DIY Video Ad Service Includes Targeted Campaigns

If you've been wanting to tap into the growing trend of online video advertising, but don't know where to begin and think it will bust your budget, Jivox just may be the solution you need to channel your inner video producer.

Based in San Mateo, Calif, Jivox is a self-service online video advertising service for small businesses. It gives smaller and local advertisers access to online video advertising by making it easy to create, target and deliver online video ads.

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The Jivox platform combines a video ad creation tool, proprietary targeting technology, reporting capabilities and a growing network of publishers to offer advertisers a complete, do-it-yourself service for online video advertising. And the best part? It's super affordable.

"The big barrier to entry is how much time and money it can cost to create effective video ads," said Jivox CEO Diaz Nesamoney. "Big companies have marketing staffs and ad agencies and big budgets, so our mission when we got into this business was to bring a complete ad service to the smaller guys so they don't get left out."

Create Your Video Ad

Using the service is simple. You begin by using the Jivox AdSlate self-service video ad maker to access the company's library of stock images, video clips and music to create your own ad.

Or, you can take your existing content, such as a digital picture of your storefront, product shots, head shots, logos, or even your own video clips and mix-and-match it with the stock content. Nesamoney said currently about 30 percent of his clients take the latter approach. "Creating your ad is free, so you can make two or 20, it's up to you," he said.

Identify Your Target Audience

The next step is to specify your target audience for the Jivox ad network. "For some local businesses, it's important to geo-target, and pick a particular state, city or county for instance," said Nesamoney. "We use contextual targeting, so you could also define an age group or say you're interested in people who are interested in travel. Once that's specified, our technology takes that information and serves your ad on our network, which has over 40 million unique visitors. We match your ad with an audience by using keywords, tags and behavior profiles. Then we track how they do with real-time reports."

In addition to this, he said Jivox also lets advertisers put coupons in their video ads. "This feature is especially useful for small businesses who are more interested in closing the sale than building their brand. They can create a coupon as a .PDF or Word file, and when the ad is displaying, there's a little bar at the bottom that will say, 'Click Here for a Special Offer' type thing, and the viewer can print out the coupon or if it's an online coupon, get the coupon code."

Kick Off the Campaign: Define Budget and Timing

Once you've created the ad and identified your target audience, you define your budget and the timing for your advertising campaign. You can choose to run your ad at specific times of day, or during specific days and so on. The Jivox Ad Campaign Reports show how you're doing. The advantage, Nesamoney said, for small Web shop owners is that there is little up-front cost and lots of flexibility when actually running the campaign.

"If you decide to run a campaign for five weeks, but after the first week you want to pause it, and change the ad, you can because there's no charge for creating a new ad. Then you can continue, and, say, launch three different ads to see which one does best, and continue tweaking it," said Nesamoney. "This is critical for small businesses who can't afford to pay $5,000 for a campaign, just to find out it isn't working. With Jivox they can incrementally test the campaign and adjust it as they go."

In terms of pricing, the cost of airing your ads is typically in the $10-$40 range for each 1000 views (CPM). Nesamoney said the company typically recommends a start-up campaign that will cost about $500, as that's what it generally takes to run the ads long enough to get enough exposure for effective measurement and analytics.

Case Study: Soren Legal Finds Test Takers

One client that found success with a Jivox campaign is Soren Legal. The company, a founding principal of the New York State Notary Association, provides a range of workshops, services and community efforts to help prepare future notary publics to pass the New York State notary public exam and to assist existing notary publics in conducting business.

To market its services in the past, Soren Legal had used tools such as direct mail and fax campaigns based on existing customer lists. It also advertised on local cable outlets, but the company was still seeking to generate additional interest in its services. Soren also wanted to ensure that its efforts were specifically targeted at potential test takers that could reasonably travel to its workshop locations.

Recognizing the growing use of online video advertising by small businesses, Soren Legal experimented with the Jivox online video advertising platform. The company created an original video ad, repurposed video ad content from its earlier cable ads to create an additional ad and then deployed both ads on the Jivox ad network. Within 24 hours, Soren Legal noted an uptick in inbound leads and an unexpected increase in its page rank on Google, according to the company.

(Continue to Page 2 for more Case Study Details and Five Tips for Video Creation)