TubeMogul adds online video advertising sales to its analytics business

TubeMogul, which late last year teamed with Brightcove to provide in-depth insight into viewer engagement and behavior, has been crafting it's own video ad network on the side. The company today said it was launching a "transparent video advertising network" called PlayTime that took full advantage of the analytics its been gathering using its Mass Audience Segmentation Technology (MAST) to target viewers at a per-stream level.

The play has raised some eyebrows among competitors who feel the combination of a company selling analytics to advertisers and also trying to sell ads is a potential conflict.

"This feels like a church-and-state issue," Molly Gallatin, director of marketing for video ad network YuMe, told MediaWeek. "Nielsen and comScore have never gone in that direction. They let agencies make their own decisions on how to connect the dots with data."

But TubeMogul discounts those concerns, saying PlayTime simply is designed to give advertisers and publishers a better  accounting of where views are happening.

"There is a gap between what an advertiser thinks they are buying and what they are buying," BrightRoll CEO Tod Sacerdoti recently told AdWeek.

MediaWeek, meanwhile, reports that TubeMogul has tested some 100 campaigns with clients like 20th Century Fox, Coke, Nestlé and Kmart.

"We kept hearing advertisers complain about a lack of transparency in this space," said TubeMogul CEO Brett Wilson. "The drumbeats were loud. This will be a 100 percent transparent video ad network. With our stuff, you see [what you buy] for better or for worse." Wilson said PlayTime is more efficient than contextual advertising because it does a better job of reaching users who are inclined to watch a client's ads because they know what a user already as viewed.

"Think of it as Netflix for [Web] video," he said, he told MediaWeek.

For more:
- see this release
- see this MediaWeek article

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