Imagine looks for SureFire success with video ad server line
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Joseph O'Halloran
| 21 April 2022
Claiming to allow media companies to increase ad revenue across VOD, OTT and addressable linear services, selling premium inventory direct to advertisers, while reducing total cost of ownership, Imagine Communications has added the SureFire ad server to its suite of monetisation solutions.
Imagine Sure Fire 21April2022
SureFire is attributed by Imagine with being able to address decade-old gaps in the cost, yield, and quality of advertising on digital video streams. It is built to provide linear-like control and brand protection to sell inventory on OTT platforms directly, enabling media companies to sell and fulfil campaigns across their entire audience. It is also designed to also enables media companies to lower overall costs by eliminating silos while increasing margins and keeping more ad revenue via direct sales. That is, eliminating intermediaries that take a percentage of revenue.

The result says Imagine is more revenue, higher eCPM prices and improved fill rates, as well as a great advertiser and viewer experience.

“Digital video advertising is growing rapidly, by as much as 50% according to some sources,” noted Brad Herman, senior vice president, product, at Imagine Communications. “But we don’t think that the monetisation is as effective or safe as it has been for linear TV. All the projections for advertising suggest that linear television revenues are relatively flat. In order to thrive, media companies must find a way of capturing the premium values of linear television and applying it to their digital advertising — maintaining brand values and aggregating audiences across all platforms.”

Indeed, Imagine added that while multiplatform content delivery is fast becoming ubiquitous, quick digital deployments have led many media companies to deploy separate ad management systems for OTT and traditional linear, which Imagine says is expensive, inefficient and often results in a poor experience for both viewers and advertisers. SureFire, combined with Imagine’s unified monetisation solution, consolidates cross-platform workflows. This will enable, says Imagine, media companies to increase revenue opportunities, reduce total cost of ownership (TCO), and deliver a consistent, quality experience for streaming OTT and VOD.

Imagine also pointed out that despite viewers’ and advertisers’ desire for quality, linear-like advertising experience across all video platforms and devices, brand rules, such as frequency or competitive separation, are often not enforced on OTT platforms. To address these issues, SureFire supports the application of common, broadcast advertising rules across OTT and traditional linear, providing a unified premium ad experience for viewers wherever they consume content.
SureFire operates as a managed cloud service on Amazon Web Services (AWS), with auto-scaling enabling it to support millions of ad requests per second, with sub-100ms response times even under heavy load. It uses the advertising industry-standard VAST and VMAP protocols to communicate dynamic ad insertion instructions with AWS Elemental MediaTailor.

Using open APIs, SureFire has been pre-integrated with Imagine’s Landmark Sales ad management platform, providing media companies a path to unified monetisation of OTT and linear TV. SureFire is also fully compatible with the recently announced Imagine Aviator cloud-native, unified origination and monetisation platform, providing broadcast-quality ad decisions to monetise OTT and FAST channels created by Aviator.

The first customer deployments of SureFire are expected in the summer of 2022.