Happy Friday!
This week Samsung announced a whole host of new gadgets, including the Note 9, Samsung home, and a new version of their smart watch! 📱⌚
Let the scrolling begin!
Future of TV
Ad-supported OTT keeps growing, and advertisers would be wise to take note
AppNexus, the ad-serving company that was AT&T’s first post-Time Warner purchase, released stats this week showing a 748% year-over-year “explosion” in connected TV ad sales.
A 748% YOY explosion!
OTT is exciting for advertisers. It holds the ability to target niche, qualified audiences at scale. Rather than the scattergun approach of traditional TV advertising.
In this article from TV[R]EV, Alan Wolk walks through the technology that helped form this shift in advertising.
Interactive Media
Snap's strategy shifts win over advertisers more than users
Since Snapchat's recent redesign, and the loss of some unhappy users, the company is still having wins. Prince Alwaleed bin Talal reportedly just bought 2.5% stake in the company for $250m.
His sentiment that there are big opportunities for advertisers on Snapchat—even if they're trailing behind Instagram—aligns with the company's leadership. In his words, he believes that Snap has just begun to “scratch the surface of its true potential.”
Virtual Reality
Magic Leap One Creator Edition preview: a flawed glimpse of mixed reality’s amazing potential
Over the past few years we've been keeping a close on eye on Magic Leap here at Rerun.
Magic Leap is a "spatial computing" company that build mixed reality glasses for everyday computing. There's been a lot of talk and quite a lot of money poured into Magic Leap but this week they finally shipped the "Magic Leap Creator Edition", a headset designed to compete with Microsoft's HoloLens.
At $2,295 it's probably not the kind of experimental electronic gadget most of us are going to pull the trigger on but the Verge have a great hands-on preview that goes deep into the strengths and unsettling weaknesses of the project.
I genuinely believe Magic Leap has given me a glimpse of the future of computing, but it might take a long time to reach that future, and I’m not sure Magic Leap will be the company that gets there first.
Esports
The state of esports for advertisers, in five charts - Digiday
The esports FIFA World Cup finished up last weekend with the winner, Mosaad Aldossary, taking home a cool $250,000 in front of a packed crowd at London's O2 arena. Proof, if it were needed, that esports has hit the big leagues.
So whilst esports has caught on with millennials, advertisers have yet to fully embrace this new field of opportunity.
The reasons for this are complex and tied up with the demographic involved. The nature of the esports industry itself, unregulated and largely at the whim of games developers, creates challenges for advertisers who struggle to find stable properties with which to align themselves.
Esports fans are avid streamers and tend to prefer streamed over linear broadcast, so let's expect to see some developments in this space — and with the esports market projected to grow by more than $250 million in 2018 expect to see them fast.
Biz Bits
Sinclair Rolls Out An Addressable Ad Product Via vMVPDs And TV Takes A Giant Step Forward
There has been a question whether vMVPDs like SlingTV and Hulu have the ability to provide linear addressable advertising at massive scale. With Sinclair's launch of its new CompulseOTT platform for serving addressable ads via vMVPDs that question may be answered very soon.
Previously the only way to run linear addressable advertising was via one of the MVPDs like Dish or Direct TV (AT&T) but they have many limitations like the small window available during the two to three minutes per hour the networks gave the MVPD.
With this new platform, Sinclair is stepping in the direction of the advertiser promised land of low volume, highly qualified ads that people don't mind watching.
The Zozosuit
Japan's largest online retailer Zozotown has come up with a solution to the common roadblock when shopping for clothing online. Will it fit when it arrives? Enter the Zozosuit, simply slip it on and spin around and you can rest assured when you order that dress or suit from Zozotown it will be a perfect fit.
Zozo’s clothes will be made through state-of-the-art technology. Shoppers will have to download its app and then order a free Zozosuit — a black spandex suit covered in a few hundred white fiducial markers. Once they’re in the suit, shoppers will stand in front of their smartphone, where the app will initiate the camera.
That's all from the Rerun team at Axonista. We look forward to sharing more news from the future of TV and interactive video next week.