Tremor Expands Ad Playbook with Interactive Pre-roll

Tremor Media, the largest video ad network in the world (according to ComScore), has been expanding its suite of interactive video ad products at a break neck pace since early 2010. Today, the New York City based company announced a strategic partnership with Israel based Innovid to provide a whiteversion of Innovid’s iRoll technology to Tremor’s network of over 1,500 sites. Today’s announcement comes almost exactly a year to date from Tremor’s launch of its own interactive ad platform, vChoice, in June of 2009, and comes hot on the heels of its $40 million dollar Series D funding round in April.

The product, which will be marketed under the vChoice iRoll brand, brings interactive functionality to pre-roll ad units including the ability to print coupons, view multiple videos, showcase product, and integrate with social media tools. The product will be integrated into Tremor’s ad operations platform, Acudeo.

Tremor and its competitors, like BrightRoll and ScanScout (which has its own interactive pre-roll product, Super Pre-Roll), have seen a decrease in the effectiveness of pre-roll advertising over the last year. According to a recent study from YuMe, in 2009, pre-roll video click-through rates decreased from 1.88% in Q1 09 to 0.74% in Q4. By contrast, Innovid’s iRoll deployments have achieved CTRs of 5-8%. In a world where pre-roll CPMs are reaching into the double digits, interactive pre-roll deployments stand to generate significantly more revenue, and lower abandonment rates for video advertising networks.

Innovid, which itself raised over $6 million dollars since launch in late 2007, has played a leading roll in galvanizing standardization of interactive advertising formats with the IAB, and has aggressively pushed it’s iRoll technology with top-tier publishers like CNET, Discovery, MTV, and NBC, MTV.