Online Advertising Products
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The Mobile Video Wall
The Problem:
Our team had an existing Desktop unit called “The Video Wall” which was popular with Entertainment clients. It displayed a :15s video clip which was perfect for trailers. It had a high video completion rate (VCR) and click through rate (CTR) which were both KPIs which clients wanted to hit.
When pitching clients however with this product we were only leveraging less than half of our traffic (60% of site users were on mobile.) We had other mobile products, but none of them were video-first units. We were leaving money on the table by not having a truly mobile version.
The Solve:
Introducing: “The Mobile Video Wall” (MVW) a mobile only companion unit. To mimic the scale of the the video wall unit, the MVW was a 9:16 video player served out of MPU slot that was in-line with the page just below the hed of the article, in conjunction with a sticky banner on the bottom of the page.
The Next Problem:
The unit looked great, everyone agreed and we took it to market. It performed miserably. VCRs were down, and CTRs were all coming from the companion banner ad. So what went wrong?
We took it back to the drawing board and quickly realized our errors. When we had the team QA the unit, they weren’t acting like actual end users, they were assessing the unit as a design decision, and were impressed by the scale of the unit on the page. They stopped and watched the video. Actual end users would not do such a thing, they’re on the page to read an article and the video is (often times) an interruption.
So how do we redesign the unit so that we can keep the scale of video player, but also make it unavoidable (and hit all those client KPIs)?
The Next Solve:
The first solution we thought of was to create an overlay unit that would expand out of the sticky banner at the bottom. Users would be forced to click out of the video in order to see the article page. This was nixed because it could potentially derank us with google who frown on this kind of ad unit at the scale (millions of users) that we wanted to serve it to.
So what if we kept what we had already of the unit, and simply added another state to it. Instead of letting the user simply scroll past the video without it ending, what if we added another state to it after that user action? We decided that the best course of action was for the unit to expand back out, at 1/5th its original size, from the upper left hand corner. The development team had a lot of work to do. But they created this second state fly-out player, and we adjusted it so that the flyout player would begin the video at the exact moment of the video timeline which the user had last seen it, thus limiting the entire video ad experience for user to exactly :15s. Upon video completion, the unit simply flys back out of the article page frame, thus limiting the risk of annoying the user, and forcing them to interact and “X-out” of the unit. Branding would remain on screen for the user in the form of the sticky banner, so any curious users could click through that to find out more about the product.