Last year, we report­ed on video ad com­pa­ny YuMe’s ambi­tions to deliv­er effec­tive video ads across mul­ti­ple devices in the age of screen frag­men­ta­tion. Busi­ness devel­op­ment man­agers and oth­ers with media jobs in online adver­tis­ing may remem­ber that YuMe’s Senior VP of Mar­ket­ing, Ed Haslam, was talk­ing back then about how to hold viewer’s atten­tion across mul­ti­ple screens at a time when online video adver­tis­ing was start­ing to explode. And now his firm has pulled a tech­no­log­i­cal rab­bit out of the hat to do just that, with the launch of a new brand named Video reach.

A good year

YuMe, as the more informed busi­ness devel­op­ment man­ag­er may be aware, has had a rather good time of it over the last year. It raised $65 mil­lion dur­ing its IPO last July, just as it planned to do after turn­ing prof­itable and post­ing a net income of $6.3 mil­lion (a rad­i­cal turn­around from the $11.1 mil­lion loss it made in 2012). It also man­aged to increase its gross mar­gin from 38 per­cent to 46 per­cent over the same inter­val and its rev­enue for 2012 had grown by 70 per­cent on the pre­vi­ous year to reach $116.7 million.

Fig­ures like that tend to inspire con­fi­dence; its gam­ble that video stream­ing would rapid­ly sup­plant TV view­ing, dri­ving ad dol­lars online, now seems like a very sound one. But what, the intrigued busi­ness devel­op­ment man­ag­er will be ask­ing, does Video Reach add to the equation?

Beyond cook­ie-based targeting

Basi­cal­ly, it adds to YuMe’s Con­nect­ed Audi­ence Net­work by allow­ing pro­gram­mat­ic buy­ing and sell­ing of video ads. Unlike Con­nect­ed Audi­ence Net­work, though, Video Reach has been designed specif­i­cal­ly for TV brand adver­tis­ers and agency trad­ing desks.

Haslam explains:

“Most pro­gram­mat­ic solu­tions for video adver­tis­ing today uti­lize tra­di­tion­al cook­ie-based tar­get­ing hence can only work in web-based envi­ron­ments. YuMe’s first-par­ty data sci­ence solu­tion tran­scends cook­ies and allows for true mul­ti-screen tar­get­ing in app envi­ron­ments such as mobile, tablet and Con­nect­ed TV apps, as well as web for true cross plat­form reach, due to its deep, mul­ti-screen Audi­ence Aware SDK integrations.”

Buy­ers using either Con­nect­ed Audi­ence Net­work or Video Reach will be able to access the same video ad inven­to­ry, although dif­fer­ent sales teams will be respon­si­ble for them. Video Reach’s team, says Haslam, has been “specif­i­cal­ly trained to sell to trad­ing desks.”