With the latest Mixpo platform feature release, you now have an additional easy and effective way to make Xspots relevant on a viewer-by-viewer basis: the Map Directions overlay action.

In case you’re new to Mixpo, overlays are text, image, video, and widget objects that you place on top of the video content in an Xspot. For example, an auto dealer’s Xspot might include a text overlay that invites viewers to sign up for a test drive. A restaurant Xspot might include an image overlay of its logo.

As the examples imply, you can associate overlays with actions. The auto dealer’s text overlay is associated with a Lead Capture action. Viewers who click the overlay open a customizable form where they fill in their names, email addresses, and more. The restaurant’s logo is associated with a Link action. Viewers who click the logo open the restaurant’s website home page.

To add a Map Directions action to an overlay, you provide a destination address – the address of your dealership, restaurant, retail outlet, event, or other key location. Viewers who click the overlay see a tailor-made Google maps Get Directions page. The page shows viewers how to get from the zip code where they’re sitting to the destination address.

Google maps Get Directions page (click for larger image)

To experience a Map Directions overlay for yourself, play the following Xspot of a recent Mixpo bowling party. Click the Find the Mixpo office overlay that appears a few seconds into the video. (If you can spare a few minutes, take in the rest of the video to enjoy our team at play. While you’re there, explore some of of the other dynamic and interactive features that you can add to your own Xspots.)

Is your business national or regional with franchises or dealerships in a number of cities or zip codes? By adding a geotargeting variable as the destination address, you can automatically show each viewer the closest location.

More Information

New to Mixpo? Explore our website today to learn more about dynamic video advertising.

Mixpo customer? Learn more now about overlay actions and geotargeting by signing in to your account, opening the Client Resources home page, and then searching for “actions” and “geotargeting.”

Why? Brands with a social media presence engage their customers. This engagement brings customers closer to the brands.

Because Xspots are dynamic, they also provide advertisers with opportunities to bring customers closer. Four dynamic features with which you may already be familiar include:

• Auto-optimization React automatically to viewer preferences and get the best performance by optimizing an Xspot while it’s running.
• Message targeting Deliver the right message to the right viewer at the right time using geographical and other targeting methods.
• Rapid response Respond to breaking news or date-specific offers by changing creative on the fly without re-trafficking ad tags.
• Interactivity Increase engagement opportunities with links, forms, coupons, surveys, social media sharing actions, and other interactive features.

Now, advertisers have a new way to build rapport between customers and their brands. Xspots can include dynamic widget overlays that contain built-in animation and intelligence, such as XML, RSS, and other live feeds. As the Xspot plays, the widget continues to update in real time.

The possibilities are virtually limitless.

For example, a political Xspot might include a Twitter widget that streams the candidate’s most recent Tweets as the Xspot plays.

Or, as the following innovative demo Xspot illustrates, a lottery ad might include a widget that updates daily to show winning numbers.

More information

Interested in learning more about what dynamic Xspots can do for your ad campaign? Visit our Industries page now.

Mixpo customer? Learn more today about adding widget overlays to Xspots by signing in to your account, opening the Client Resources home page, and then searching for “widget.”

These are the questions Harry Gold raises in a recent ClickZ article.

You can have the best media plan in the world, says Gold. The success of your ad, however, rests ultimately on how well the creative answers a couple of key consumer questions:

• How are you going to help me?
• What do you have for me right now?

“Basically,” says Gold, “people are looking for the benefits and offers in your ads.” His advice? “…Make sure you have an arsenal of benefits and offers to test in your campaigns and use this as the basis for your creative testing.”

Great advice, as far as it goes. Unfortunately, for you, the advertiser, it leaves a lot of questions unanswered. Does each benefit and offer in the arsenal require its own unique creative? How can you test different versions cost effectively? How can you easily monitor performance and turn it into information you can carry into the design of future ads?

Building on Gold’s advice about testing benefits and offers, here are 3 quick, easy, and concrete steps you can follow to boost the performance of your online video ads.

Step 1. Develop benefit and offer lists

Interactive offers in video ad

Before you run a campaign, take Gold’s advice and do some brainstorming. Develop 2 lists. One list includes what Gold calls “the ways that your product really helps your target audience.” The other includes “offers you can make and fulfill right on the spot.”

For example, an auto dealer might list “zero percent APR financing” as a benefit and “sign up for a test drive” as an offer.

Winnow and sift the lists until you have a manageable collection of the most attractive benefits and offers.

Tip As you brainstorm, don’t let pre-conceived ideas about what’s possible limit the offers you come up with. Online video ads can include printable coupons, surveys, forms, links to more in-depth video content, and much more. In addition, you can target different audiences with benefits and offers that update on-the-fly based on a viewer’s geographic location.

Step 2. Create a unique ad for each compelling benefit-offer combination

On the face of it, this step sounds prohibitively expensive. But if you run your campaign through a dynamic video ad platform, it’s a quick, cost-effective process.

Here’s how it works:

• Upload a 15- or 30-second TV spot to create the master ad. This master forms the basis for each unique version.
• Make copies of the master. Creating copies is as simple as pressing a Copy button.
• Make each version unique by layering interactive benefit and offer overlays on top of the underlying video.

