Innovid - driving industry change to support online video advertising
The period of time I spent with Innovid was one of significant change for online video advertising. We saw the rise of mobile, then of CTV; deprecated Flash in favor of HTML5; transitioned from progressive video downloads to adaptive bitrate streaming and SSAI; and moved away from VPAID as an omnipresent video standard.
In addition to product work to stay ahead of and support all these transitions, I was very actively engaged with the IAB, the MMA and other industry trade groups to help evolve existing standards to better support our products and the video ad industry as a whole.
I played a major role in helping to define versions of MRAID, VAST and VPAID, SIMID, and contributed to other efforts such as general mobile advertising standards and OpenRTB. This work was recognized by two IAB service awards and a global Smarties award by the MMA (Mobile Marketing Association).
PRODUCT STRATEGY
PRODUCT MARKETING
THOUGHT LEADERSHIP
SALES ENABLEMENT
SALES ENGINEERING
PARTNERSHIPS
I led the product charge to migrated the output of the iRoll Studio (and our custom units as well) from Flash to HTML5, which involve rewriting all the APIs and creating a whole new approach to authoring utilizing different tools.
Additionally, we designed and implemented asynchronous encoding of video in the Studio via a 3rd party encoding partnership, allowing units to be built at the same speed without having to wait for encodes to happen.
The early days of in-app mobile advertising were dominated by MRAID, a standard that allowed rich media ads to function reliably in in-app environments. Unfortunately, the standard made little allowance for video.
Since both MRAID and VPAID (the existing interactive video standard) were JavaScript-based, our team worked in partnership with handful of other companies to define and implement a standard that grafted the relevant components of VPAID onto MRAID to support interactive video in-app. We also ran these units at scale with Brightroll and other partners. Ultimately these changes were folded into the next main version of MRAID, and the standard still dominates mobile in-app display ad delivery today.
During this period the main video standard in use, VAST, also needed to be evolved in order to meet the needs of an ecosystem that had shifted away from desktop to mobile and CTV. I worked with a number of leading publishers, including broadcasters, as well as a number of other leading video advertising companies to make significant contributions to new versions of the specs.
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I led efforts not only to adhere to the standards changes on the creative side, but also to educate our internal staff and external clients and partners on the changes occurring in the video advertising ecosystem and the reasons behind them. These thought leadership and product marketing efforts helped underscore Innovid's credibility as video experts and helped clients see the benefit of having a buy-side ad server dedicated to video.
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I also led a partnership effort with leading mobile inventory providers AOL, InMobi, Mopub, and Fyber to support a brand new interactive video creative format that operated solely with VAST rather than relying on either VPAID or MRAID, since both had compatibility issues with the majority of mobile in-app inventory (and also CTV).
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