Video is a stronger ad format that drives higher levels of engagement with consumers and works with both branding and performance campaigns. Video is exciting because it can be used to tell a story with audio and visual elements – something that banners have failed to do.

That’s why the mobile advertising ecosystem is talking about mobile video exploding. Mobile video views on Facebook have increased to 8 billion daily views doubling in the last six months, while Snapchat recently announced that they now process over 6 billion daily video views – that’s tripled since May 2015.

These are very big numbers indeed and the key takeaway for the mobile ad industry is that consumers are now comfortable with video content on mobile devices and that should pave the way for agencies and brands to start investing significant advertising dollars in mobile video.

The first wave of mobile ads ten years ago, copied ad formats from the web and agencies just couldn’t get their heads around these ads for many reasons that have been well documented. Video is different – agencies get video and they’ve been working with video across multiple screens for many years. That’s why video should be exciting for everyone in the industry.

Mobile video ad spend is the fastest growing sector in digital marketing and that’s backed up with analysis by eMarketer which forecasts mobile ad spend to be on the same level as online ad spend by 2018.

Smadex video ad formats 

We are now opening up our mobile video ad capabilities to advertisers during November. This means that advertisers will be able to buy mobile video for performance and brand campaigns across all the big mobile ad exchanges that support VAST and MRAID. Smadex mobile video ads will not incur any ad serving costs.

The Smadex Creative Lab team will support the agencies with pulling together proposals and mock ups for creatives. We will support mobile video as a managed service given the technical effort involved with mobile video.

Smadex video will enable advertisers to programmatically buy video enabled mobile inventory across twelve ad exchanges. Video ads are currently supported with MoPub, Doubleclick, Nexage and Liverail, and advertisers will be able to create whitelists across all available ad exchanges. For branding campaigns, there are premium publishers across these exchanges can be selected for specific campaigns.

Agencies will be able to overlay audience data for targeting using Smadex ‘s Data Management Platform or third party data from Statiq and Adsquare.

For more information on mobile video contact sales[at]smadex[dot]com.