Step 3: Set up ad rotation and auto-optimization

Auto optimize to improve ROI

The only way to really learn which benefits and offers customers respond to is by giving these customers the chance to respond. In a video ad platform that is truly dynamic, you can integrate performance testing into the process of running a campaign.

By rotating different versions of a video ad through the same Player, you discover which version results in the best view rate, clickthrough rate, or percent of video viewed.

After a specified number of impressions, the platform automatically eliminates poor performers and optimizes on the best performing version.

As Gold points out, running ads on the right properties aimed at the right audience gets you only so far. It’s delivering the right benefits and offers that makes the audience respond.

More information

Learn more today about using a dynamic video ad platform to boost your video ad performance.

Mixpo customer discovering auto optimization for the first time? Visit the Client Resources home page now and search for “copy,” “overlays,” and “auto optimize.”

To increase holiday donations, the Salvation Army rotated 3 Xspots and 1 rich media ad without video in the same banner ad space on Comcast Online. While all of the ads helped raise dollars, performance data showed the power of compelling true-story video content. The Xspot engagement rates outperformed the rich media ad rate by 38 to 1.

These success stories show the key role that accurate and detailed performance data plays in online video ad campaigns. Advertisers rely on the data not only to measure the success of completed campaigns but also to optimize campaigns while they’re running and run better campaigns in the future.

Through its Dashboard and Advanced Analytics, the Mixpo platform has always provided a wealth of performance data. Now, a new Reports wizard makes that data easier than ever to access.

Click to see a larger custom reports list

A user-friendly interface guides you through the process of setting up and scheduling fully customizable Xspot and placement reports that you and other recipients receive automatically in email.

For example, you can schedule a weekly report organized by Xspot that includes:

• All of the Xspots in your Group.
• All of the available performance, click, and interaction data.

Or, you can generate a one-time report organized by placement domain that includes:

• Two Xspots in a specific advertiser’s account.
• All of the placement domains where the Xspots are running.
• Only engagement rate, views, view rate, clicks, and click rate data.

Coming soon: The addition of conversion tracking and geotargeting to the Reports wizard.

More information

Read more success stories now.

Mixpo customer? Learn more about the new Reports wizard. Sign into your account today, open the redesigned Client Resources home page, and search for custom reports.

But, when repurposing TV creative, advertisers must remember that, as Phil O’Neill, director of analytics at VideoEgg, put it, “the web is not the same as TV.”

“Your [online] audience,” says O’Neill, “will spend more time with the brand’s message if they can become immersed in, and engage with, the content.” Including interactive elements, such as multiple videos, Twitter and Facebook links, lead capture forms, surveys, coupons, and maps, in a video ad “increases interaction rate, the time spent with the ad and ultimately drives impact to the bottom line.”

In the Mixpo platform, its always been easy to add interactive text, image, and video overlays on top of the video content in an Xspot. With the release of 3 new features, managing those overlays just got a lot more convenient.

Independent Media Library

The old way Images and video clips in an account’s Media Library were tied directly to the account’s Xspots. If you deleted an Xspot, you deleted its images and clips from the Library. If you added an image or clip, it was automatically placed in an Xspot.

The new way You can upload images and clips directly to the Media Library. They stay there until you delete them, regardless of whether or not they are used in Xspots.

Multiple overlay Timelines

The old way All overlays added to an Xspot appeared on the same Timeline. They often sat on top of one another and overlapped, making it difficult to get to overlays you wanted to change.

Overlapping overlays on a single Timeline

The new way You can have up to 3 overlay Timelines in any Xspot and you can move overlays freely between them.

Overlays on multiple Timelines

Replace overlays

The old way You took a bunch of time to add, position, and format a text, image, or video overlay. Then, you discover that the image changed or you needed a different shape to contain the call to action. Your option? Delete the overlay and start over.

The new way You take the time to add, position, and format an overlay. Things change. You click Replace Overlay and the new overlay replaces the old, while retaining all of the old overlay’s action, formatting, and transition settings.

More information

Mixpo account holders: Learn more about the new features by visiting the Client Resources page, and then searching for media library, multiple timelines, or replace overlays.

Graphical display of views/impressions ratio

The data is in.

Video ad views result in a lift in branded search queries and visits to and time spent on advertisers’ websites.

That’s the conclusion of recent research studies by comScore, Microsoft, and others.

So it’s in any advertiser’s self interest to make sure that the online video ads they run attract as many views as possible.

Based on data that tracks hundreds of campaigns across numerous industry segments, here are 3 tips for increasing any video ad’s active view rate:

Use a compelling starting image

The starting image is the image that viewers see before they play a video ad. The more compelling that image, the more viewers the video ad attracts.

• Video ads in the tourism and politics/advocacy segments with compelling starting images have attracted active view rates as high as 4.3 percent (compare to an industry benchmark view rate of 1.43 percent for tourism and 1.77 percent for politics/advocacy).

Beckon viewers with words

Include words on the starting image that make viewers an offer they can’t refuse. Or, ask viewers a question they can’t resist answering.

