To Basics

Albert Thompson, a buy-side veteran with 20+ years of experience, weighs in on attention metrics, the value of MFA sites, brand safety backlash and how publishers can improve their inventory.

Privacy! Commerce! Connected TV! Read all about it. Subscribe to AdExchanger Newsletters
A comic depiction of Google's ad machine sucking money out of a publisher.

DOJ vs. Google, Day Five Rewind: Prebid Reality Check, Unfair Rev Share And Jedi Blue (Sorta)

Someone will eventually need to make a Netflix-style documentary about the Google ad tech antitrust trial happening in Virginia. (And can we call it “You’ve Been Ad Served?”)

Comic: Alphabet Soup

Buried DOJ Evidence Reveals How Google Dealt With The Trade Desk

In the process of the investigation into Google, the Department of Justice unearthed a vast trove of separate evidence. Some of these findings paint a whole new picture of how Google interacts and competes with its main DSP rival, The Trade Desk.

Comic: The Unified Auction

DOJ vs. Google, Day Four: Behind The Scenes On The Fraught Rollout Of Unified Pricing Rules

On Thursday, the US district court in Alexandria, Virginia boarded a time machine back to April 18, 2019 – the day of a tense meeting between Google and publishers.