More than just episodic content
In November, Castfire began powering a video ad campaign with Federated Media and The IT Room that runs
on some of the largest technology blogs and sites, including Digg, GigaOM, TechCrunch, Boing Boing, Mashable and more. While video ad units are nothing new on websites, the campaign was integrated into the RSS feeds of almost all of the sites as well. In addition, the campaign was comprised of 8 separate videos, of which all of them have been updated or changed throughout time. The technical hurdles were quite large, but Castfire’s automation, player templating and analytics data warehouses have enable all of the demands.
If you are not familiar with some of the challenges of working with RSS feeds, there are two key areas that needed to be addressed immediately. First off, the feeds are generally cached by online feedreaders, stripping javascript and other code from the xml. This removes the ability for an ad server to directly interact with each impression. Additionally, the many of the large feed readers do not allow for flash components to be used directly in the reader.
Custom players and tracking codes were generated for each of the sites - both the RSS unit and the 300×250 unit, with each of the 8 videos loaded for each. Publishers were provided a single block of html to place into their RSS feed, for which Castfire is able to manage. Castfire’s automation and player templates provides the ability for random videos to be played, or for Federated Media to update/change the creative at any time.
Castfire has also worked with many of the online feed readers to ensure that our video players are whitelisted and allowed to be displayed within the reader. This is a key to this campaign’s success; without being able to view the player, it would be impossible to watch the video!
Scale is a big issue when looking at a campaign like this - RSS can be brutal and some of the sites have the largest RSS audiences out there! At the time of this blog post, Feedburner reports TechCrunch’s subscribers at 624k. For each post on all of the sites, a player is displayed, analytics collected, and a video may be played. Tens of millions of impressions for this single campaign - not including any of the standard episodic content that is published.
The final piece of the puzzle is analytics to which our data warehousing efforts come shining through. Castfire creates a separate data warehouse for each network. With multiple fact tables, tons of dimensions, and incredible detail, reports breakdown sites, player impressions, video plays, click throughs, geo information and more.
While 98% of our customers are publishing branded, episodic content, the value of our audio/video platform becomes more apparent as the system is responsible for more and more uses. It is exciting to see our platform continue to grow and expand. </proud parents>