• Video ads in the financial segment with compelling starting image text have attracted active view rates as high as 7.3 percent (compare to an industry benchmark view rate of 2.98 percent).
• Video ads in the auto segment with compelling starting image text have attracted view rates of 3.38 percent (compare to an industry benchmark view rate of 2.54 percent).

Auto-optimize

The way to squeeze the best active view rate out of a video ad campaign is auto-optimization.

Auto-optimization means rotating different video ad versions through the same Player. After a specified number of impressions, the platform automatically runs the version with the best active view rate.

This gives advertisers the opportunity to effortlessly test different creative within the context of running a campaign. For example, an advertiser might compare the performance of:

• Three versions with different starting images.
• A version where the starting image includes an offer and a version where the starting image poses a question.

Auto-optimization not only helps advertisers improve video ad performance. It also gives them valuable information to carry forward into the design of subsequent campaigns.

The motivation for the paper was that, while online advertising was becoming mainstream, many advertisers were still not using proven strategies to improve ad effectiveness.

The first proven strategy the report lists for increasing online advertising effectiveness is setting clear campaign objectives and building optimization into the campaign process.

“Plan for campaigns to improve iteratively as you learn,” the report recommends, and adjust based on which ad creatives best achieve the defined objectives.

Four years later, online advertising is a good deal more mainstream. And, yet, probably because it’s perceived as difficult and expensive, many advertisers are still not building iterative optimization into their online advertising campaigns.

Designed to help video advertising campaigns succeed, the Mixpo platform removes barriers to optimization by allowing you to quickly and easily copy Xspots.

Click Copy, name the versions, and you're done

After you click OK in the Copy this Xspot window, the new Xspot versions are immediately ready for editing. For example, you might experiment with different:

• Starting images so you can test which image drives the most views.
• Call to action language, so you can test which language drives the most viewers to your website.
• Overlay actions, so you can test whether a lead capture form or an in-video printable coupon drives the most interactions.

Once the versions the advertiser wants to test are in place, you can rotate them through the same Player. After a specified number of impressions, the platform automatically drops the low performers.

More information

Mixpo account holders: Find instructions for copying Xspots and settings up auto-optimization by visiting the Client Resources page, and then searching for copy and auto-optimize.

For example:

• A national auto dealer runs an video ad campaign in several local online publications. After a general introduction to the newest model, the Xspot automatically sends viewers, based on their IP addesses, to Xspots created by their local dealers.
• A candidate in a tight congressional race wants to clearly distinguish her policies from those of her opponent. At the end of a brief introductory Xspot, she directs voters to 3 detailed Xspots that describe her approaches to the economy, health care, and national security.

In both cases, the transition from general to detailed Xspot occurs seamlessly within the same Player.

Telescoping options similar to these are available now using the new Redirect overlay action in the Mixpo platform.

Click the Economic Crisis overlay at the end of this Scott Brown campaign demo Xspot to experience a simple example of telescoping for yourself.

Note This telescoping example is for demo purposes only and was not used in an actual Scott Brown campaign ad.

If you’ve used overlays before to link to webpages or open lead capture forms, you’re already familiar with the basic process for adding redirect actions to Xspots.

More information

Learn more about dyamic video advertising for politics.

Mixpo account holders: Find instructions for setting up telescoping by visiting the Client Resources page, and then searching for redirect.

You can design video ads to take full advantage of brand lift by displaying the advertiser’s brand early and often and giving viewers the opportunity to interact with the brand through compelling calls to action.

In addition, in the Mixpo platform, you’ve always had the ability to customize the Player to reinforce brand. For example, you can set Player control colors and size, and you can customize the options available in the INFO menu.

Now, you can take customization one step further. You can choose the Player skin that best suits the advertiser’s brand and the content and tone of each particular Xspot. And, you can choose an INFO menu style to complement the skin.

The following thumbnail images for the same Xspot demonstrate some of the Player skin and INFO menu options.

Default skin

Minimalist skin

Sleek skin

INFO menu icons

More information

Mixpo account holders: Find instructions for how to customize the Player and INFO menu by visiting the Client Resources page, and then searching for skin or INFO menu.

In an article on ClickZ, Heidi Cohen suggests that this data points to “the growth of brand response advertising, an evolving form that blends the strengths of branding and direct response disciplines in one ad. Brand marketers benefit from such driving actions as building e-mail lists and downloads to enhance customer relationships.”

In the Mixpo platform, it’s easy to build lead generation into the Xspots you create and to manage and track the leads the ads generate.

The following demo Scott Brown ad (this specific ad did not run during the recent Scott Brown for US Senate campaign) illustrates lead capture in action. Play the ad and then click the Become a Scott Brown supporter overlay to open and submit a lead capture form.

As viewers submit the lead capture form, the data is automatically stored by the platform. At any time, you can generate a report in a spreadsheet format that’s easy to open or integrate into other lead tracking applications.

More information

Learn more about dynamic video advertising for politics.

Mixpo account holders: Find instructions for how to add lead capture actions and generate reports by visiting the Client Resources page, and then searching for lead capture.