Eyeblaster Launches Video Studio

Rich media advertising provider Eyeblaster today unveiled a suite of tools for advertisers to create, track and manage video ads online.

“The issues of producing video online are the complexity and time, which translates to an issue of costs,” Doug McFarland, GM of North American operations, told ClickZ. “We want to make it as easy as creating any other kind of ad, and take the complexity out of the process.”

Video Studio automates the process of encoding video for multiple connection speeds and file formats for a variety of media players. Creating ads in multiple formats is essential to provide the best experience for users, but it’s also a time-consuming product, McFarland said.

Using Video Studio, an advertiser can take an existing video clip and embed it into a Flash template to create an interactive ad. Templates include pre-defined skins for playback controls, or and advertiser can create a custom skin. The ad is then automatically encoded into multiple formats and file sizes.

The platform creates a package of multiple streams for each video clip, which is kept separate from the ad, so the same video clip can be used for multiple ad units, further cutting down on development time, McFarland said.

“This process previously took several days for creative shops to do. It’s been a pain point to pay for rendering,” he said. “And with our rich media platform, the metrics are automatically built in, so that saves development time as well.”

Along with the launch of Video Studio, Eyeblaster announced enhancements to the rest of its rich media platform, including Flash 8 and Macintosh support and enhanced trafficking with Excel. Eyeblaster was a late entrant to the video advertising space, but has been making improvements to its offerings to compete with more experienced competitors EyeWonder and Klipmart. Eyeblaster has ramped up quickly, and in the first quarter of 2006 surpassed Klipmart in the number of video campaigns it served, according to self-published numbers.

Join ClickZ’s Online Video Advertising Forum in New York City, June 16, 2006.