AOL Extends Premium Ad Solutions Into Video

Just a few months after being acquired by Verizon, AOL has made its first big post-acquisition push into the video space with five new linear premium ad formats.

Different from traditional pre-roll ads, AOL’s data-driven video solutions – Linear Expandable, Linear Modules, Linear Sequence, Branded Slate, Branded Skip – leverage the convergence of interactive video and display advertising, according to David Miller, vice president of advertising product management for AOL.

“Premium advertising has been important for us for a long time; it has been built around exposure, conversation and ultimately conversion,” Miller says. “What we are trying to do here is combine the power of video and traditional pre-roll: leverage the emotion of video and add the relevancy, engagement, and data that generally come with the traditional display advertising.”

He continues that today’s offering enables advertisers to deliver immersive video experiences. For example, advertisers can build interactive elements – including polls, Twitter feeds and photo galleries – into a video ad. They can also give viewers the option to continue watching or skipping a branded video, and collect relevant data to see where their target audience spend the majority of their time.

“All of our data insights can be sent back to advertisers so they can work on their next round of advertising innovation or spend,” Miller says.

The new video ad formats are available across AOL On, an online video content platform that houses video content from AOL’s owned and operated properties, including The Huffington Post, TechCrunch, AOL.com and partner publishers. Meanwhile, they are programmatically accessible via the ONE by AOL platform.

AOL’s five premium video units are primarily focused on desktop. The company will expand the video experience into mobile by the end of this year.